Paul Almond obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/apr/30/paul-almond

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Paul Almond, who has died aged 83, directed seven feature films and more than 120 television dramas in Canada, Britain and the US. He wrote 12 novels. The Directors Guild of Canada gave him a lifetime achievement award and the Canadian government made him an officer of the Order of Canada. In Britain, though, he is known for one thing: a documentary transmitted on ITV on Monday 5 May 1964.

Seven Up! appeared in Granada Television’s current affairs slot, World in Action. The series was then in its second year and known for its brash, steamroller delivery of facts and opinions (and, in the trade, for its cavalier disregard of the technical niceties of documentary film-making). Taking the unjournalistic – indeed, essayistic – topic of the persistence of class in 1960s “swinging” Britain, Seven Up! did not quite fit the programme’s news-driven agenda. It certainly did not make headlines in the Tuesday morning papers – always the show’s ambition at this time.

Tim Hewat, World in Action’s creator, was a macho Australian journalist, Almond a quiet, charming, suave Oxford-educated Canadian TV director. The two shared a colonial’s perplexity at the class system they were confronting. “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” was their key to unpacking its absurdities. And the result, essentially a series of extended interviews, beautifully conducted by Almond, with a sample of the nation’s seven-year-olds, was destined to become the best known of all World in Action’s efforts over the 35 years of its run.

It created a franchise of “Up” documentaries: the children were revisited when they were 14 and then at further seven-year intervals, with few refusing to take part. The latest instalment was 56 Up, broadcast in 2012. These return visits were made by the director Michael Apted, who had been the researcher on the original show, and together the films produced a format much copied – the longitudinal documentary.

Seven Up! was made in the midst of a revolution in documentary making. In the early 60s, for the first time, it was possible to film with a handheld camera that simultaneously recorded sound. Another World in Action film of this period, Yeah!, Yeah!, Yeah!, Dick Fontaine’s report on the Beatles’ first visit to New York, transmitted three months before Seven Up!, was one of the first documentaries to exploit the new “direct cinema” style for mainstream British television. Seven Up!, on the contrary, was conservatively shot but it stands as testimony to the strengths of traditional film-making and the ability of documentary to illuminate the human condition.

Almond’s interviews are a model of tact and his skill as a film-maker – honed in the trenches of TV drama series production – is still breathtaking. Asked about his further education, a seven-year-old prep school boy says: “We think I am going to Cambridge, Trinity Hall.” Almond cuts to a boy in care: “What does university mean?” What, indeed? There are few documents that more succinctly reflect the condition of Britain over the past half-century than the Up series.

Almond was born in Montreal, the son of Eric, an Anglican minister, and his wife, Clarice (nee Gray). After studying literature at McGill University, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1949 to study philosophy, politics and economics. On returning to Canada, he began his TV career in 1954, recording On Camera, a forgotten CBC comedy-drama, and Hollywood series including Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He criss-crossed the Atlantic, shooting episodes of the police show RCMP, a CBC/BBC co-production, and, for Granada, a prestigious televising of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. He was well enough established at the end of the 60s to obtain Hollywood funding for a feature film, Isabel (1968), the first of a somewhat Bergmanesque trilogy starring Geneviève Bujold, his second wife. Canadian projects seldom received such recognition.

But Almond was never at ease with Hollywood razzmatazz. Feature films with established stars continued to appear throughout the 70s and 80s, but without much recognition outside Canada. By 1990, he was ready to quit. He turned to his own family’s long history on Quebec’s Gaspé peninsula to produce a dozen novels of family life centred on his ancestral village of Shigawake.

Almond’s generosity led him to share the credit for Seven Up! with Apted, an unusual honour for a researcher. World in Action’s other researchers, serious journalists all, had indicated a certain unwillingness to go looking for seven-year-olds. Apted, who was to go on, via Coronation Street, to a stellar film career in Hollywood, was on a brief attachment as a trainee and got the task. He secured his claim to the franchise by going back to the children when they were 14 – and again and again thereafter – and over the decades, Almond’s contribution became more obscured.

He is survived by his third wife, Joan Harwood Elkins, a photographer, as well as Matthew, a son from his marriage to Bujold, which ended in divorce; by three stepsons, Trey, Tim and Chris, and a stepdaughter, Tracy; and by eight grandchildren.

• David Paul MacPherson Almond, film director and producer, screenwriter and novelist, born 26 April 1931; died 9 April 2015