Peter Watkins, who has died aged 90, was a remarkably talented, visionary film-maker who made a literally explosive impact on British television in the 1960s with two BBC drama-documentaries about events of historical significance – Culloden, confronting a bloody battle of the past in an era of rifles, broadswords and cannon fire, and The War Game, imagining a future conflict in the nuclear age.
He was not only a pioneer of this blend of drama and documentary, but also of using hand-held lightweight cameras to chase the action and give a sense of immediacy and authenticity – he called it the “reconstructed newsreel”. His casting of non-professional actors added to the realism.
Like Ken Loach, another director new to the BBC and developing this style of filming, Watkins sought to challenge the establishment view at a time when the Swinging Sixties were just under way, a generation of Tory rule was in its death throes and people were beginning to question the old order and cast aside deference.
Watkins’s 1964 television film Culloden, based on John Prebble’s historical book, was a re-enactment of the last battle fought on British soil, the final stand by Highland Scots against English rule at the 1746 Jacobite rebellion, and the repression that followed their defeat.
He cast an Anglo-French Mauritian, Olivier Espitalier-Noel, in the role of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was a Highlander with Polish and Italian blood, instructed his cast to wear their battle costumes through every minute of the three-week shoot, when they lived as a unit and talked constantly about the English massacre, and filmed current affairs-style interviews with the participants.
Although the groundbreaking Culloden was well received by critics and the public, Watkins rued that no one related the brutality in it to world events of the time, particularly the Vietnam War. However, with his next film for the BBC, he collided firmly with both the political and broadcasting establishments.
The War Game, made in 1965, recreated the likely effects of an attack on Britain with a one-megaton nuclear bomb. Mostly amateur actors appeared in it and “interviews” with establishment figures were interspersed among juddering shots of the horrors.
The BBC banned The War Game, claiming it was too “horrific” to screen, but it was later revealed that this censorship was a political decision intended to prevent any questioning of the government’s policy of building up nuclear weapons.
Lord Normanbrook, chairman of the BBC board of governors and former secretary to the cabinet, wrote to his government successor, Sir Burke Trend: “The showing of the film on television might well have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the policy of the nuclear deterrent.”
Home Office and Ministry of Defence officials, along with Trend, were given private screenings. They subsequently wrote: “The film would have the effect of lending support to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.” In 1998, Tony Benn, who had in 1965 been postmaster general, revealed that the home secretary, Frank Soskice, “ordered” him to send a directive to the BBC saying The War Game must not be broadcast.
The film received a cinema screening in 1966 and even won a Best Documentary Oscar and Best Short Film Bafta Award, but it was not broadcast on television until 1985. In the meantime, its director had left the BBC for a new career in feature films and moved abroad, finding a warmer reception in mostly Scandinavian countries.
Peter Ralph Watkins was born in Norbiton, Surrey, in 1935 to Peggy (née Nibbs) and George, a banker, and attended schools in Surrey and Wales, then Christ College, Brecon. Intent on a career in acting, he started training at Rada in 1953, but his studies were interrupted by national service. While working in a clerical job with the Army’s East Surrey Regiment in Canterbury, he performed with Playcraft, a local amateur dramatics group.
He spent three years as an assistant producer of television shorts and commercials for a London advertising agency, then became an assistant film editor at the documentary production company World Wide Pictures. Away from his day job, he bought a Bolex spring-driven 8mm camera and made experimental 16mm films with friends from Playcraft about war and other conflicts. Two of the shorts, The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1961), won awards for amateur film.
This led in 1962 to an offer to join the BBC as an assistant producer of documentaries in preparation for the launch of its second channel two years later.
Watkins’s first feature film was to be about the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, but it fell through in the planning stages. He then directed Privilege (1967), set in the near-future and depicting the state and church controlling youth by promoting adulation of a pop star they manipulated (played by Paul Jones on a rare occasion when the director used professional performers). Bruised by poor reviews (one called the film “hysterical”) and the failure to get nationwide cinema screenings, Watkins left Britain for Stockholm in 1968.
He spent the rest of his life campaigning against what he termed the “media crisis” – the allegiance of the “mass audiovisual media” to the “monoform”, techniques such as rapid cuts that leave the audience with no time to reflect, and controlling content to fit the ideology of the consumer society.
Watkins continued to direct films challenging the idea of media objectivity and highlighting the state’s insidious control. The Gladiators (1969), made in Sweden and released in Britain as Peace Game, showed the superpowers forestalling another world war by organising battles to the death between teams of soldiers. He filmed Punishment Park (1971) in the United States, but few cinemas there screened it because of its story of anti-Vietnam War protesters being consigned to a desert without food while the National Guard pursues them.
Edvard Munch (1976) was a three-and-a-half-hour mini-series, co-produced by Norwegian and Swedish television, about the Norwegian Expressionist painter who endured critical maulings. Aftenlandet (Evening Land, 1977) dealt with a Copenhagen shipyard strike over a wage freeze and the building of nuclear submarines.
A planned 1982 remake of The War Game partly funded by ITV collapsed when Watkins failed to raise the rest of the money. Instead, he returned to the theme with his 14-hour-plus film documentary Resan (The Journey, 1987), with people from 15 countries talking about the nuclear threat. (The BBC, meanwhile, had made the award-winning 1984 TV movie Threads, the writer Barry Hines’s account of a nuclear attack on Britain, directed by Mick Jackson.)
There were other instances of film and television companies pulling out of productions by the passionate and uncompromising anti-war film-maker. But finance came from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, for the 345-minute La Commune (Paris 1871) (2000), a television film re-enacting the bloody working-class uprising, which uncharacteristically met with wide acclaim.
In 1994, Watkins moved to Lithuania and, later, to France. His book Media Crisis was published in 2004.
Watkins’s 1962 marriage to Françoise Letourneur ended in divorce. In 1992, he married Vida Urbonavicius, who survives him, along with Patrick and Gerard, the sons from his first marriage, and his brother, Paul.
Peter Watkins, director, born 29 October 1935, died 31 October 2025
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