Innes Lloyd - Other Work

Other Work

Innes Lloyd also worked on Thirty-Minute Theatre, the football soap United! and Dead of Night, but he is best be remembered as the producer of more prestigious drama. As a BBC drama producer in the 1970s and 1980s, his chosen projects were often biographical. Collaborating with authors such as Roger Milner and Don Shaw, he brought to the screen biographies from a diverse range of, often flawed, heroes ranging from Orde Wingate and Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the Campbells Donald and Malcolm, through to the first Director General of the BBC John Reith. He also explored notions of Englishness in the twentieth century with productions such as England, Their England (directed by Stephen Frears), East of Ipswich (written by Michael Palin) and An Englishman's Castle (1978) starring Kenneth More; a dystopian vision of the consequence of losing the second world war. He was a frequent collaborator with Alan Bennett. That relationship started in 1972 with Bennett's poignant comedy A Day Out and continued through landmark productions such as the first series of Talking Heads until Lloyd's death in 1991. Bennett's An Englishman Abroad told the remarkable true story of the chance meeting between actress Coral Browne (playing herself) and spy Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) in Moscow in 1958, while A Question of Attribution (finished shortly before Lloyd's death) was a logical sequel, showing the radically different fate of Keeper of the Queen's Pictures and fellow traitor Anthony Blunt.

Innes Lloyd died on 23 August 1991, aged 65.