Jack Gold obituary | Television & radio | The Guardian

Originally posted in The Guardian.

A well-worn path for bright young recruits to television in the 1950s to 1970s would take them from shooting little news and current affairs items to directing documentary features, thence to dramatised documentaries and finally into fully fledged drama. Many trod this path, but few progressed more surely than Jack Gold, who has died aged 85.

Born in London, and having graduated from London University with degrees in economics and law, he entered BBC Radio in 1954 in the traditional apprentice role of assistant studio manager. After two years he transferred to TV as a film editor, and in 1960 joined Donald Baverstock’s revolutionary early-evening miscellany Tonight. Here, he duly started to make the programme’s brisk little trademark films starring its idiosyncratic reporters – Fyfe Robertson, Macdonald Hastings, Derek Hart, Alan Whicker and Trevor Philpott.

In 1964 came the break which made Gold’s name overnight. The Tonight team made occasional 40-minute specials devoted to a single subject. Death in the Morning was about fox-hunting, with Whicker in full cry after the Quorn but upstaged, for once, by the sheer brilliance of Gold’s film-making, notably a breathless pursuit sequence as seen and heard and suffered by the fox. It won him the first of his…

via Jack Gold obituary | Television & radio | The Guardian.