For more than 30 years, my friend and former colleague Roger Keech, who has died aged 64 after suffering from heart disease, was one of the brightest and most talented of northern television programme makers, with several hundred documentaries and features to his credit and a remarkable seven awards from the Royal Television Society.
His work took viewers from the footplate of the locomotives Flying Scotsman and Sir Nigel Gresley to the cockpits of the Lancaster and Spitfires of the RAF’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight; and from the Batley Variety Club to the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel.
Roger was born and brought up in Leeds, the son of Connie and Donald Keech. His father was the first person to create and manufacture ink suitable for the newly invented Biro ballpoint pen. Roger made his first film while still in his teens - a home-made affair shot on Ilkley Moor involving friends and family in costume. When he left Leeds grammar school he started learning television production at what was then Ravensbourne College, near Bromley, in south-east London.
He joined the BBC TV newsroom in Leeds in the 1970s as a studio assistant, learning – in pre-computer days – to make graphic displays from basic materials: cardboard, sticky tape and Letraset. Increasing confidence led him into studio management and directing cameras from the gallery for the BBC’s Yorkshire and Lincolnshire audience. Roger had three particularly close colleagues at BBC Leeds. Brenda May became his lifetime partner, and with Patrick Hargreaves and Michael Murray, she and Roger left the BBC to set up their own production company.
Broadcast News Training was heavily involved teaching Leeds University students in the art and craft of television, but the team kept the films coming too. Roger was a gifted photographer, with a perceptive eye both for characters and for landscapes – subtle, moody or spectacular. The old fisherman on the Yorkshire coast selling dressed crabs and talking of his seafaring days; filming from a helicopter among the Lakeland mountains in a gathering storm; and hearing the pilot of a 1,000mph jet fighter confess his apprehension at learning to handle a 70-year-old Hawker Hurricane.
Roger’s attention to detail was well-known. Every film shoot, every outside broadcast was meticulously planned. And the post-production editing of sound and picture tracks – much of it done in his spare bedroom – was equally precise. One of his last programmes, Flying Scotsman from the Footplate, shown on BBC4 last December, was highly acclaimed. The Royal Television Society said he and his colleagues had “achieved something extraordinary”.
Roger’s programmes spoke for him, for the man himself was self-effacing, modest, almost shy, and quietly spoken. He was generous, kind and very funny. His was a rare talent, but it is good to know that Roger’s former students are taking his ideas with them as they develop their own careers in television.
He is survived by Brenda, and by his brother, Andrew.
