The five books on journalistic Editing and Design by Harold Evans provided the inspiration for a four-part series on BBC One entitled Evans on Newspapers, produced by Bernard Adams in 1980, assisted by Marion Allinson and me as directors.
We all found Harry an inspirational figure, the hero of so many struggles for truth and justice, and it was a privilege to work with him. He could be infuriating, such as when we were desperately trying to get a script out of him, only for it to arrive via courier, an envelope full of seemingly random scraps of paper with hastily hand-written text in pencil, with plenty of crossings out, side notes and arrows. Of course, when deciphered it all made perfect sense.
In a break Harry told us about an off-the-record briefing for select Fleet Street editors asking them to do nothing that might wreck the burgeoning relationship between Prince Charles and Lady Di, such as revealing any of Charles’s clandestine relationships. He ruefully admitted that he would anyway be reluctant to carry such stories because his socialist but fervently royalist engine-driver dad in Manchester would never have forgiven anything that damaged the monarchy.
