Actor, writer, director, producer - Tony Garnett made an enormous contribution to film and television.
He was responsible for ushering in some of the biggest British television shows including 'Between the Lines', 'This Life' and 'Ballykissangel'.
But he also had an eye for stirring, occasionally controversial drama and for unearthing writing and directorial talent from Ken Loach and Jim Allen to Amy Jenkins, Kieran Prendeville and Jed Mercurio.
Born in Birmingham in 1936, he was orphaned at an early age after his mum, Ida died during a back street abortion and his grief stricken father committed suicide 19 days later while under police investigation.
Details of his family's tragic history did not emerge until he revealed it in an interview with the Guardian in 2013 and in hindsight the terrible circumstances of his parents' death contributed to his social conscience and sense of injustice.
It also came as a surprise to many of his associates as he had never discussed it before.
However Garnett later said if he had ever asked before about his knowledge of illegal abortion, he would have revealed the tale.
Raised by his aunt and uncle, Garnett attend the Central Grammar School in Birmingham and University College London where he read psychology.
However as a student he developed a taste for acting and he spent much time in its drama society.
This inspired him to pursue an acting career and before long he landed roles in film and TV dramas like Troy Kennedy Smith's Army tale 'Incident at Echo Smith' with Barry Foster in 1958, the BBC's 1960 series of Shakespearean history plays 'Age of Kings' with Robert Hardy, Julien Glover and Judi Dench and Sidney J Curie's 1962 courtroon drama movie 'The Boys' with Richard Todd, Robert Morely and Dudley Sutton.
There would also be appearances in the police series 'Dixon of Dock Green', 'Z Cats', 'The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre' and TV movies and plays like Ben Jonson's 'The Alchemist'.
However in 1964 he would first meet Ken Loach while appearing in a series called 'Telltale'.
A year later, they collaborated on the innovative BBC 'Play for Today' production 'Up the Junction' serving as story editor for Nell Dunn's adaptation of her own short stories about a backstreet abortion.
With its mix of a realist filmmaking techniques including a documentary style interview with a real doctor, 'Up the Junction' was a radical departure for British TV drama with its frank depiction of real life issues.
It would also mark the start of a fruitful 13 year collaboration with Loach that would see Garnett produce the director's groundbreaking realist one-off homelessness drama 'Cathy Come Home' by Jeremy Sandford for BBC1 and spark a national political debate and inspire a number of charities including Shelter.
Now fully ensconced in his role as a TV drama producer, he was responsible for getting work made under the BBC's 'The Wednesday Play' brand,. 'The ITV Play' and one-off TV productions of plays like Jack Gold's version of Berthold Brecht's 'The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui' with Nicol Williamson and Sam Wanamaker.
This introduced him to work of left wing, politically charged screenwriters like Jim Allen who he introduced to Loach and the writer-director Les Blair.
One of Allen's plays he produced under the BBC's 'The Wednesday Play' banner was Loach's 'The Big Flame' in 1969 with Norman Rossington and Godfrey Quigley about the occupation of Liverpool docks by 10,000 workers.
The play angered the conservative campaigner Mary Whitehouse so much that she wrote to the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Conservative Party Opposition Leader, Edward Heath to register her disgust at the BBC broadcasting communist propaganda and demanding that the corporation's charter be reviewed.
Garnett would produce Loach's classic 1969 film adaptation of Barry Hines' working class Yorkshire tale 'Kes" with David Bradley, Lynne Perrie, Colin Welland and Brian Glover.
The film would establish Loach as a major force in British and European cinema and one of most politically conscious and passionate advocates of the realist filmmaking tradition.
In 1971, Garnett and Loach collaborated on a documentary shot in Kenya about the work of Save the Children but their depiction of aid work as a misguided attempt to salve British consciences about its colonial past horrified the charity which party funded it.
The documentary was suppressed for 40 years due to legal threats until it was allowed to be shown as part of a retrospective of Garnett's work in London's National Film Theatre.
They also teamed up for the acclaimed 1971 film 'Family Life', a remake of David Mercer's 'In Two Minds' which was originally broadcast as a 'Wednesday Play', about a young unmarried mother forced into having an abortion by her disapproving conservative parents.
The movie won awards in Australia, France and at the Berlin Film Festival
In 1975, he produced Loach and Allen's four-part series 'Days of Hope' with Paul Copley, Pam Brighton, Alun Armstrong and, in a minor role, a young Stephen Rea which charted the experiences of a family from the Great War to the 1929 General Strike.
The first episode's depiction of conscientious objectors being tied up outside the trenches and exposed to enemy fire caused a huge furore.
Garnett, Loach and Barry Hines teamed up again on the controversial two-part 'Play for Today' drama 'The Price of Coal' in 1977 which was set in a South Yorkshire collery and dealt with the dangers many miners were exposed to.
The drama in many ways anticipated some of the fault lines that would lead to the miners strike which would see the NUM clash with Margaret Thatcher's Government in the 1980s.
Loach and Garnett's final collaboration would be in 1979 on the children's period drama feature film 'Black Jack' with Stephen Hurst, Louise Cooper and Jean Franval which captured the Critics Award at Cannes.
A year before that, Garnett and Allen were reunited for the Roland Joffe directed 'The Spongers' under the BBC's 'Play for Today' strand with Christine Hargreaves, Bernard Hill and Peter Kerrigan about a single mum struggling with welfare cuts against the backdrop of Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee.
Joffe, Allen and Garnett's work picked up the prestigious Prix Italia award and has since been lauded by the actor Christopher Eccleston and writer Jimmy McGovern as one of the greatest TV dramas of all time.
Garnett further cemented his reputation as a producer of edgy, thought provoking TV drama in 1978 with the BBC2 production of GF Newman's 'Law and Order'.
The four part drama series, starring Peter Dean and Derek Martin, faced a media backlash as it tackled corruption in the police and legal system from the perspectives of a policeman, a barrister, a prisoner and the real villain.
Garnett tried his hand at writing and directing, with the 1980 gritty drama 'Prostitute' starting Eleanor Forsythe and the 1983 Texan rape revenge drama 'Handgun' with Karen Young which he sold to Warner Bros who buried it as they focussed on a Clint Eastwood drama with similar thenez.
He would produce other feature films like Ken Kwapus' Sesame Street inspired musical road movie 'Follow That Bird' with Big Bird, Julien Temple's goofy 1988 sci-fi romcom 'Earth Girls Are Easy' with Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum and Damon Wayans and Hettie MacDonald's acclaimed 1998 drama 'Beautiful Thing' with Glen Barry and Scott Neal as working class lads in a London council estate who fall in love but feel pressure to hide their relationship.
For the most part, he would become a major player in the 1990s and 2000s as a producer of TV dramas - especially through his company World Productions.
Garnett did not stick rigidly to political content but brought realist production values to shows like JC Wilsher's BBC1 police corruption series 'Between the Lines' with Neal Pearson and Tony Doyle, Amy Jenkins' BBC2 twentysomething series 'This Life' which launched the careers of Andrew Lincoln and Jack Davenport and the short-lived but excellent BBC2 police on the beat series 'Cops' with Katy Cavanaugh and John Henshaw.
He gave Jed Mercurio his big break with the BBC1 medical drama series 'Cardiac Arrest' and his production company would go on to executive produce the writer's subsequent BBC1 hit series 'Line of Duty' and 'Bodyguard'.
Through World Productions, he would also executive produce David Drury's 1996 BBC and HBO submarine drama 'Hostile Waters' with Martin Sheen, Rutger Hauer and Max Von Sydow.
Other World Productions successes would include BBC1's gentle Sunday night rural Irish comedy drama 'Ballykissangel' with Stephen Tompkins on, Dervla Kirwin and Tony Doyle and Channel 4's nursing comedy drama 'No Angels' with Louise Delamere and Sunetra Sarker,.
They also produced BBC2's Westminster drama 'Party Animals' with Matt Smith and Andrea Riseborough, Guy Burt's ITV codebreakers period drama 'The Bletchley Circle' with Anna Maxwell Martin and Lennie James' Sky Atlantic drama 'Save Me' which also starred Stephen Graham, Suranne Jones and Susan Lynch.
Garnett's passion for meaningful drama never dimmed and in 2009 an email he sent
criticising the stifling of creativity in the BBC surfaced, causing a stir in the industry.
In subsequent interviews, he also criticised senior executives in the corporation for no longer being interested in depicting the reality of the poorest people in society, preferring instead to portray them as chavs.
Even after his retirement, he continued to argue for investment in one-off dramas and told the Guardian in 2013 that while soap operas had been great platforms for writing, directing and acting talent, they had become "the McDonald's of television.
"Just as junk food poisons you with sugar and trans fats, so clichés, emotional shortcuts and mechanical narratives poison you culturally over 20 years.
"It reduces people's sensibilities when we should be expanding them. I'm not saying get rid of soaps - we all eat a bit of junk food now and then - but the balance has shifted towards high value trash..
"I think TV should be a bloody great circus with lots and lots of acts. The difficult task, the only one worth trying, is how to do serious work and make it available to the maximum number of people."
(Tony Garnett passed away at the age of 83 on January 12, 2019)
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