TOM CLEGG

(16 October 1934 – 24 July 2016)

The Lancashire-born director Tom Clegg initially worked for Granada Television as a camera operator. Moving to ABC TV he became a director and for most of his career worked in television directing high-profile series such as Special Branch, Regan (1974), the TV pilot that led him to direct The Sweeney with John Thaw and Denis Waterman, the Gerry Anderson sci-fi series Space 1999 and episodes of Minder, The Chinese Detective, The Professionals, Boon, Van der Valk, Bergerac, Between the Lines, Poirot and Rosemary and Thyme etc.

Probably his biggest contribution to British television was directing 16 feature-length TV action films based on the character of Sharpe, a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars, starring Sean Bean. Clegg made a few films for the cinema: Sweeney 2, the second spin-off from Sweeney, McVicar (1980), a relentlessly powerful study of villain John McVicar’s time in prison, with Roger Daltrey, G’Olé!, the official FIFA documentary on the 1982 World Cup, The Inside Man (1984), a Cold War thriller with Dennis Hopper and Any Man’s Death (1990), about a missing journalist in the African civil war, with John Savage. Clegg’s last work was on Sharpe’s Peril (2008), the final in the series about which he also made a documentary film.

MICHAEL DARVELL