Chairman of the Academy 1968
From his earliest brush with showbusiness as a rewind boy at the Dominion Cinema on Tottenham Court Road Morley would go on to become an innovative maker of television documentaries. After his war service he got a job as a projectionist for The Film Producer’s Guild, a group of documentary companies that brought him into contact with the work of John Grierson, Paul Rotha and Jill Craigie, inspiring his own earliest efforts at writing, directing and editing film.
He signed on as a trainee director at Associated Rediffusion in 1950, and by 1955 recognised the unique opportunity that the advent of ITV represented. In the years that followed he helped demonstrate that the commercial network could match the BBC for serious and highbrow subjects, winning acclaim for such films as Fan Fever (1956) about the adulation of youngsters at a pop concert; Tyranny – The Years of Adolf Hitler (1959), which was ITV’s first hour long documentary; and a live television production of Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw (1959).
He was also a significant figure in the founding of BAFTA. In 1972, together with Lord Attenborough, Lord Brabourne and Richard Cawston he was a founder Trustee of the Society of Film and Television Arts, now BAFTA, creating the fund which grew out of the original Premises Committee, known as the David Lean BAFTA Foundation. This established a permanent headquarters for the Academy at 195 Piccadilly.
His own work would later be recognised with British Academy Awards for the long running ITV current affairs programme This Week (1960 – 1963) and coverage he produced of the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965. In addition he was awarded the Royal Television Society Silver Medal for Lord Mountbatten: A Man For The Century (1968), and the Royal Television Society Documentary Award for Kitty – Return To Auschwitz (1979).
His prodigious output also includes an epic history of Europe in the 20th Century The Mighty Continent (1971-73). By his own estimation he directed some 200 programmes over the span of a long and distinguished career, recalled in his autobiography A Life Rewound, published by Bank House Books.
Click here for a photographic showcase of of Peter Morley's work and time at the Academy
