My father, Eric Davidson, who has died aged 87, was a writer and film-maker of restless energy, impish humour and eclectic curiosity who saw documentary film-making as a calling.
He came to television at a time when it was introducing society to unheard voices, and he brought to it a cinematic approach. Through the BBC series Travellers’ Tales in the 1960s and its successor, The World About Us, he brought distant cultures to the small screen in films composed from existing footage, such as India! My India! (1966), and films he shot himself, such as Letter from Thimphu (1968), from the hitherto closed Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.
There followed finely honed personal perspectives for One Pair of Eyes (from the novelist John Braine and sculptor Arthur Dooley), and masterful group portraits for the Tuesday Documentary – notably A Month of Sundays (1972), an elegiac rendering of a mining town on strike. Last Night Another Soldier ... , accompanying reluctant army recruits to Belfast, won a Bafta in 1973. Don’t Shoot the Ref! (1976), a referee’s experience of football, typified his adoption of the outsider’s viewpoint.
In the 70s he added drama to documentary, most memorably in the gritty Robin Hood (1975). In the late 70s, he went freelance, tackling diverse subjects: Vietnamese boat people, Derry after the Troubles, homeopathy, dying, modern music, endurance running and more. His crusade to “get it right” earned him exasperation, gratitude and unconditional loyalty.
He was born in Inverbervie, Aberdeenshire, the youngest of three children of Bruce Davidson, an invalided first world war veteran, and Isabella (nee Blain), a seamstress and singer. His father and brother, Ian, fostered Eric’s interest in photography, his mother a taste for the theatre, and the German PoWs he delivered food parcels to a fascination for different cultures. He studied languages and history at St Andrews University, then flirted with a career in the Royal Navy before leaving over Suez.
In 1957, he joined Data Films, an outfit supplying the Coal Board’s mouthpiece, Mining Review, and filmed in pit communities on anything from coal-face technology to Jackie and Bobby, the footballing Charlton brothers. In 1960 he moved to Copenhagen to study film. While there, he married Karen Jensen, a medical photographer, and worked on Danish feature films.
Returning to London in 1962, he was hired as chief film researcher for the BBC series The Great War (1964), saving the bulk of the first world war footage that survives today. A future in historical documentaries beckoned; instead, Eric, more concerned to film the world around him, joined Traveller’s Tales.
In later years, he turned to publishing some of his fiction, including a volume of second world war stories, On Yer Bike, Schweik!, which was read on Radio 4.
Karen died in 2008. He is survived by his children, Lisa and me, and a granddaughter, Ella.
