Michael Beckham obituary
This article is more than 6 years oldFearless World in Action producer-director whose films of Vietnam and Chile left an indelible mark on the genreMichael Beckham, who has died aged 78, was a producer-director of films that defined a golden age of television – mostly for the famously fearless Granada TV programme World in Action. He made about 80 documentaries for the series, and award-winning dramas thereafter. “He was the Dickens of television,” said his colleague and friend since 1966, Mike Ryan, “prolific, but always the best. He could do everything.”
It’s not nostalgia to regard those days as halcyon ones in television. World in Action broadcast to audiences of 13 million at prime time, against Panorama’s 9 million on BBC – a third of the country watching serious, international quality documentaries. I got my first real job on World in Action in 1979, an ambition conceived six years previously as a student watching Michael’s report of Chile’s 1973 military coup, which included the last interview with the murdered singer Victor Jara while in captivity.
Michael teamed up with the reporter John Ware for The Hunt for Doctor Mengele (1978), which won a gold medal at the New York international film festival, and during the making of which he was arrested in Paraguay. “Mike was fast on his feet, clear-eyed and pushed the envelope to its outer limits,” said Ware. “Sometimes even beyond, as when he got arrested in Asunción and spent a couple of nights in President Alfredo Stroessner’s cells, where the dictator’s political opponents were tortured. We had been spotted filming one of Stroessner’s drug-dealing generals. Mike was whisked to the airport having been declared persona non grata – we reconvened in Brazil and returned to the fray from there.”
From 1987, he also made films for Granada’s anthropology series Disappearing World, among them documentaries shot in the Amazon and Kenya. In 1990 he produced and directed the acclaimed drama Who Bombed Birmingham?, with a cast headed by John Hurt.
He continued making films for Granada, Channel 4, the BBC and other broadcasters before setting up his own company, Circus Productions, in 2005. He won an Emmy for Rx for Survival (2005), about global health, narrated by Brad Pitt, and he wrote, produced and directed The World’s First Computer (2012, known as The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer in the UK), a documentary unravelling the mystery of the Antikythera mechanism.
Michael was born in Witham, Essex; his parents, John and Emily, ran a cattle-breeding centre. He went from Braintree County high school to St John’s College, Cambridge, to study engineering, proceeding to a PhD in chemical engineering. He was offered a career with Shell, but turned it down after winning a Times student drama prize, and was talent-spotted by Granada.
He duly joined Granada’s trainee scheme in 1962, and directed Coronation Street before moving to World in Action in 1964. There, Michael made an indelible mark not only on the innovative programme, but on the history and future of documentary television. He filmed all over the world, including award-winning editions on Vietnam and the CIA.
Ryan, who joined World in Action in 1968, recalled Michael as “inscrutable, you never quite knew where he was coming from. He’d sit through long meetings in silence, and at the end say: ‘Crap’. Or: ‘There might be something there.’ He’d always be right.” Beckham’s talent, said Ryan, was that “he combined being a wonderful film-maker and extraordinary investigative journalist, a rare gift.”
If World in Action had been an Arab village, Beckham would have been its mukhtar – mentor and guardian of the spirit: until this month, he organised regular reunions of WIA alumni at the Frontline Club in London. He was very funny, and had a twinkle in his eye; if he wanted a quiet talk in that crowded room, he had a way of summoning you with a glance – both invitation and order. It was always enriching to listen, be it to droll, scalpel-edged observations about our present stupid times, or tales of serendipity and shambles behind some apparently heroic film sequence.
Michael married Ann Roberts – a doctor, his third wife – in 1999. She and their son, Alexander, survive him, as do his daughter, Daisy, from his second marriage, and his brother, Paul.
Michael Anthony Beckham, television producer and director, born 27 April 1938; died 23 March 2017
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