Christopher Ralling, who has died aged 95, introduced wonderful tales of journey and human endurance to tv in groundbreaking programmes that charted the journeys of the good explorers, from Charles Darwin and David Livingstone to Ernest Shackleton, Thor Heyerdahl and Chris Bonington.
The producer and director, who incessantly used drama-documentary to make historical past come alive for viewers, additionally chronicled the highway to the abolition of slavery within the British Empire.
He regarded his first main tv mission, The Seek for the Nile (1971), about expeditions by Victorians obsessive about the supply of Africa’s longest river, as “an awesome journey”, shot on location on the continent.
As producer – in addition to director of three of the six BBC episodes – he forged actors as history-makers corresponding to Richard Francis Burton (performed by Kenneth Haigh), Livingstone (Michael Gough) and Henry Morton Stanley (Keith Buckley), with James Mason narrating. The programme gained a Primetime Emmy award within the US.
Ralling continued with drama-documentary – and filming in Africa, in addition to Jamaica – when he directed all the collection of The Struggle Towards Slavery (1975). He commissioned Evan Jones, a Jamaican good friend from Oxford College with the blood of each slaves and slave house owners, to script it, with David Collings as William Wilberforce and Dinsdale Lansden as a plantation proprietor. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, a rusty outdated Thames lighter barge was rebuilt to resemble the hull of a slave ship.
A duplicate of the HMS Beagle, transformed from a Spanish fishing vessel, was sailed to South America for what Ralling described as “a very powerful tv collection of my life”, The Voyage of Charles Darwin (1978). Starring Malcolm Stoddard within the title function, it advised the story of Darwin’s scientific expedition previous his guide The Origin of Species.
He was firmly within the producer’s seat, with Martyn Good friend directing, however accompanied the forged and crew on virtually each step of their voyage. The programme gained Bafta’s award for greatest factual collection and contributed to Ralling’s lifetime achievement award from the academy.
David Schofield performed the Antarctic explorer when Ralling wrote one other dramatised historic collection, Shackleton (1983). Eight years earlier, he had demonstrated the adventurer in himself as producer of Everest the Onerous Approach, becoming a member of Chris Bonington for Bonington’s profitable ascent of the world’s highest mountain and making it as an easy documentary. Tragically, one of many two BBC digicam operators, Mick Burke, died, final seen a number of hundred metres from the summit.
Later, in producing one other documentary, The Kon-Tiki Man (1989), for a Swedish manufacturing firm, he accompanied Heyerdahl – well-known for his expeditions on balsa wooden raft and reed boats – on return visits to unique areas from his previous.
Ralling’s first massive journey was being born on a kitchen desk in Beckenham, Kent, to Dorothy (nee Williams) and Harold Ralling. He grew up within the Kent village of Brenchley on considered one of his father’s fruit farms; his mother and father had beforehand spent 20 years rising money crops, together with espresso, in Kenya.
On leaving Charterhouse faculty Ralling did nationwide service within the Royal Military Service Corps, rising to the rank of second lieutenant, then studied English at Wadham Faculty, Oxford (1949-52), the place he developed leftwing leanings.
After working briefly on the household apple farm he joined BBC Exterior Providers in 1955 as a scriptwriter of talks and options that had been translated for its European shops. Quickly he grew to become a radio producer.
Ralling stated his outlook on life was then reworked by a go to to the Hungarian border following the 1956 rebellion. He drove his father’s lorry to take reduction to refugees on the Austrian aspect of the border, together with two rubber dinghies for crossing the canal separating the 2 nations to move a whole lot of others to security. In his 2017 autobiography, Scrapbook for Jessica: A Life in Broadcasting, he described the expertise as “exhilarating”, and revealed that it triggered in him a brand new understanding of humanity and a extra liberal viewpoint.
Not lengthy afterwards, on attachment to the Australian community ABC (1958-59), he reported for radio programmes and made the tv documentary The Query for Johnny, concerning the lifetime of Indigenous Australian youngsters.
Again in Britain he grew to become a TV producer on information and journal programmes on the BBC’s Southampton and Bristol studios earlier than becoming a member of Panorama (1961-64) as a producer, then assistant editor. He was arrested whereas filming tales in Ghana, Serbia and Bulgaria, and labored on the primary full-length British programme on Mao’s China.
Switching to the documentaries division, he produced and directed Mata Hari: The Eye of the Day (1965), on the unique dancer who was executed as a German spy; To the South Pole with Peter Scott (1966), that includes Captain Scott’s son retracing his doomed father’s trek; Revolution in Hungary (1966), an account of the rebellion that had modified his life; and Australia the Final of Lands (1970), the journalist Michael Charlton’s evaluation of his homeland on the time of its bicentenary. He additionally created One Pair of Eyes, with James Cameron and others presenting their views on typically controversial topics, working as its government producer from 1967 to 1969.
After serving because the BBC’s head of documentaries (1980-82), Ralling moved into impartial manufacturing, notably for Channel 4. He directed episodes of Africa (1984), a historical past of the continent, and, within the vein of his earlier Mata Hari programme, Chasing a Rainbow: The Lifetime of Josephine Baker (1986), on the singer-dancer and French second world battle spy. He additionally made Return to Everest (1993), a nostalgic journey to the mountain’s base camp with John Hunt, Edmund Hillary and others from the primary profitable British expedition 40 years earlier. He was made OBE in 1992.
Ralling married Angela Gardner in 1963; she died in 2022. He’s survived by their daughter, Joanna, and granddaughter, Jessica.
