My father, Michael Blakstad, who has died aged 83, was a television producer and director whose credits include the popular BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World. He was also an entrepreneur and, in later life, a campaigner on behalf of people with dementia.
Born in Penang to Jill (nee McGrath) and Cliff Blakstad, an official in the Malay civil service, Michael was still a baby when the second world war struck the region. His father was captured and tortured in the Changi PoW camp; Michael was evacuated with his mother to her native Australia.
After the war, the family remained in Malaya, but Michael was sent away to school from the age of eight, first to Bourke Hill in New Brighton, Australia, then to Ampleforth college in North Yorkshire. In 1957, after Malayan independence, the rest of the family joined him in the UK and Cliff took a job teaching mathematics at Michael’s school.
The following year, Michael went to Oriel College, Oxford, to study classics. On graduation he joined the BBC as a trainee. After a spell in the North American radio department, he moved to television production, directing factual programmes whose subjects ranged from Bertrand Russell and TS Eliot to the newly discovered Twiggy.
While at the BBC, he met Tricia Wotherspoon, who worked as a designer. They married in 1965, and had twins, Karen and Sofie, in 1966, followed by me a year later.
In 1969 Michael moved to Yorkshire Television. Shortly after, the presenter Alan Whicker also left the BBC for YTV, and Michael became producer-director of the ITV version of Whicker’s World, globe-trotting with the series and arranging interviews with figures such as the brutal president of Haiti “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
He returned to the BBC as a freelance in 1970, and the family settled in west London. Among the notable documentaries Michael made was the 1974 film Children in Crossfire, which followed the lives of Northern Irish children from both sides of the sectarian divide.
Taking up a permanent contract in 1974, he became series producer and editor of The Risk Business, a prize-winning series on industry, along with The Burke Special and Tomorrow’s World.
After again leaving the BBC, in 1981, he became programme controller of Television South and founded two production companies, first Blackrod, with the former Tomorrow’s World presenter Michael Rodd, then Workhouse Limited, through which he produced content on emerging digital formats for corporate clients.
In retirement, from 2002, Michael remained busy in Hampshire as a member of the East Meon historical society and as a keen theatregoer. But in the 2010s, his diagnosis of Parkinson’s and Tricia’s of Alzheimer’s necessitated a move to a retirement community in Eastleigh.
During the Covid lockdowns Tricia’s dementia worsened and she had to move into a care home where, owing to the isolation imposed by quarantine rules, her condition deteriorated rapidly. Angered by the policy choices that had caused her plight, Michael began to campaign for the rights of people with dementia, making regular appearances on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Tricia died in 2022, and in spite of his increasing disability, he spent his final months establishing Media versus Dementia, an organisation promoting media technology to help people in the early stages of the condition.
He is survived by his children, and his sister, Judi.
