My friend Ritchie Cogan, who has died aged 75, was a producer and pioneer of social action through broadcasting and, sometimes, a thorn in the side of the BBC.
In 1984 he devised Crimewatch, inspired by a German format and presented by Nick Ross and Sue Cook. He enlisted the police to bring unsolved crimes to the studio. These were re-enacted on film, the public were asked to help and a battery of police officers manned the phones to take calls from the public, live on air. This year it is to be replaced by its spin-off, Crimewatch Roadshow.
A year after Crimewatch he produced Drugwatch, presented by Ross and Esther Rantzen. This brought to air the biggest survey into drug abuse and led to the publication of the first national directory of help organisations. For the broadcast in July he arranged for Princess Diana to come to the studio and appear, with no advance publicity.
In 1986 he continued the genre with another one-off, Childwatch, presented by Rantzen and Cook, campaigning against and supporting the victims of child abuse. This led to Childline, which still provides indispensable service.
Born and raised in Dublin, the son of Erinna (nee O’Brien) and Patrick Cogan, a civil servant, Ritchie went to the Presentation Brothers school and then to Trinity College, Dublin, to study maths and physics. On graduating, in 1963 he joined the BBC in London as a studio manager.
In 1972 he became a radio producer, first on Woman’s Hour, and then set up an investigative documentary unit where he worked with Roger Cook on series including Reel Evidence. In 1980 he moved to TV documentaries producing Out of Court.
Ritchie was outspoken in the row over Real Lives: At the Edge of the Union (1985). A month after Margaret Thatcher’s appeal not to give terrorists “the oxygen of publicity”, the BBC made a television documentary about two Northern Irish paramilitaries (one Protestant, one Catholic – Martin McGuinness) who were also elected councillors – a fact often forgotten. The home secretary, Leon Brittan, hearing about it, declared that transmission would not be in the national interest. The BBC governors agreed and dropped the programme. Ritchie hid the programme tape under his girlfriend’s bed and arranged for it to be shown to a packed audience at the ICA. After a BBC-wide strike over the intervention, the programme was broadcast, with minor changes.
In 1990, Ritchie persuaded William Nicholson to write The March, a prescient film about a multitude of African people who trek across the desert to the Moroccan coast, climb into boats, and are confronted by troops on crossing the water. Then the screen turns to black. It starred Malick Bowens and Juliet Stevenson, and was shown in 36 countries.
When Ritchie left the BBC in 1991 he developed the One World Broadcasting Trust (now One World Media), a leading NPO that supports media productions concerned with the developing world. Its annual awards are prestigious and highly competitive. In 1994 he married Heike Wessels, a German translator, whom he met in 1990 when both were working on the Rio Earth summit. They settled in Cologne, where Ritchie became a freelance consultant on human rights media.
Ritchie is survived by Heike and their son, Robin.
