Jeremy Newson obit

Jeremy Newson obituary

Documentary film-maker who lifted the lid on the fashion, music and entertainment businesses

 

He was not on the list.

The film-maker Jeremy Newson, who has died aged 73 after suffering from motor neurone disease, made landmark television series on the fashion, music and entertainment industries. The genius of The Look (1992), The Music Biz (1995), and The Entertainment Business (aka The Entertainment Biz, 1998), each made in six parts for the BBC, lay in the clarity with which the raw capitalism behind the industries was laid out alongside the often spectacular creative end results.

Viewers were transported from the catty politics of who sat where in an haute couture catwalk to the deals and contract negotiations that drove the music industry – but all written and presented with such wry and humane detachment that no participant could object. The programmes, produced and directed by Jeremy with his partner, and from 1999 his wife, Gina Martin, marked a rupture from the hagiographies that had typified TV arts coverage until then.

The Look captured fashion’s move from being quite a small, elite activity to the industry we know today. The extraordinary access that the Newsons got depended on endless patience: when Issey Miyake finally agreed to appear, it was only on a remote island off Osaka, so they ensured that there was a crew there to meet him armed with questions and a shot list.

In The Music Biz they went backstage at a Metallica concert, and the ensuing voiceover, “with a fan’s intonation … always had the sense that the tongue was in the cheek”, according to the Independent’s review. The Entertainment Business took an early look at celebrity culture. Variety noted that “the irony that it would take a relative Hollywood outsider like the BBC to produce TV’s most penetrating and cynical look at its own to date should not be lost”.

In these films Jeremy was inventive with technology, for example in the use of green-screen backgrounds to project intriguing images into the backgrounds of interviews to reinforce the content. The combination of visuals, scripts and content – the taking apart of creative-industry capitalism – was groundbreaking.

Jeremy also displayed versatility as an actor, singer and songwriter. in the film version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), he played Ralph Hapschatt, reprising the role in the follow-up Shock Treatment (1981). In the mid-70s he released a couple of recordings on CBS’s Epic label, and wrote many songs, some of them for Lulu in Peter Pan at the London Palladium. For BBC TV’s Not Mozart series in 1991 he wrote the libretto for, and directed, a half-hour opera by Michael Nyman, Letters, Riddles and Writs, which featured Ute Lemper as the composer.

Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Jeremy was the son of Steve Newson, a salesman for a building firm, and his wife, Ruth (nee Fisher). When Jeremy was six, the family moved to Calgary, Alberta, in Canada, where his father hosted a radio programme. In 1964 Jeremy left the University of Calgary before graduating in order to run a touring troupe of musicians and then joined a creative writing course at the University of Vancouver.

Robert Altman was filming McCabe and Mrs Miller in the city and looking for locals to be in it; Jeremy went for an audition and got a part, with Altman using his languid drawl for many of the intercut voice-overs in the 1971 film. Through Julie Christie, who starred as Mrs Miller, he met the illustrator and lyricist Alfie Benge and followed her back to London; she eventually married the musician Robert Wyatt.

 

Jeremy met Gina in a workshop with the British company that had developed from the New York-based La MaMa Troupe. I first met him and Gina on a package holiday to Sorrento, near Naples, in 1976. The length of their hair suggested that they were the only couple on the airport bus likely to have interests in common with us.

After parting company with CBS, Jeremy turned to television directing with Gina. The arrival of Channel 4 in 1982 created opportunities for independent companies, and they set up Freelance Film Partners (FFP), starting with Joan of Arc (1983), and Imaginary Women (1986), both with Marina Warner, and quirky documentaries. Following the 1990s documentaries, he directed and Gina edited Tales from the Global Economy (2001, BBC2), presciently querying whether globalisation was quite the force for good the political consensus was presenting it as.

He sustained his songwriting, often collaborating with the musician and founder of the Beatles tribute band the Bootleg Beatles, Neil Harrison. It was Jeremy who suggested their name.

He and Gina lived in Kilburn, north-west London, with their son, Max, and daughter, Miki. The basement of their house became the production and editing heart of FFP. Jeremy continued with profiles of designers and architects, but by 2012 they felt that there was no place in contemporary TV for their sort of approach, and wound up the company.

When not undertaking occasional directing assignments, Jeremy went sailing off Mersea Island, on the Essex coast. After the diagnosis of his illness he continued to write and record songs for release online; his EP Seize the Day has a particular following.

Gina and their children survive him.

Film

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1971      McCabe & Mrs. Miller    Jeremy Bergon (as Jeremy Newsom)

1975      The Rocky Horror Picture Show Ralph Hapschatt              

1979      Yanks    Mechanic

1981      Shock Treatment              Ralph Hapschatt

1991      Not Mozart: Letters, Riddles, and Wits    Director/Writer                 (TV Movie)

Television

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1976      Centre Play         Jeremy

1992      The Look              Director/Producer           (TV Series Documentary)

1998      Bravo Profiles: The Entertainment Business          Director/Writer

2004      The Shakespeare Job      Director/Producer