MICHAEL WEARING

(12 March 1939 - 5 May 2017)

Michael Wearing was chiefly known as a BBC Television producer responsible for some of the most iconic drama series of the 1980s and ’90s. Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) was the sequel to the original 1980 Play for Today, The Black Stuff. The series won a Bafta award, as did Wearing’s production of Edge of Darkness (1985), with Bob Peck, which he later remade as a feature film. From 1980 he also produced The History Man, Blind Justice, Ashenden, Common as Muck, Martin Chuzzlewit, Seaforth, Pride and Prejudice, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, Our Friends in the North, Holding On, Our Mutual Friend, Gormenghast and many other TV movies, series and serials.

For the cinema he started with Bellman and True (1987, with Bernard Hill from Blackstuff), The Advocate (1993, with Colin Firth), Human Traffic (1999), and from 2000 When the Sky Falls, South West 9, Mystics, Red Mercury and, finally, Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson. In 1997 he won the Alan Clarke Bafta award for Outstanding Achievement in Television. Michael Wearing had two children, the late Catherine Wearing, a former journalist for What’s On In London, who also became a television producer, and Benjamin Wearing, a film and television cameraman, who survives him.

MICHAEL DARVELL