Mark Shelmerdine, who has died aged 78 after affected by most cancers, began his profession as a producer and worldwide distributor for movie and TV as an accountant. A chance that he noticed in that position led to the manufacturing of two of the largest TV costume collection of the Nineteen Seventies, Poldark and I, Claudius.
The realisation got here to him whereas working as monetary director of the Taylor Clark group, run by the Scottish businessman Robert Clark, whose property included the dormant London Movies, based in 1932 by the Hungarian-born British film-maker Alexander Korda.
Shelmerdine not solely noticed the potential to take advantage of London Movies’ again catalogue of titles, but in addition unearthed contracts that had given the corporate unused display screen rights to literary classics. These included Winston Graham’s romantic Poldark novels, set in 18th-century Cornwall, and he arrived at a co-production settlement with the BBC.
The end result was the Sunday-evening interval drama Poldark, which ran for 2 collection (1975-77) with tales of skulduggery, smuggling and tin-mining. It additionally introduced heart-throb standing to Robin Ellis because the dashing squire Ross Poldark, getting back from combating within the American Warfare of Independence and ultimately marrying Angharad Rees as Demelza Carne – and income from gross sales to greater than 40 nations.
From the identical London Movies supply Shelmerdine additionally got here throughout I, Claudius, a blood-letting, taboo-busting story of the early Roman empire which was tailored from novels by Robert Graves for the BBC by Jack Pulman and starred Derek Jacobi as emperor Claudius. Negotiations with the BBC have been reasonably extra protracted than that they had been with Poldark, however the collection lastly arrived on TV screens in 1976, and it received an Emmy and three Bafta awards.
This led to additional co-productions with the BBC when Shelmerdine purchased the rights for serialisations of Testomony of Youth (1979), primarily based on Vera Brittain’s first world conflict memoir, and Thérèse Raquin (1980), from Émile Zola’s novel.
In every case London Movies held on to the distribution rights, and ultimately Shelmerdine noticed the potential for reviving the agency as a manufacturing firm. He persuaded Clark to promote him the enterprise and subsequently grew to become an govt producer on The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982), with Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour in a TV film remake of a 1934 manufacturing that had been directed by Korda.
Branching out from the London Movies catalogue – and pioneering co-production with each British and international corporations – Shelmerdine then made the mini-series Little Gloria … Pleased at Final (1982), starring Lucy Gutteridge because the American socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, and the TV films The Nation Women (1983), primarily based on Edna O’Brien’s acclaimed ebook, and Kim (1984), from Rudyard Kipling’s novel, with Peter O’Toole because the Tibetan lama.
In 1980 Shelmerdine was a kind of who arrange the Impartial Programme Producers’ Affiliation to barter with Channel 4, as a result of begin broadcasting two years later and launched as a commissioner reasonably than a manufacturing firm. The affiliation helped to form the unbiased sector.
Shelmerdine was born in Fulmer, Buckinghamshire, over the last months of the second world conflict to Margaret (nee Bedwell), a military nurse, and Dick Shelmerdine, who was serving within the Highland Mild Infantry. The household moved to Singapore, the place his father served within the police earlier than changing into commissioner of police within the Bahamas, though Shelmerdine was by then attending a Devon prep faculty. He went on to Blundell’s faculty in Tiverton and educated as a chartered accountant at Coopers & Lybrand, qualifying in 1968.
After becoming a member of the Taylor Clark group, he discovered himself charged with compiling weekly box-office experiences for 2 different Clark-owned companies, Caledonian Related Cinemas and the ABC chain, analysing which movies attracted the largest audiences. He then turned his consideration to London Movies, which had put out films equivalent to The Non-public Lifetime of Henry VIII (1933), The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and The Third Man (1949), however had successfully ceased exercise after Korda’s demise in 1956. I, Claudius had really been put into manufacturing by London Movies in 1937, with Charles Laughton within the title position, however had been deserted after Merle Oberon, taking part in Messalina, was injured in a automotive crash.
As govt producer with London Movies, Shelmerdine was additionally accountable for The Outdated Males on the Zoo (1983), Troy Kennedy Martin’s five-part adaptation for the BBC of Angus Wilson’s novel, up to date as a satire on the Margaret Thatcher period. In a distinct vein, Shelmerdine and London Movies co-produced, with the American CBS community, the 1985-89 revival of the sci-fi anthology collection The Twilight Zone.
His different enterprise ventures included establishing SelecTV, a pioneer within the cable tv and pay-per-view market, in 1980, and, after transferring to the US 5 years later, co-founding Bafta’s Los Angeles department. This got here after his marriage in 1985 to the self-help writer Susan Jeffers, with whom he arrange a publishing firm, Jeffers Press. The next 12 months he offered the Korda catalogue to the ITV firm Central Tv.
Shelmerdine’s first marriage, to Anne Eastwick in 1967, resulted in divorce. Jeffers died in 2012 and two years later he married Donna Luskin, who survives him, together with Man and Alice, the kids of his first marriage.
