As an admirer of his co-authored book Juntas United!, I was pleased when Ed Harriman joined us at the BBC Community Programme Unit for a few months in the early 1990s.
He made a powerful, if controversial, series about the impact of divorce on children, but his real legacy lay in a rather different direction. As a highly respected investigative journalist with a track record in ITV’s World in Action, he was in some ways a challenging figure in our unit.
A key aspect of the “public access” programmes we made was that they gave editorial control to members of the public. Ed always argued for greater journalistic rigour, not as a constraint on what people could say, but as a way of strengthening it.
