Kenith Trodd obituary: firebrand TV producer and Dennis Potter’s right-hand man
Trodd, who has died aged 90, was the bold and influential producer behind Dennis Potter’s greatest works, championing radical drama and shaping British television with a lifelong commitment to creative risk and writer-led storytelling.
On a Wednesday afternoon in the summer of 1965, the senior staff of the BBC were gunning for Dennis Potter, a television critic and now budding playwright of the small screen. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, his satire on electioneering and the cynicism of modern politics, was scheduled for evening transmission on BBC1. Potter was at Broadcasting House, appearing on the Light Programme’s mid-afternoon Woman’s Hour. Meanwhile, his long-time friend and now Wednesday Play story editor Kenith Trodd was at Television Centre, acting as Potter’s eyes and ears on manoeuvres to have the play pulled. Paul Fox, the head of public affairs, despaired: “The play is very nearly a documentary.” Sydney Newman, head of drama, simply asked why Potter wanted to “shit on the Queen”. Trodd phoned through to Potter just as Woman’s Hour ended, to inform him that the play had been cancelled. Huw Wheldon, the controller of programmes, weighed in via the official press release: “When we transmit Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, or whether we transmit it, will depend on further work and further consideration.”
It was the first of many skirmishes for Potter and Trodd in the corridors of the BBC, and led to an increasingly familiar war in the national press over perceived censorship and the challenges faced by dramatists keen to experiment with the emerging television form. In the case of Nigel Barton, Potter had the last laugh: a substantial fee for rewrites, and even winning an additional play commission as part of the bargain. This, too, was achieved with the help of his friend Trodd.
A defining partnership of the so-called ‘golden age’ of British television (both would strongly refute it was ever easy), Potter and Trodd first met during their national service in the Intelligence Corps in 1953. They studied Russian, later transferring to MI3 at the War Office in 1955. This experience would inspire not only a play (Lay Down Your Arms, 1970) but also the office scenes in Lipstick on Your Collar (1993).
Both – and they were truly intertwined for decades – made their mark at Oxford University: Potter, the controversial working-class voice who shocked viewers on BBC Television’s Does Class Matter? (1958); Trodd, the provocative editor of university mag Isis who got removed from his post in favour of the milder-mannered David Dimbleby in 1959.
Trodd was at this time Kenneth but styled his name Kenith (to rhyme with zenith) upon arriving at the BBC in television drama in 1965. His friend Roger Smith had sneaked him into the corporation and soon started him off on Thirty Minute Theatre where he commissioned early work by Simon Gray, as well as Potter.
However, his first opportunities to produce came with the formation of Kestrel Productions, one of the earliest independent production companies working in television in the UK. It was founded by Trodd with Tony Garnett and others in the summer of 1967, and was prompted by an invitation from the consortium behind London Weekend Television – then bidding for the ITV franchise in London, and which would come on the air in 1968. Kestrel was a producer of radical television drama by the big names of the day, including Jim Allen, Gray and Potter. A major name to emerge from this period was Colin Welland, former star of Z Cars, who developed a flare for writing slice-of-life dramas in Bangelstein’s Boys (1969, director John Mackenzie) and Roll On Four O’Clock (1970, director Roy Battersby).
For Kestrel, Trodd also produced Jean-Henri Roger and Jean-Luc Godard’s British Sounds (1969). He played down his centrality to the film, telling me after a screening at the BFI that his main involvement had amounted to meeting JLG at airports to hand over briefcases filled with cash. The producer was perhaps the ultimate example of a delegator, trusting and protecting his writers and directors completely. LWT, for their part, considered the film – a melange of communism, nudity and slow tracking shots of factory floors – untransmittable. But as a demonstration of how self-reflexive television was becoming as a commentator on its own innovations and limitations, the arts show Aquarius gave time to a lengthy debate about the film. British Sounds has played in Godard retrospectives ever since.
Returning to the BBC, Trodd went on to produce over 30 entries in BBC1’s flagship strand Play for Today (1970 to 1984). These included more work with Gray and Potter, as well as productions that still stand apart. The Operation (1973) was a hard to categorise satire on the corrupting power of money, written by Roger Smith and starring George Lazenby. This was directed by Battersby, who collaborated with Trodd and Welland on the astonishing Leeds — United! (1974), a two-hour epic that took to the streets, the factories and city halls to dramatise the recent strike by female textile workers fighting for equal pay. The opening sequence – a tracking shot over early morning streets – is as good as anything else made in Britain in the 1970s.
One of the most notorious Play for Todays did not air for over a decade. Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle, commissioned in 1973, was delivered with a one-line description that simply read “The Devil arrives in a suburban home.” This rather underplayed its challenging mix of sitcom styles, non-naturalism and dark themes. The script remained on the shelf for two years and was already known in the press as the ‘rape play’ before it was even shot.
Filming was in February 1976 and the studio recording in early March. A rough cut was assembled by director Barry Davis and found itself swiftly referred up to the controller. Potter throughout this period was struck down with flu so had Trodd to fight his corner. One of the reasons why so many variant edits of the play survive is because it was never officially finished. Alasdair Milne, director of television, had already decided to pull the plug before transmission before its final dub. He found it “brilliantly written and made but nauseating”. It eventually surfaced in 1987.
Potter and Trodd were lauded for making some of television’s most innovative, memorable and challenging dramas: Pennies from Heaven (1978), Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and The Singing Detective (1986). They founded another independent company in PfH Ltd and led the way on moving into all-film bi-media productions. Despite their ups and downs and fallings out they survived the decades largely in lockstep, collaborating in the weeks before the writer’s death on casting and planning for Karaoke (1996) and Cold Lazarus (1996).
Trodd’s wider contribution to television is considerable, collaborating with directors Mike Leigh (Four Days in July, 1984) and Paul Greengrass (The Fix, 1997), writers G.F. Newman and Stephen Poliakoff, and a huge range of actors including Colin Firth (A Month in the Country, 1987), Alan Bates (Unnatural Pursuits, 1992), Julie Walters (Bambino Mio, 1994), Elizabeth Hurley (her breakthrough role in Christabel, 1988) and Steve Coogan (The Fix, 1997).
Pennies from Heaven won the BAFTA for Most Original Programme/Series in 1979. Caught on a Train, a film for television written by Poliakoff and starring Dame Peggy Ashcroft, won a BAFTA in 1981 Trodd personally received the Royal Television Society Silver Medal in 1987 and the BAFTA Alan Clarke Award in 1993.
Kenith Trodd, 28 May 1935 to 1 March 2026