Charles Chilton obit

Charles Chilton obituary

This article is more than 12 years old

BBC radio producer who created the serial Journey into Space 

He was not on the list.

The BBC radio producer and writer Charles Chilton, who has died aged 95, created a classic radio serial, Journey into Space, various series exploring the America of the past, and the one-off programme that eventually took to stage and screen as Oh! What a Lovely War. At the start of his career, radio could still attract audiences greater than those for television, and as well as producing popular comedy series such as The Goon Show and Take It from Here, Chilton devised some of its most distinctive material.

The first series of Journey into Space, broadcast in 1953, was described as "groundbreaking". "Well, it has to be," Chilton laughed in response. It took Captain Jet Morgan, played by the actor and future MP Andrew Faulds, and his crew to the moon. They went on to Mars in the remaining two parts of the trilogy, which gained an enormous following and was translated into 17 languages. An atmospheric theme tune and echo-chamber sound effects contributed to its success: music was a regular feature of the various panoramas that Chilton summoned up, far away from postwar Britain.

Cabin in the Cotton (1947) featured the folk songs of the American south, with performers including the Trinidad-born Edric Connor and the young Petula Clark. Riders of the Range (1949-53), "a musical drama of the west", related the story of the building of the railroads and the exploits of cowboys Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Chilton scripted a strip version of it for the comic Eagle.

In 1961, he juxtaposed music-hall songs of Edwardian Britain with an account of the trench warfare and slaughter of the first world war. Narrated by Faulds, the programme went under the name of The Long, Long Trail. The following year a further version was broadcast, narrated by Bud Flanagan, and it was this that came to the attention of the theatre director Joan Littlewood. Oh What a Lovely War opened at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in March 1963, and as it took on a more theatrical form Chilton's credit became just "based on an idea of". A transfer to the West End was highly successful, and Richard Attenborough directed the star-studded film version of 1969 (for which the title acquired an exclamation mark).

The inspiration for the original came from Chilton's discovery of his father's name on a war memorial at Arras, in northern France. The two had never met, and Charles, born into poverty in the St Pancras area of north London, also lost his mother when he was just five.

Brought up by his grandmother, he slept five to a bed, sharing two rooms with nine relatives. Despite little formal education, he managed to win a London elementary schools essay competition writing about hygiene in the house. When he reached 14, he left school for jobs in shops, and at the cinema was entranced by both the old silents and the new talkies.

As a messenger at the BBC, Chilton at first felt inadequate, but set about remedying the gaps in his education. He quickly progressed to the gramophone department and began presenting jazz programmes, but was thwarted by a head of variety whose objection to the sound of his voice compelled him to take elocution lessons. Work with Alistair Cooke on his series I Hear You Singing (1938), which traced the history of America through folk song, led to promotion as a producer. With war imminent, Cooke asked Chilton to join him in leaving for the US, but Chilton preferred to stay in Britain. After a period as an RAF radio instructor, he was sent to run a radio station in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. One of his colleagues there was David Jacobs, whose varied broadcasting career once back in Britain included taking many of the bit parts in Journey into Space.

On his own return to the BBC after the war, Chilton made notable programmes on such varied subjects as the General Strike, the Mormons, the American civil war and Demon Drink, detailing the perils of the gin palace in Victorian Britain. Though a staff producer, he came to operate with a considerable degree of independence – when we met in the streets around Broadcasting House, he would always be clutching a pile of records and files under his arm, totally immersed in his next project.

Appointed MBE in 1972, he continued to work as a freelance after retirement, and there were two Journey into Space one-offs – The Return from Mars (1981) and Frozen in Time (2008), in which Jacobs finally got to play Jet Morgan. The original Journey into Space stories were reworked for Radio 2 as Space Force (1984-85). In 2011, Chilton published an engaging autobiography, Auntie's Charlie.

He married Penelope Colbeck, at one time his secretary at the BBC, in 1947. She survives him, as do their daughter and two sons.

 Charles Frederick William Chilton, radio producer and writer, born 15 June 1917; died 2 January 2013

 

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