Photo: Anne Devlin
Chris Parr, who has died aged 80 from Parkinson's disease, was a champion of new writers during his days as a theater director, when he gave breaks to Howard Brenton and David Edgar. In his subsequent move to the BBC as television producer and then executive director, this policy brought to the screen challenging dramas such as Graham Reid's Billy trilogy - with Kenneth Branagh in his breakthrough role - and Donna Franceschild's series Takin' Over the Asylum set in a psychiatric hospital in Glasgow.
Parr brought his left-wing, anti-establishment views to the agitprop theater movement of the 1960s. He and Brenton, a former classmate at Chichester boys' secondary school, were members of the Brighton Combination "arts lab" experimental theater group. He then directed Brenton's anarchic play Revenge, about a criminal who turns his back on a police officer, with moral ambiguity on both sides, at the Royal Court Theater in London in 1969.
The collaboration continued when Parr became the first fellow in theater at Bradford University (1969-72), where he formed the drama group, then again at the Royal Court and later during his tenure as Artistic Director of the Traverse Theater Club, Edinburgh ( 1975-81). ). With creative inspiration he staged Brenton's mock 'cabaret on ice' Scott of the Antarctic (1971) at the Silver Blades rink in Bradford.
Edgar, a local newspaper journalist, was also commissioned by Parr to write material for Bradford students. The group took a number of his plays to the Edinburgh festival fringe, including Acid (1971), which brought the Charles Manson murders to Britain.
The End (1972), Edgar's drama about the nuclear disarmament debate, was another spectacle. The audience in Bradford, given the chance to vote at the end, chose to launch a nuclear attack on at least one night - leaving them in shocked silence as the play ended with a huge explosion.
Parr's move to television came in 1981 when BBC Northern Ireland discovered his talent for commissioning original writing. As founding script manager and producer in the drama department, he was responsible for Reid's Play for Today production Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982). It starred Branagh as the title character, a son in conflict with his fiery father, played by James Ellis, and left politics out of the story set in Belfast, at a time when the Troubles were at their height. Branagh himself praised the play for portraying 'humour, warmth and passion in working-class family life'. Follow-ups followed in 1983 and 1984.
The story continues
After moving to BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham as a producer in 1984, Parr made a series of critically acclaimed dramas. Nice Work (1989), starring Haydn Gwynne and Warren Clarke, was David Lodge's four-part adaptation of his own novel about a feminist university lecturer who has an affair with the boss of the engineering firm she shadows. It won a Royal Television Society award. Education was clearly central to Chalkface (1991), teacher and writer John Godber's account of the frustrations of school community staff in a deprived area.
Parr collaborated with Reid again on You, Me & Marley (1992), about joy riding in Northern Ireland, and continued to tackle difficult subjects with Bad Company (1993), Don Shaw's dramatization of the real-life murder of newspaper delivery boy Carl Bridgewater, which questions the capture of the suspects. Four years later their convictions were overturned.
One of the suspects was played by Ken Stott, who went on to star as an alcoholic hospital radio DJ in Parr's Bafta-winning BBC Scotland production Takin' Over the Asylum (shown in 1994), with David Tennant among the patients. Parr, wanting to handle the subject sensitively, ran the script through Scottish Action for Mental Health.
At Pebble Mill he also produced Fighting Back (1986), starring Hazel O'Connor as a single mother, and Lodge's adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit (1994). From 1993 he was head of television drama based at Pebble Mill and oversaw the territorial army comedy All Quiet on the Preston Front, launched in 1994, and the following year he was responsible for the launch of Shaw's popular series Dangerfield, starring starring Nigel Le Vaillant as a police surgeon. .
Parr moved to London as head of BBC drama (1995-96) and then executive producer of the drama group (1996-98), where he made the six-part Ivanhoe (1997) and the crime novel adaptations The Ice House (1997). and The Scold's Bridle (1998). From 1998 to 2002, he was head of drama in Britain at independent production company Thames Television, where his responsibilities included the second series of the legal saga Wing and a Prayer (1999) and 2001 and 2002 episodes of The Bill .
He was born in Dorking, Surrey, the son of Jane Parr, a café owner, and Serge Dohrn, an author and anti-Nazi German émigré who was killed in the bombing of a cinema shortly before his son's birth during the Second World War. World War. Chris grew up in Littlehampton, West Sussex, and while studying classics at Queen's College, Oxford, he began directing plays. His enthusiasm for it was so great that he was sent down in his third year due to missing seminars.
Parr eventually received a scholarship to train as a director at Nottingham Playhouse (1965-66), where Richard Crane was an actor. Crane, who later became the National Theatre's resident playwright, was commissioned by Parr to write plays for the Brighton Combination and Bradford University.
John Byrne, with the Slab Boys Trilogy (1978) and other plays, and Tom McGrath, with works such as The Hard Man (1978), about Jimmy Boyle, were newly emerging writers during Parr's time at the Traverse, where Robbie Coltrane began his career . acting career.
The only drama Parr directed (rather than produced) for television was Anne Devlin's play The Long March (1984), made for BBC Northern Ireland, about a woman who returns to Belfast as the IRA hunger strikes are about to begin. to start.
Devlin became Parr's third wife in 1985, following his marriages to Tamara Ustinov (1973) and Theresa Crichton (1980), both of which ended in divorce, and she adapted DH Lawrence's novel for his 1989 production of The Rainbow.
He is survived by Anne and their son Connal.
* Christopher Serge Parr, producer and director, born September 25, 1943; died November 24, 2023