The end of the trail

One of British TV's most influential and innovative programme makers died at the beginning of this month at the age of 69.

Desmond Wilcox is a name many will not have heard outside media circles. But he was one of the figures who pioneered what might be termed 'human interest TV', and who turned out some of the best-remembered and most moving television at its very best. He's rightly been described as a 'trailblazer'.

Wilcox had been a newspaper reporter until the late fifties, working on weekly regional newspapers and later as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mirror in New York.

The first taste of TV

In 1960 he became known as a 'TV face' when he joined the long-running ITV current affairs programme 'This Week'. By the mid-sixties he had joined the BBC and was the moving force behind another long-running series, 'Man Alive'.

It's arguable that without 'Man Alive', modern TV would be unrecognisable. In a tribute to Wilcox the day after he died, his former boss at the BBC, Bill Cotton said "He came from Fleet Street and brought with him a good nose for a human-interest story and the ability to tell it in a compelling and tasteful way." Certainly, much of the style of modern human-interest TV documentaries was born in the fertile mind of Desmond Wilcox.

Groundbreaking series

Two series etched themselves in the minds of British viewers (and from other countries as the BBC sold many of them around the world). 'The Visit' featured ordinary people who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances. This series included a sequence of programmes about a young Amazonian Indian child born with a terribly disfigured face, who was rescued and taken to the UK by a charity worker. There his face was repaired by a Scottish plastic surgeon, who went on to adopt the boy. The series was moving, tragic, uplifting and unforgettable.

Another set of programmes under the title "The Visit", (which if my memory serves me right, by this time had transferred from the BBC to Yorkshire TV following one of the Corporation's fits of privatisation) featured Simon Weston, a British soldier who was badly burned during the Falklands conflict in the South Atlantic. The programmes followed the man's harrowing return to life as a civilian and his rehabilitation following his injuries.

Some of his work is allegedly available at the University of Glasgow's Performing Arts Data Service, organised in conjunction with the British Film Institute. PADS has digitised versions of some of Wilcox's programme at http://www.pads.ahds.ac.uk/bfiTelevision... ... except for the fact I couldn't make it work.

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