Brian Armstrong obituary
Television producer best known for World in Action and Coronation Street
He was not on the list.
Brian Armstrong, who has died aged 86 of prostate cancer, joined British commercial television in its early days and went on to produce some of its most famous programmes, from Coronation Street to World in Action. He was fortunate in learning his craft with the Manchester-based rebel in the ITV system, Granada Television, which sought to provide an alternative voice on the national channel.
While a producer-director (1967-69) of the current affairs programme World in Action, he covered the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, smuggling film out in car door panels, having survived what he thought would be his final moments, when he was stopped by a Russian soldier. “As I moved, he followed my head with his rifle,” Armstrong said. “Then, for no apparent reason, he lowered it and turned away. I’ll never know why.”
Planning for a possible report to camera on a satellite link back to Manchester, he had decided he should look “sincere” and borrowed from Granada’s wardrobe department a jacket to twin with his Burton’s tie.
In the book Granada Television: The First Generation, he wrote: “I had been in the middle of mayhem for three days – sullen gunfire on the horizon, the squeal of heavy caterpillar treads on tarmac, tanks outside the hotel window, Kalashnikovs in nervous hands – when the phone rang in my hotel room. It was a call from Granada. ‘Can I have [Coronation Street character] Albert Tatlock’s jacket back immediately? In the storyline, he’s going to a reunion and he needs it.’”
Armstrong also recalled that during his time on World in
Action, when he narrated his own films, he was tracked by Iran’s secret police
at the time of the Shah’s coronation, stoned by “malcontents” in Calcutta
(Kolkata), tear-gassed in Washington and manhandled by the IRA on the Falls
Road shortly after British troops arrived in Northern Ireland.
Later, working for an enterprising TV company that saw only creative possibilities in moving staff between departments, Armstrong spent six months as producer of Coronation Street (1971-72). For his final episode, he brought Barbara Knox back to the serial to play Rita as a regular, eight years after she had taken the role for a single episode. Over the next 20 years Armstrong showed his versatility by working mostly on Granada drama and comedy output.
He was born in Tynemouth, Northumberland, to Isabella (nee Boyd), a silent film pianist, and her husband, Norman Armstrong, a draughtsman. He attended Heaton grammar school in Newcastle upon Tyne, and gained a degree in English from Wadham College, Oxford, before national service in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, with whom he was seconded as a captain to the Royal West Africa Frontier Force in Nigeria.
In 1958, after a short time working as a technical process manager for Formica, he joined Granada as an assistant transmission controller. Four years later he was writing and researching local programmes and, from 1963, producing and presenting them. He was regularly seen by viewers in the north of England as a presenter and reporter (1965-66) on the regional news magazine Scene at 6.30.
Armstrong continued to narrate episodes of World in Action until 1971, by which time he had switched to producing dramas for Granada. The Sinners (1970-71), 13 plays adapted from Irish short stories – some of which he scripted himself before his stint on Coronation Street – was followed by A Raging Calm (1974), Stan Barstow’s adaptation of his own novel about the intertwined lives of four people in a West Riding town. He also oversaw Nightingale’s Boys (1975), a seven-part tale of a teacher organising a 25th-anniversary reunion of his brilliant “class of 49”, created by Arthur Hopcraft.
In addition, there was the Bafta award-winning children’s series Soldier and Me (1974), about two boys on the run from assassins after the Prague Spring of 1968, which he commissioned from David Line (the pseudonym of the thriller writer Lionel Davidson), who adapted the story from his 1966 novel Run for Your Life, set during the Hungarian revolution of 1956.
When Armstrong was made Granada’s head of comedy (1974-84), his biggest success was The Cuckoo Waltz (1975-80), starring Diane Keen and David Roper as poor newlyweds and Lewis Collins as their better-off lodger. Other sitcoms he commissioned included My Brother’s Keeper (1975-76), Yanks Go Home (1976), Devenish (1977), Leave It to Charlie (1978), Foxy Lady (1982-84), Union Castle (1982) and Affairs of the Heart (1983-85). He also oversaw the sketch show Wood and Walters (1981-82), the first to pair Victoria Wood and Julie Walters on TV.
Returning to drama, Armstrong produced Travelling Man (1984-85), starring Leigh Lawson as a narrowboat-living former detective wrongly imprisoned for taking a bribe and seeking the person who framed him, and Game, Set & Match (1988), with Ian Holm in a lavish adaptation of Len Deighton’s Cold War espionage trilogy set in Berlin, Mexico and London.
Armstrong finished his career as producer of the newspaper review What the Papers Say (1990-92) after it became the first Granada programme to be sold to BBC television. In retirement he read a book a day and continued his hobby of collecting toy soldiers.
He is survived by his wife, Christine Moffat, whom he married in 1964, their sons, Duncan and Gavin, three grandchildren, Jamie, Mike and Emma, and his brother John.
Brian Stainton
Armstrong, television producer, born 10 October 1933; died 24 February 2020.
Producer
Attacks of the Mystery Shark
7.8
TV Movie
producer
2002
Kings & Pirates
TV Movie
producer
1999
Brian Inglis in What the Papers Say (1956)
What the Papers Say
6.1
TV Series
producer
1989–1992
17 episodes
Game, Set, and Match (1988)
Game, Set, and Match
8.6
TV Series
producer
1988
13 episodes
Leigh Lawson in Travelling Man (1984)
Travelling Man
8.0
TV Series
producer
1984–1985
13 episodes
Affairs of the Heart (1983)
Affairs of the Heart
TV Series
producer
1983–1985
7 episodes
Diane Keen and Patrick Troughton in Foxy Lady (1982)
Foxy Lady
5.2
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1982–1984
12 episodes
Rep
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1982
4 episodes
Union Castle (1982)
Union Castle
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1982
7 episodes
The Glamour Girls
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1980–1982
13 episodes
Rik Mayall, Duncan Preston, Julie Walters, and Victoria Wood
in Wood and Walters (1981)
Wood and Walters
7.3
TV Series
producer
1982
7 episodes
Tiny Revolutions
6.8
TV Movie
producer
1981
David Neilson in Young at Heart (1977)
Have I Got You... Where You Want Me
TV Series
producer
1981
7 episodes
Chintz
TV Series
producer
1981
7 episodes
The Cuckoo Waltz (1975)
The Cuckoo Waltz
7.0
TV Series
Head of Comedy
producer
1975–1980
26 episodes
Can We Get on Now, Please?
TV Series
producer
1980
6 episodes
Leave It to Charlie (1978)
Leave It to Charlie
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1978–1980
26 episodes
Cabbages and Kings
TV Series
producer
1979–1983
Duggie Brown and Elisabeth Sladen in Take My Wife... (1979)
Take My Wife...
6.6
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1979
6 episodes
Dinsdale Landen in Devenish (1977)
Devenish
5.2
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1977–1978
14 episodes
Bruce Boa, Stuart Damon, Meg Johnson, and Peter Sallis in
Yanks Go Home (1976)
Yanks Go Home
5.2
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1976–1977
13 episodes
George Layton and Jonathan Lynn in My Brother's Keeper
(1975)
My Brother's Keeper
7.0
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1975–1976
13 episodes
Arthur English, Nicholas Hoye, and Michael Robbins in How's
Your Father? (1974)
How's Your Father?
7.2
TV Series
producer
Head of Comedy
1974–1975
10 episodes
Nightingale's Boys (1975)
Nightingale's Boys
6.3
TV Series
producer
1975
7 episodes
Alfie Bass and Bill Fraser in Bootsie and Snudge (1960)
Bootsie and Snudge
7.2
TV Series
Head of Comedy
1974
6 episodes
Soldier and Me (1974)
Soldier and Me
8.1
TV Series
producer
1974
9 episodes
Alan Badel and Diana Coupland in A Raging Calm (1974)
A Raging Calm
8.8
TV Mini Series
producer
1974
7 episodes
Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Paul Scofield, and Anna
Calder-Marshall in ITV Saturday Night Theatre (1969)
ITV Saturday Night Theatre
6.1
TV Series
producer
1971–1973
4 episodes
Peter Adamson, Jean Alexander, Johnny Briggs, Margot Bryant,
and Doris Speed in Coronation Street (1960)
Coronation Street
5.6
TV Series
producer
1970–1972
32 episodes
Evin Crowley, Mary Larkin, Eamon Morrissey, and Aidan Murphy
in The Sinners (1970)
The Sinners
TV Series
producer
1970–1971
12 episodes
World in Action (1963)
World in Action
7.0
TV Series
producer
1967–1969
15 episodes
Nice Time
TV Series
producer
1968–1969
4 episodes
Gay Byrne in Scene at 6:30 (1963)
Scene at 6:30
TV Series
producer
1963–1965
14 episodes
All Our Yesterdays (1960)
All Our Yesterdays
8.6
TV Series
producer
1960–1989
Additional Crew
World in Action (1963)
World in Action
7.0
TV Series
production team
1967–1968
2 episodes
Writer
Attacks of the Mystery Shark
7.8
TV Movie
Writer
2002
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