Monday, February 24, 2020

Brian Armstrong obit

Brian Armstrong obituary

This article is more than 4 years old

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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