The documentary-maker Roger Mills, who has died aged 86 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, accompanied the actor Michael Palin on his globe-trotting adventures for almost 20 years and helped to establish the template for celebrity travel series. Palin called his director, an Oxford classicist, “the Professor”.
Viewers enjoyed the natural situations Palin found himself in, as he brought his humour, inquiring mind and sense of excitement to the places and challenges he experienced, as well as displaying the awkwardness of travellers confronted by new cultures and people.
It began with Around the World in 80 Days (1989), which recreated the route of the fictional explorer Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s 19th-century novel of the same name. The idea came from Clem Vallance, who went on to produce the series, for which he and Mills directed different episodes. Although Palin was Vallance’s preferred choice as presenter from the start – having been impressed by a 1980 programme he made about a train journey from London to the Kyle of Lochalsh in Scotland – Will Wyatt, the BBC’s head of features and documentaries, proposed the seasoned TV traveller Alan Whicker.
Mills had just spent months filming British expats in Australia for the 1988 Whicker’s World series Living With Waltzing Matilda, but he and Vallance conspired to ensure Palin landed the job. At a lunch with Whicker, they decided to stress the discomforts and lack of five-star hotels, with Mills telling Whicker: “You will have to share deck space with the crew between Oman and Bombay.”
Mills recalled: “He wrote a letter the next day to the effect that he thought the pace of the show would be such that he wouldn’t have time to prepare his interviews.”
Palin was confirmed as presenter and even consulted Whicker for some travel tips. As he circumnavigated the globe by land and sea via Venice, Athens, Egypt, Dubai, India, Hong Kong, China and the US, before sailing across the Atlantic back to Britain, he dubbed Mills, Vallance and the rest of the film crew Passepartout, after Fogg’s French manservant and constant companion.
In Bombay, Palin struggled with what he recorded in his diary as “grinding poverty” and children begging, adding; “It’s wearing us all down.” Mills captured his uncomfortable response, verging on guilt, to such encounters.
Viewers and critics agreed on the wisdom of having Palin front a travel programme, and more followed – with Mills again directing. Two further series completed what became known as a trilogy: Pole to Pole (1992), from north to south pole via Scandinavia, Russia, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Africa, providing greater physical challenges, and Full Circle (1997), a logistically complicated, anti-clockwise, 50,000-mile journey round the Pacific Rim that started in the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia.
Mills also directed Palin’s subsequent series, Sahara (2002), Himalaya (2004) and New Europe (2007), and was an executive producer of his 2012 Brazil adventure.
He admitted making Palin suffer in front of viewers. When they were both interviewed by the Independent in 2014, Mills told Palin: “There’s not a Turkish bath or hammam that you haven’t been slapped or walloped in – or any medicinal mud that you haven’t been smeared with.” But he never asked Palin to do anything he would not do himself.
Mills was also the editor of BBC Two’s 40 Minutes strand for its first four years (1981-85), overseeing a wide range of documentaries, encouraging young talent and winning Bafta’s best factual series award twice.
He was born in Anerley, south London, to Aileen (nee Rowe), a radio actor and dramatist, and Henry Mills, a history teacher. He attended Portsmouth grammar school after his father became head of the city’s Southern grammar school for boys. Following national service in the Intelligence Corps, then at GCHQ, he studied classics at Worcester College, Oxford (1956-59), taught Latin and Greek at Felsted school, Essex, and then moved to Eastbourne college.
Mills joined BBC South in 1962 as a television news reporter and later moved to BBC West. Nationally, he produced and directed documentaries such as The Mormon Invasion (1967), about missionaries of the American church recruiting members in Britain, and Expulsion (1971), about drug-taking in schools.
In 1972, Mills became an executive producer of several groundbreaking fly-on-the wall series about institutions, including the Royal Navy in the award-winning Sailor (1976) and Radley college in Public School (1980). He regarded it as an achievement to get access to what he had seen as “closed” institutions. He was also the first executive producer of the investigative-journalism series Inside Story, from 1974 to 1980.
As a director, Mills’s other documentaries included Return to Saigon and Return to Peking (both 1988), with the reporter Anthony Grey, and The Clintons: A Marriage of Power (1998) on Channel 4, for whom he also produced the series New Model Army (2000), about the military’s efforts to stamp out racism.
His contribution to factual television was recognised with Bafta’s 1981 Desmond Davis award.
Mills’s marriage to Kathleen Hayward in 1962 ended in divorce. In 1989 he married Susie Mansell, and she survives him, along with their daughter, Hannah, the daughter of his first marriage, Sophie, and his granddaughter, Frances.
• Roger Edwin Stuart Mills, producer and director, born 22 November 1936; died 5 May 2023
