Tom Clegg obituary

The television director Tom Clegg, who has died aged 81, gained a reputation for his expert handling of action on screen, in work ranging from the pilot episode of The Sweeney, featuring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman as tough, no-nonsense detectives, to the swashbuckling Sharpe television films, following the daring exploits of a British officer (Sean Bean) in the Napoleonic wars. “Action isn’t just about fights,” Clegg told Rachel Murrell, author of Sharpe’s Story: The Making of a Hero (1996). “Action is what moves the story on dramatically. Just because people are rushing around, [it] doesn’t make it action. A good argument between Sharpe and Hakeswill can have as much action as the Chosen Men running across a battlefield.”

Clegg directed Regan, the 1974 pilot of The Sweeney, which featured Thaw as the detective inspector of the title, wearing a paisley cravat, and Waterman as Detective Sergeant George Carter, his sidekick in the Metropolitan police’s flying squad. Ian Kennedy Martin specifically wrote the role of Jack Regan for Thaw, but it was Clegg who cast Waterman, whom he had seen at the Royal Court theatre and in the film Up the Junction (1968), before directing him on TV in Special Branch.

He was then one of the lead directors through four series (1975-78), in which the cravat and any suggestion of artistic leanings were wisely abandoned, out of place among the punch-ups and bad language that brought The Sweeney under heavy fire – especially from an audience raised on Dixon of Dock Green and Z-Cars – for the violence it portrayed. It was one of the pioneering programmes made by Euston Films, a subsidiary of the ITV company Thames Television, which took the drama out of the studio to be shot almost entirely on location using 16mm film cameras, giving it a gritty, realistic look that Clegg and other directors enhanced with fast-paced action. Clegg did the same when he made the second spin-off film, Sweeney 2 (1978).

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Later, he revelled in working with “the guns, the horses, the fights” in the Sharpe dramas – 16 feature-length stories screened between 1993 and 2008, most based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels following the adventures of the maverick Richard Sharpe as he rises through the ranks with the 95th Rifles and the South Essex Regiment. Most of the filming was done in the Ukraine, Turkey and India.

Clegg was born in Kirkham, Lancashire, to Nannie (nee Harrison) and Ernest Clegg. His father made clogs for the shoe shop he owned in the town. On leaving the local grammar school, Clegg did national service in the RAF in Singapore (1952-54), then studied photography at art college.

He joined the newly launched Granada Television in Manchester as a camera operator in 1956, then moved to another ITV company, ABC, based at studios in Teddington, Middlesex. He eventually became a director of series such as Candid Camera, in 1967, and shows with the comedy duo Mike and Bernie Winters, from 1966 to 1968.

Switching to Thames Television, he directed the afternoon soap Harriet’s Back in Town (1972-73) and made his first foray into crime dramas in 1970 and 1974 with three episodes of Special Branch, whose later series were the first to be made by Euston Films. Then came the Sweeney pilot in the Armchair Cinema strand.

Clegg’s time on The Sweeney and expertise at casting what he called “the East End lot” or “the Joan Littlewood set” (from the pioneering Theatre Workshop, which gave a platform to working-class voices) made him perfect for directing the feature film McVicar (1980). He collaborated on the script with the former armed bank robber John McVicar, who escaped from Durham prison, which was replicated on a set at Pinewood Studios. The Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltrey, took the starring role.

Clegg liked challenges, and switched to sci-fi to direct episodes of the live-action series Space: 1999 (1975-77), produced by Gerry Anderson; he toyed with the supernatural for two 1980 Hammer House of Horror stories. Four episodes of Minder (1980 and 1982) and the television film The World Cup: A Captain’s Tale (1982) reunited him with Waterman. He directed three of the six episodes of Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy (1986) and worked as a jobbing director on many other popular dramas, including episodes of The Professionals (1978), The Chinese Detective (1981), C.A.T.S. Eyes (1985), Bergerac (1986), Between the Lines (1992), My Uncle Silas (2003) and Rosemary & Thyme (2003).

Clegg also directed the documentary G’olé!, Fifa’s official film of the 1982 World Cup, in Spain, with Sean Connery narrating and music by Rick Wakeman, and the feature-length television drama Bravo Two Zero (1999), starring Bean as Andy McNab (a pseudonym for Steven Mitchell), commander of an SAS patrol searching for Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile launchers in Iraq during the first Gulf war.

In 1957, Clegg married Audrey Harrold, a stage and film hair stylist and makeup artist. They later separated but remained friends. She died in April. Clegg is survived by their daughters, Alison and Fiona.