Early in his career at the BBC, Peter Goodchild, who has died aged 85 after suffering from dementia, was asked by Aubrey Singer, head of science and features, whether he wanted to be an educationist or an entertainer. Despite saying he longed for the latter, he successfully combined both qualities as a producer of programmes such as Horizon, then biographical dramas, before becoming the corporation’s head of television plays.
He joined Horizon in 1965, a year after it began on BBC Two with a mission to “provide a platform from which some of the world’s greatest scientists and philosophers can communicate their curiosity, observations and reflections, and infuse into our common knowledge their changing views of the universe”.
It evolved from a magazine show into single filmed documentaries, and one of Goodchild’s most hard-hitting as producer and director, in 1967, showed new links between smoking and lung cancer in Britain and the US. Two years later, he became the programme’s editor. During his tenure (1969-76) it won more than 30 awards, including two as best factual series from the Society of Film and Television Arts (now Bafta) and two Prix Italia honours.
The subjects ranged from stress, sex, infertility, mental health and drug abuse to additives and preservatives in food, animal experiments, the body clock’s circadian cycle and the history of Apache Native Americans.
Goodchild then moved to the BBC’s drama department. As producer, with John Glenister directing and Jane Lapotaire starring, he made the five-part series Marie Curie (1977), Elaine Morgan’s adaptation of Robert Reid’s biography of the physicist.
Typical of the international acclaim it received was the New York Times’s declaration: “A production as ambitious and with as much artistic integrity as Marie Curie would never be considered by American commercial television today.”
As a result of its success, the BBC appointed Goodchild the first editor (1977-80) of its newly created special features unit, making factually based dramas. He began with another biopic, Oppenheimer (1980), with Sam Waterston playing the “father” of the atomic bomb.
As executive producer, he set it up as a co-production between the BBC and WGBH of Boston, with Barry Davis directing, and travelled with its writer, Peter Prince, to New York to meet Oppenheimer’s family and friends. “It was an amazing story and I’d always wanted to do it,” he told Variety in 2023. Like Marie Curie, it won Bafta’s best drama series award.
He set on its way the unit that would later be responsible for challenging dramas such as Threads (1984), the writer Barry Hines’s imagining of a nuclear attack, and The Monocled Mutineer (1986), Alan Bleasdale’s play about a first world war army deserter.
By then, Goodchild had finished a spell as head of the science and features department (1980-84), where he notably founded QED (1982-99), with documentaries adopting a more populist approach than Horizon. One episode, A Guide to Armageddon (1982), showed the possible effects of a single, medium-size nuclear warhead on a big city. When the BBC’s director general Alasdair Milne suggested a fully dramatised version, the documentary’s director, Mick Jackson, turned it into Threads.
After proving his own ability to switch from documentaries to dramas, Goodchild was made BBC television’s head of plays (1984-89). One of his first decisions was to drop the Play for Today strand, feeling it had become “slightly tired”, but he remained a champion of the single play, launching Screen Two on BBC Two (1985-98) and Screen One on BBC One (1989-98).
A surprise choice for the job, he pushed the BBC into a new age by commissioning more dramas filmed on location rather than on video in the studio. It was a response to the investment in films being made by Channel 4 since its opening in 1982. Unfair Exchanges (1985), Hotel du Lac (1986) and East of Ipswich (1987) were among the productions Goodchild oversaw.
There was controversy when the playwright Ian Curteis complained that his drama The Falklands Play had been dropped by the BBC in 1986 – before going into production – because it “presented Margaret Thatcher and her policy on the Falklands in a favourable light”. Curteis claimed that Goodchild had demanded changes that were “political”, not “dramatic”, which the head of plays rejected, while Michael Grade, BBC One’s controller, blamed a poor quality script. (Much later, in 2002, a shortened version of The Falklands Play was made for both BBC television and radio.)
Curteis also chipped in that Goodchild’s background of producing science programmes was “a million light years from making a play”, but Goodchild enjoyed a string of successes, including commissioning the Falklands war drama Tumbledown (1988). A year later, he became an executive producer at BBC Films (1989-94), which took the corporation into a new era of making – or co-producing – films for both television and the cinema.
He was born in Windsor, Berkshire, to Lottie (nee Ager), a Citizens Advice bureau worker, and Douglas Goodchild, head of ICI’s paints division, and educated at Aldenham school, Hertfordshire.
On graduating in chemistry from St John’s College, Oxford, in 1963, he joined the BBC as a trainee. The following year, Goodchild produced a radio drama and wrote episodes of a schools science programme. Switching to TV, he was researcher on the 1965 series of The Science of Man. Later, he wrote radio plays such as The Nuremberg Trial (1996) and Lockerbie on Trial (2001).
In 1968, Goodchild married Penelope Pointon-Dick; she died in 2022. He is survived by their daughters, Abigail and Hannah, and five grandchildren.
• Peter Robert Edward Goodchild, television and film producer and executive, born 18 August 1939; died 6 May 2025
