The television documentary maker Michael Barnes, who has died aged 86 of a heart attack, opened a window on the lives of those suffering injustice, discrimination and neglect.
For Navajo: The Last Red Indians (1972), which Barnes produced and directed for the BBC’s Horizon series, he spent six weeks in northern Arizona on the Navajo reservation to discover how the largest surviving Native American tribe was trying to hold on to its culture and beliefs while contending with threats such as coal-mining ravaging its land. Footage of a medicine man staging a healing ceremony sits alongside film of Navajo people navigating the “white man’s” hospitals and schools.
After noting that the building of power stations to supply electricity to “white” cities was causing “more particulate air pollution than Los Angeles and New York combined”, Barnes’s script, narrated by Duncan Carse, ended with the words: “This could begin the final tragic act in the destruction of what remains of the first Americans.”
Making this documentary engendered in Barnes, alongside his concern for the oppressed, a fascination for US Indigenous culture. He returned to the subject for Horizon in 1976 with Geronimo’s Children, about the Apache fightback to revive Native American values and achieve economic independence.
Then, in 1979, he made The Long Walk of Fred Young, another tale of culture clashes. It told how a desire to understand nature led a half-Navajo, half-Ute man who walked barefoot in the snow-covered mountains of southern Colorado to become a leading nuclear physicist, an expert on laser fusion.
Barnes’s Horizon programmes shot in Britain include The Killer Dust (1975), about the deaths of dozens of workers at a Yorkshire asbestos factory, and A Home Like Ours: A Story of Four Children (1976), filmed in a specialist institution and both heartbreaking, for its tales of those abandoned or abused, and graphic, with pictures of the aggressive behaviour displayed by some children.
Meanwhile, Half-way to 1984 (1976) tackled the issue of mass surveillance by the state and the possibility of its political misuse. Then, on a break from Horizon, Barnes continued the broad theme of democracy and openness with a 1979 Panorama documentary, Do You Want to Know a Secret?, asking whether Britain needed a US-style freedom of information law.
Barnes filmed in the US again for his stand-alone documentary The Secret File on Citizen K (1987), questioning the collection and misuse of surveillance on civilians – in this case, the journalist Penn Kimball and his battle to clear his name after the FBI and CIA had wrongly labelled him a security risk suspected of having communist sympathies.
Born in Redhill, Surrey, Michael was the son of Cecil, who sold insurance, and Lily (nee Hennessey). He attended Purley grammar school, graduated in English from Keble College, Oxford, and became a reporter on the Newcastle Journal.
His move into television came with the launch of BBC Two in 1964, when he was made an assistant producer on Revolution Round the Corner, about the implications of automation on society, in the channel’s Tuesday Term higher education slot.
It was a natural step to the same job on the science and technology series Tomorrow’s World when it began on BBC One. A year into his stint on the programme (1965-68), he became a fully fledged producer.
His first documentary for Horizon, in 1969, was about what some experts saw as a failure by Britain’s medical and legal authorities to treat alcoholism appropriately. He made similar waves, but abroad, producing and directing The City That Waits to Die (1970), featuring scientists contending that public officials in San Francisco – which stands on a fault line – were unprepared for the possibility of a large earthquake.
In 1990, a year after a quake outside the city caused the collapse of the Bay Bridge and the Nimitz double-deck freeway, Barnes returned to make The Quake of 89: The Final Warning? for Horizon. It included exclusive footage and further claims of neglect, as well as predictions of a future quake in the city itself.
Barnes briefly switched to the BBC Two series The Lively Arts to make documentaries on famous names who shared his anti-establishment leanings. For Jessica Mitford: The Honourable Rebel (1977), he took the author and former US Communist party member back to her childhood roots to talk about her aristocratic British family, their support for Hitler and how her own civil rights activity made her a target of the FBI.
In Jane Fonda (1978), he provided an insight into the upbringing of the Hollywood film star, daughter of the actor Henry Fonda, and her political activism. She told him: “There I was, with everything privilege can bring, feeling dead inside and somehow very old in my young skin.”
The two-part Horizon documentary The Mind of a Murderer (1984) focused on the American “hillside strangler” Kenneth Bianchi. Barnes obtained videotapes showing the part played by psychiatrists in assessing Bianchi, including the controversial use of hypnosis. Described by one critic as a “masterfully crafted documentary”, it won two Emmy awards in the US.
Barnes’s last programme for Horizon was The Pyramid Builders (1993), on the Egyptians’ extraordinary feats of construction, and, before leaving the BBC, he made the series Secrets of Lost Empires (1996). As an independent producer, he followed it with Secrets of Lost Empires II (2000) for Channel 4.
Inspired by Mitford’s bestselling book The American Way of Death, about rackets in the undertaking business, he also made a two-part World in Action documentary for ITV in 1998 focusing on concerns over the American multinational funeral company SCI’s move into the British market. His later programmes included Machines Time Forgot (2003) and Dogfight Over Guadalcanal (2006).
In 1964, Barnes married the TV producer and critic Elizabeth Cowley; the marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, the film editor Clare Douglas, whom he married in 1992, died in 2017. He married Farideh Dizadji in 2021. She, the children of his first marriage, Suzy and Mandi, and three grandchildren survive him.
• Michael John Barnes, producer, director and writer, born 23 December 1938; died 11 September 2025
