Tristram Powell, who has died aged 83, forged a career of two halves as a television director. He made arts documentaries celebrating Thomas Hardy, Ralph Richardson, Marcel Duchamp and other greats before switching to drama with productions by some of the screen’s finest writers.
The move was not a total departure from the programmes he had made for 17 years, but more a change of gear. He described the first television play he directed, No Country for Old Men (1981), as a “dramatised literary programme”. David Nokes’s account of the satirist Jonathan Swift’s “exile” in Dublin starred Trevor Howard as Swift, with Cyril Cusack playing his lifelong friend, Tom Sheridan.
He drew on real lives again to direct East of Ipswich (1987), Michael Palin’s gentle autobiographical play about an adolescent first encountering love on a dreary 1950s seaside family holiday.
He worked with Palin again on the 1991 feature film American Friends. The former Monty Python star had discovered the Victorian travel diaries of his great-grandfather, which revealed an encounter with two American women on a walking tour of Switzerland. The life of the Oxford don, played by Palin, changes for ever when he marries one of them – and leaves his Oxford college, which forbids its fellows to marry. Powell helped Palin to flesh the story out into a film that he directed to give it “a steady pace and a strong sense of place”, in the eyes of one critic.
It was not new but rekindled love at the centre of another television play made by Powell. The Long Roads (1993) was written by John McGrath, who had scripted and directed early episodes of Z Cars, the gritty series that revolutionised the depiction of the police on British television, before founding the 7:84 theatre group to take his socialist message to venues neglected by established companies.
Although The Long Roads brought up poverty, selfishness and apathy, it was essentially the personal tale – following the death of McGrath’s parents – of an elderly couple’s rediscovery. Robert Urquhart, as the cantankerous Highlander, and Edith Macarthur as his wife, diagnosed with cancer, brought sensitivity to the roles as they set off on a last journey together to see their children, who are geographically and socially miles apart.
Powell also formed a professional partnership with Alan Bennett that began with an episode in the writer’s straight-to-camera monologue series Talking Heads (1988). Soldiering On featured Stephanie Cole as an elderly charity worker facing life after her husband’s death.
He then directed Penelope Wilton in Nights in the Gardens of Spain for the sequel, Talking Heads 2 (1998), and half of the 10-part Telling Tales series (2000), with Bennett in front of the camera recalling his Leeds childhood.
The collaboration was revived when Powell directed Denmark Hill, a Bennett play rejected by the BBC in the 1980s. After discovering the forgotten script, he made it for Radio 4 in 2014 with a cast headed by Geoffrey Palmer. Bennett narrated this tale of a suburban south London family whose story echoes the plot of a Shakespeare play – “Hamlet without the twiddly bits,” as the writer described it.
Powell took from his parents his love of the arts. His father was the novelist Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time, while his mother, Violet (nee Pakenham), daughter of the 5th Earl of Longford, wrote literary biographies.
Born in Oxford, brought up in London and, from the age of 12, in Frome, Somerset, Powell attended Eton college, Berkshire. He studied modern history at Trinity College, Oxford, then worked as a subeditor on Queen magazine.
In 1964, with the launch of BBC Two, he entered television as a production assistant on Writers’ World and the literary panel game Take It or Leave It. They were produced by Melvyn Bragg, who elevated Powell to director on the latter series, then on the arts magazine New Release (1965-67).
He moved on to directing documentary films for two longer-running arts series: Omnibus between 1970 and 1986, including portraits of Alfred Hitchcock and the novelists Jean Rhys and Beryl Bainbridge; and Arena from 1977 to 1988, with programmes on Salman Rushdie and the film directors Andrzej Wajda and Louis Malle.
One of his first dramas was The Ghost Writer (1983), from the novel by Philip Roth, but Powell recalled a fraught time collaborating with Roth on the script after the author saw the original adaptation and insisted Powell sack the writer.
Among the director’s other BBC works were The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1988), from Brian Moore’s novel about scheming employers corrupting their innocent shop assistant; The Old Devils (1992), Andrew Davies’s three-part adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s novel; Selected Exits (1993), Alan Plater’s dramatisation of the Welsh author and raconteur Gwyn Thomas’s memoirs, starring Anthony Hopkins; and Tears Before Bedtime (1995), a dark comedy about three couples and their nannies, written by Sandy Welch.
As television moved into a multi-channel age, with the established broadcasters taking fewer risks, Powell switched to more mainstream drama, mostly for ITV, including a feature-length version of the Agatha Christie mystery Sparkling Cyanide (2003) and Falling (2005), Davies’s adaptation of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel.
He also directed episodes of the legal drama Kavanagh QC (1997 and 1999), Lynda La Plante’s police series Trial & Retribution (2005-08) and The Commander (2006), Foyle’s War (2007 and 2008) and Law & Order: UK (2009), as well as Judge John Deed for the BBC (2005 and 2006).
In 1968, Powell married Virginia Lucas. She, their children, Archie and Georgia, and his brother, John, survive him.
• Tristram Roger Dymoke Powell, director, born 25 April 1940; died 1 March 2024
