MICHAEL CROUCHER was at the forefront of documentary making at the BBC at a time that has come to be known as the golden age of television.

In the early 1960s this visionary young producer and his colleague, John Boorman, did away with the established technique of writing a script and then finding the pictures to fit. Instead Croucher and Boorman left the studio to go out and shoot what they found, filming ordinary people telling their extraordinary stories straight to camera. Together they made risk an essential ingredient in film-making.

Michael Croucher arrived at BBC Plymouth in 1954 after studying at the Royal College of Music. Rejecting the life of a professional musician, he turned instead to broadcasting where he used his National Service RAF training in wireless telegraphy as a “gram swinger and balancer”.

Recording was then done on wax discs, and Croucher had to mix between discs — up to six of them at once on live broadcasts. He would experiment with sound for plays and later referred to the period as a “self-designed apprenticeship”. His principal and mentor was Brandon Acton Bond, a radio editor of genius who operated on location from a shooting brake.

At that time it was easy to move between television and radio and, in 1958 when Croucher moved to BBC Bristol, he took his editing skills to the film cutting rooms. His first 30-minute documentary film in 1962, The Bashers, focused on a gang of teenage boys preparing for bonfire night in Barton Hill, a tough Bristol district.

Croucher’s patience and forbearance was invaluable as a means of persuading his subjects to speak straight to camera, and many other films followed. Croucher himself had a wry memory of those early documentary years, recalling: “I had just seen Eisenstein, so everything was underlit, with stark shadows.”

Boorman arrived at BBC Bristol in 1961 and remembered: “I had come from ITV, so I got a frosty reception. It was like entering a conclave of university dons. I was a barbarian at the gate, a pariah.

“Michael was assigned to me as assistant producer, and he was immensely valuable to me because he already knew how to manipulate the system, getting crews and resources, maximising expenses. For the four years we worked together he always remained rather mysterious to me. He drove an old Citroën, like Maigret, and that’s what he was like: a smooth suspension. Never intrusive. I think he was fundamentally shy.

“He had the ability to fade in and out. I’d say, ‘Where’s Michael? Oh — he’s already here’. He had faded in again. He was a skilful documentary maker, and he handled people well.”

The breakthrough series for their now burgeoning documentary unit was Citizen 63, which was followed in 1964 by The Newcomers, the first big series on the new BBC2. The first of six parts traced a Dante-esque descent from the heights of Clifton to dropouts in a squat. Theirs was the only BBC unit making such documentaries at the time. The series established both Boorman and Croucher’s reputations as talented film-makers with a fully realised sense of place and time.

When Boorman moved away to Hollywood, where he would later make films such as Deliverance and Point Blank, Croucher chose to stay in Bristol to head the documentary unit.

Apart from scores of one-off films, Croucher will be remembered for series such as The Curious Character of Britain, Summer 67, the highly popular martial arts series The Way of the Warrior, The Healing Arts and Leap in the Dark, a ghost story drama that used Colin Wilson, Alan Garner, Peter Redgrove and Russell Hoban as writers. In programmes written by John Hale (The Bristol Entertainment, Ego Hugo) Croucher pioneered the technique of colour separation in studio programmes.

He was proud of The Diary of Anne Hughes, a chocolate-boxy reconstruction of the life of an 18th-century dairy maid in Herefordshire. When the source diary was proved to be a 1930s pastiche, Croucher freely acknowledged it: “It was not presented as a deep documentary, but as a drama, based on a dubious text,” he said.

In the late 1970s, his documentary series The French Way depicted vanishing or threatened ways of life in small French villages and towns. The programme’s poignancy made it a great success and he followed it with The Italian Way and The Yugoslavian Way.

Carefully researched and always seeking to surprise, Croucher’s films focused on widening the viewer’s horizon, and their thoughtful, gentle nature reflected that of their maker. Croucher’s patience was legendary: when his PA led everyone up the wrong mountain during a shoot in Italy he did not shout; when a French rainstorm washed out a planned shoot, he managed to use the storm instead. As a director he placed emphasis on allowing a storyline to develop naturally and put great trust in his crew and film editor.

In later years Croucher became a visiting lecturer at the University of Bristol drama department, where his astute reflections on the ways in which language, image and sound come together in film influenced future generations of film-makers. Students and colleagues alike sought his advice, which he always gave generously, and with the selfeffacing modesty that comes from real talent and intellect.

His first marriage to actress Rosalind Gee produced three children. With his second wife, artist, dancer and director, Anne Adamson, he had two daughters.

Michael Croucher, documentary film-maker, was born on January 17, 1930. He died on May 26, 2006, aged 76.