My dad, Peter Tiffin, who has died aged 86, was a television director and producer for more than 30 years. He was a prolific documentary maker and proudly claimed to be the only person to have asked the Queen questions while cameras were rolling.
Peter began his career at Southern Television in Southampton, before moving to ITN and then in 1968 to Thames TV, where he worked on the flagship current affairs programme This Week.
He reported on some of the major issues of the time, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to football hooliganism and the civil war in Lebanon. He also produced longer documentaries, such as To Mrs Brown a Daughter (1978), about the birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, and The British Connection (1985) with Alastair Burnet .
In 1986 he produced and directed The Queen and the Commonwealth with Sir Trevor McDonald. It is part of royal protocol that the Queen is never interviewed. However, it was agreed she could be recorded while being prompted to comment on footage of her time on the throne. McDonald was not allowed to do it, as that would be deemed an interview, so Peter asked the questions. His voice was edited out, but it’s thought he’s the only person to have done this.
Peter was born in Beverley, east Yorkshire, to John Tiffin, an aircraft engineer, and Dorothy (nee Curtis), and grew up in Kingston upon Hull. He attended Kingston high school and there discovered a love of acting, with Tom Courtenay, a fellow pupil, once serving as his understudy. After national service, he won a scholarship to Oxford University to read philosophy, politics and economics.
In 1961 he married Sally Fitzgerald, whom he met after gatecrashing a party at her London flat. They had three daughters and in the mid-70s left suburbia for the good life in the Cotswolds, where they kept chickens, geese and goats. Peter regularly arrived at the office with remnants of the farm still on his shoes.
After taking early retirement in 1991, Peter and Sally spent a lot of their time in Italy. Dad travelled the world for work, but he was never happier than when drinking a glass of Chianti in Tuscany.
Sally died in 2017, and Dad was never really the same after that. He tested positive for coronavirus, and recovered but died a few weeks later.
He is survived by me, my two sisters, Miranda and Serena, three grandchildren and his sister, Shirley.
