Derek Granger, TV producer who overcame huge obstacles to bring Brideshead Revisited to the screen – obituary

Derek Granger, the television producer, who has died aged 101, overcame formidable odds in bringing one of the medium’s most successful classic dramas, Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981), to the small screen.

It took Granger five years to negotiate the television rights to Evelyn Waugh’s bestselling novel and another two to set up a production which would star two of the greatest actors of the day, Sir Laurence (later Lord) Olivier and Sir John Gielgud. Some 90 minutes of film out of a projected total of 13 hours had been completed when all work was halted by the ITV technicians’ strike of 1979. As the stoppage lengthened, Granger saw his scrupulously prepared plans of two years fall apart.

By the time the strike was eventually settled 11 weeks later, Granger was in despair. He had lost all his painstakingly-negotiated artists’ contracts and options on shooting in locations which included an Oxford college and Castle Howard. He fully expected that his bosses at Granada Television would settle for cancellation costs.

Instead they told Granger to go ahead. Against expectation he managed to re-sign all his original cast, although its most important member, Jeremy Irons, was already filming The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and had to be flown to the United States with hours to spare to finish a crucial scene aboard the QE2.

Another casualty of the hold-up was Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the original director, who had to be replaced by Granger’s young protégé and fellow Waugh enthusiast Charles Sturridge. By way of a bonus, Granger managed to get the Oxford scenes moved from Wadham to Waugh’s old rooms in Hertford College.

George Howard, owner of the vast Yorkshire mansion which was to serve as the stately home of the eccentric Marchmain family, agreed to let the Granada crew return. By a delicious irony which Waugh would have appreciated, Howard was then chairman of the rival BBC.

“Not too many footmen,” Howard cautioned Granger, who had laid on extra extras to shoot a domestic dinner party. Howard was aghast when he saw the Brideshead Christmas tree the Granada crew had set up: “Good God – tinsel!”

Altogether it took four years to make the series, in the face of union over-manning arguments and escalating costs. The outcome was an outstanding television film which attracted audiences of up to 12 million, drew ecstatic notices from the critics, and scooped five international awards.

Besides the brilliant casting and lavish location photography, Granger’s production was notable for its faithfulness to the original novel. This was achieved partly through the use of voice-over narration to convey the unique flavour of Waugh’s prose.

John Mortimer got the credit for the screenplay, but as his script was unfilmable it was in fact written on the hoof, often in the evenings after filming, by Granger and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Nonetheless, as one critic noted, “The whole production, breathes the leisured, measured air of an opus that knows it has 13 hours to spend, and can afford rich silences as well as honeyed words.”

What made the exercise doubly remarkable was the fact that it had been brought off by a commercial television company with backing from American resources. Most transatlantic viewers assumed automatically that Brideshead Revisited was a product of the BBC.

Granger, a committed socialist, was sometimes asked how he could justify spending £5 million of Granada’s money on glorifying the lifestyle of decadent aristocrats. “Well,” he would reply, “they may be decadent. But I don’t think anyone could call them boring.”

Derek Harold Granger was born on April 23 1921 in Stockport but the family moved to Eastbourne, where he was educated at Eastbourne College. After wartime service in the Royal Navy, during which he rose from ordinary seaman to lieutenant, he joined the Brighton Evening Argus as a reporter and feature writer.

In the early 1950s he interviewed Evelyn Waugh, who was convalescing at a local hotel. Contrary to the received image of the famous novelist as rude, snobbish and overbearing, Granger found him “amazingly nice and wonderfully funny”. As they parted after a two-hour talk, the writer murmured gravely: “Ours is a very exacting trade, Mr Granger, is it not?”

Promoted to the post of theatre and film critic, Granger reviewed pre-West End runs at local theatres, his work attracting the attention of Laurence Olivier, who recommended him to the chairman of the Financial Times, Lord Drogheda.

As the FT’s drama critic, his chief claim to fame was recognising ahead of other drama critics the significance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). He also championed the work of other contemporary dramatists, like Edward Bond, David Storey and Peter Nichols.

His 10 years as a critic came to an end when, sitting through a particularly tedious farce, he asked himself: “Why am I listening to this appalling tosh?” and accepted an offer from Granada Television in Manchester as a writer and producer.

Thrown in at the deep end, Granger exploited his journalistic instincts as producer of Granada’s current affairs flagship World In Action as well as being assigned to situation comedies and, in its infancy, Coronation Street (1961-62) with a brief to make it “bigger and stronger”.

In this role Granger allowed storylines to develop over several months rather than piecemeal, and encouraged an “earthier” style exemplified by an episode in late 1961 in which months of simmering on-screen tension between Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner erupted in a full-scale argument in the Street.

In 1963 Granger helped to initiate the acclaimed Seven Up series in which a sample of seven-year-olds talked about their hopes, plans and fears for the future, returning every seven years to update viewers.

From Granada he moved to London Weekend as head of plays, and was one of several senior executives who resigned in protest at the sacking of LWT’s managing director Michael Peacock in 1969.

Granger’s career took another turn later that year when he was invited to become literary manager of the National Theatre alongside the critic Kenneth Tynan, advising the board on choice of plays. On his return to Granada two years later, he worked on Country Matters, an award-winning series of adaptations of HE Bates’s stories, and Granada’s 1976 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner and Laurence Olivier, whom he subsequently cast as Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited.

After leaving Granada, Granger moved into feature films with his own company Stagescreen Productions. Working again with Charles Sturridge, he produced a film adaptation of Waugh’s darkest novel, A Handful of Dust (1988), and another of EM Forster’s, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), having satisfied the trustees of King’s College, Cambridge, who owned the rights, that his film would be scrupulously faithful to the original novel.

Despite this coup, and the casting of Helen Mirren in the lead role, it looked as though the traumas of Brideshead were about to resurface when the promised financial backing almost failed to materialise. Granger surmounted this hurdle and the challenge of recreating a ruined village in Tuscany, although even he was unable to find a period Italian train to begin and end the film.

Granger took a high-minded view of the theatre, believing that it should reflect contemporary issues. But he insisted that drama with populist appeal deserved equally serious attention. During his time with Granada, he told an interviewer that Elsie Tanner of Coronation Street (played by Pat Phoenix) was “the best fictional character since Anna Karenina”.

A lifelong cat-lover, he tried to get felines in all his films. No fewer than 40 were scheduled for one scene in Brideshead, to lap up milk spilled in a road accident. On shooting day in Manchester, it rained and the cats declined to appear. Only one could be coaxed into the shot.

After retiring in the early 1990s, Granger, an engaging talker with an impish mien and relish for the absurd, returned to Brighton where he served as vice-president of the Regency Society and was involved in campaigns by various Brighton societies concerned with development threats to the city’s historic centre.

His husband and partner of 66 years, the interior designer Kenneth Partridge, died in 2015.

Derek Granger, born April 23 1921, died November 29 2022