Michael Latham; Documentary filmmaker
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 04/01/2006) Telegraph
Michael Latham, who has died aged 73, was a documentary
film-maker responsible for some of the most influential
factual television programmes of the last four decades.
As the series editor of Tomorrow's World and a producer of
Man Alive, Horizon and many other programmes on subjects
ranging from the lives of the great explorers to the history
of science, Latham made meticulously researched and
thought-provoking films and pioneered the social realism
genre in British television documentaries.
Michael Latham was born on June 18 1932 in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, and returned to Britain with his family in the
late 1930s. He was educated at John Fisher School, Purley,
an experience which he did not particularly enjoy.
Following National Service, Latham became a journalist with
the Andover Advertiser, then moved to Bristol, where he
continued to work for local papers (editing a problem page
under the pseudonym "Barbara") while sharing a flat with
Peter O'Toole and Tom Stoppard.
In the late 1950s he joined the BBC's Outside Broadcast Unit
and in 1960 he covered the marriage of Princess Margaret to
the Earl of Snowdon. Latham and Snowdon became friends and
worked on a number of television projects together,
including Love of a Kind, directed by Snowdon, about the
British and their pets.
By the early 1960s Latham had joined BBC Features. It was a
time of great innovation and new freedoms, and he leapt at
the chance to stimulate debate with his programmes. Diligent
and painstaking in his research, with a particular talent
for scriptwriting, he approached each new project with a
meticulousness and enthusiasm which was to inspire many
other documentary film-makers.
Latham became a leading producer for Man Alive in 1965,
shaping the documentary series into a popular BBC 2 staple
which offered intelligent and occasionally contentious films
on almost every topic imaginable. Latham and Desmond Wilcox,
the series editor, later went on to set up Man Alive Group,
an independent production company.
In 1967 Latham and his co-producer Gordon Thomas were
awarded the Monte Carlo Critics' Prize for A Bit of an
Experience, a sensitive and compelling documentary about a
woman undergoing life-saving brain surgery.
Latham had spent months researching the programme, trying to
find a patient and surgeon who would be willing and able to
be filmed. It broke new ground in many ways, chronicling not
only the medical detail of a life-saving operation, but the
emotional effect on the patient's family.
That same year he succeeded in persuading Dr Christiaan
Barnard, the surgeon who had recently performed the world's
first heart transplant operation on a human being, to appear
in The Heart Man and Barnard Faces his Critics for BBC
Science and Features.
Latham was appointed editor of Tomorrow's World, the popular
science and technology series, in 1967. It was an enjoyable,
if occasionally nerve-wracking, task.
He was regularly approached by inventors who were keen to
publicise their latest project; one man offered to set
himself alight to prove the efficacy of a new kind of
aerosol fire extinguisher. Latham refused, opting instead to
set fire to the man's jacket, which burnt to a cinder
despite the application of the aerosol.
He continued to make one-off documentaries, attracting some
controversy in 1970 with Go Climb a Mountain, examining the
work of Dr Josef Issels, whose unorthodox methods of
treating terminal cancer included making a group of patients
struggle up a snow slope.
Two years later he produced If Britain Had Fallen, a
three-hour documentary examining the theoretical
consequences of a British defeat during the early stages of
the Second World War.
Latham's analysis proved to be a measured and thoughtful
one, as Richard Last, reviewing the programme for The Daily
Telegraph, pointed out. "You did not fail," he wrote,
shortly after If Britain Had Fallen was broadcast, "to be
impressed by the research carried out by Michael Latham's
production team, much of it based on secret German plans and
documents."
One of Latham's best-known productions was The Explorers
(1975), a series of drama-documentaries about the lives of
the great explorers. Presented by David Attenborough and
containing realistic re-enactments of several perilous
journeys, the series earned Latham a Bafta award.
Although he continued to have strong ties with the BBC, in
1978 Latham left it to join Video Arts Television. There he
maintained his high standards of documentary film-making in
series such as Free To Choose, with Milton Friedman, the
Nobel Prize-winning economist. Latterly, many of Latham's
programmes came out of Man Alive Group.
Between 1995 and 1997 he worked on a series of programmes
with the hypnotist Paul McKenna. The next three years were
devoted to Connections, a 10-hour series for the Discovery
Channel about the history of science and technology which he
made with his friend James Burke.
Latham remained, throughout his working life, a consummate
professional who was always harder on himself than on anyone
else.
At home Mike Latham loved to cook and was a great raconteur,
the kind of man whom it was always a pleasure to corner at
parties. He was devoted to his family and took much delight
in his grandchildren.
He died on December 30 after being diagnosed with terminal
cancer the previous month.
Latham was twice married. He is survived by his second wife,
Sue, whom he married in 1972, and by a daughter from his
first marriage and a daughter and son from his second
marriage.