He kickstarted the careers of Ken Loach and Jed Mercurio, defied all the bosses at the
BBC … and riled up everyone from the royals to Save the Children. We hail the bravest man in TV Tony Garnett, TV and film producer, dies aged 83On 3 November 1965, a BBC play launched a revolution that changed TV drama for ever. It was Up the Junction, produced by Tony Garnett, who has died aged 83.
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The roots of TV drama were in theatre: early programmes were often a play recreated in a studio, or a script filmed on a theatre-like set. The dream of many professionals who grew up watching movies was to create a TV-cinema hybrid called “the single film”. The brilliant and transformational insight of Garnett was that fiction should aspire to match the realism and reportorial zeal of news and documentary.