GOLD STANDARD

Until I saw the Guardian obituary today, I hadn’t registered the death of Jack Gold at 85. His career exactly spanned my own obsession with television. Watching his film Death in the Morning, made in 1964 for the early-evening magazine programme Tonight, was a pivotal moment in viewing for me. At 16, I was beginning to understand that there was a correlation between the credits I saw on programmes and movies – especially those of the writer and director and sometimes too of the producer – and the effectiveness of the work. Alan Whicker fronted the film, but it was Gold’s producer credit (which meant director in current affairs parlance) that I remembered.

Death in the Morning was arguably the spur that kicked off the anti-fox-hunting movement. It undoubtedly referenced the dazzling hunt sequence in Tony Richardson’s feature film Tom Jones, made the previous year. But it put this visceral excitement to decided polemical use. That it was a true innovation in engaged documentary was recognised by its winning of a SFTA award (the forerunner of BAFTA).

Gold made a memorable record of Malcolm Muggeridge’s lecture tour of the States before joining the roster of directors on The Wednesday Play. He immediately slipped into the Ken Loach mould with The Lump (written by Loach regular Jim Allen), though he made it his own by brilliantly casting a very grand actor, Leslie Sands, in the lead rather than the earthier type that Loach would have favoured (Bill Dean or Peter Kerrigan).

One of the most successful (if least characteristic) Wednesday Plays was Mad Jack, Tom Clarke’s play that covered similar ground to Pat Barker’s subsequent Booker Prize-winning novel Resurrection. It was on a re-teaming of Gold and Clarke, Stocker’s Copper, that I met Jack Gold. I was then a BBC trainee. Jack was reserved, watchful and serious; the part of the production that I shadowed was the recording and dubbing on of music, so the very different character of the composer Carl Davis – loud, garrulous, ebullient – somewhat eclipsed Jack. I never doubted his authority and control, however.

Jack almost invariably chose scripts by writers of the very first rank: Charles Wood, John McGrath, Jack Rosenthal, Julia Jones, Howard Barker, Peter Nichols, Adrian Mitchell, Andrew Davies. But, as all his generation of directors experienced, the movies proved less rewarding than the golden age of television – though Jack made more than most – and the golden age dwindled and died in the late 1970s.

The last time I saw Jack was on a bus in Crouch End and he mistook me for Enn Reitel, not the most flattering of misperceptions. I can forgive him that. His career was as effective and discriminating as any director of his generation and he’s left a fine legacy.