Michael Ingrams; Documentary film-maker known for Our Street
Hyfler/Rosner
Documentary film-maker known for Our Street
Philip Purser
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2009/nov/22/michael-ingrams-obituary
Michael Ingrams, who has died aged 83, was an actor,
director and reporter who in the early years of ITV -
specifically for Associated-Rediffusion (A-R) - combined all
these functions to create what was virtually a new kind of
television. It was first apparent in Look in On London
(1956), a series in which he devoted the whole of each show
to one aspect of life and work in the capital.
Street cleaners, sewermen and bargees all took their turn.
The comings and goings at an almshouse in Camberwell were
charted, while an episode set in Hyde Park focused on
Speakers' Corner. Later that same year, Look Out of London:
Northern Journey ventured along the Grand Union Canal for
Ingrams to chat to dockers in Stepney, youth in Birmingham
and actors in Salford.
The British Film Institute rated these editions so highly
that they took them all for the National Film Archive.
Historically, however, Ingrams's outstanding innovation must
be the chronicle of ordinary lives he called Our Street
(1960). Admittedly, the documentary film-maker Dennis
Mitchell had exactly the same aim in Morning in the Streets
for the BBC the year before, but his was a compilation of
bits and pieces from several northern towns. Ingrams
confined himself to just one small street - Ulric Street -
in Camberwell, south London.
He moved in to film its denizens over seven weekly episodes,
each of half an hour. Most of them had lived there all their
lives. They were in and out of each other's houses, and into
the corner pub in the evening. They remembered old times,
amiable street-fights, buying a farthing carrot to take to
school. Over the seven weeks you grew to know them, as you
grew to know the characters in soap opera. Ah, there was the
rub. That very year Coronation Street was colonising the
country. The true-life version of ordinary life, it is
fairly safe to say, was swept aside by the fictional. It is
difficult to attach much weight to the claim that Our Street
was somehow the parent of today's reality TV.
Michael Ingrams, a half-brother of the journalist Richard
Ingrams, attended Westminster school, which he left at 17 to
become an actor with the Old Vic company, based in
Liverpool. Later he understudied Ivor Novello in The Dancing
Years and doubled for James Mason in the film The Man in
Grey. As so often happened, a chance meeting - his with the
director Robert Tronson - led to his being taken on by A-R.
After working on children's programmes he was selected to be
one of the team which, in 1956, launched ITV's This Week.
Subsequently he conducted a chat- show, Here and Now, served
a year in New York as A-R's man in America, and, in 1958,
spent six months in the Soviet Union, the first western film
journalist to be accredited after the death of Stalin. After
standing unsuccessfully for parliament in 1964 he left A-R
to become a freelance and made some 80 short films for the
Rank Organisation.
Finally, in 1970, with Denis Norden, Bob Monkhouse and the
composer Malcolm Mitchell, he set up a company to organise
conferences, with music, dance and performers, for
commercial clients. In 1982 he retired from the board, and
with his third wife, Marie Frezard, settled in France. He is
survived by her, two sons and a daughter.
. Michael Dunham Ingrams, television presenter and
documentary film-maker, born 13 December 1925; died 21
September 2009