David Rose (producer)
| David Rose | |
|---|---|
| Born |
22 November 1924 Swanage, Dorset |
| Died | 26 January 2017 (aged 92) |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | TV and film producer |
David E. Rose (22 November 1924 – 26 January 2017) was a British television producer and commissioning editor.
Following war service flying on 34 missions in Lancaster bombers, he trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Drama, but following graduation pursued a career in stage management. He became an Assistant Floor Manager for BBC television in London in 1954, working on the television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his first week, but by the end of the 1950s he was a director of dramatised documentaries for the BBC, including Black Furrow (1958) about open cast mining in South Wales.
It is as a producer and production executive though, that he has had the greatest prominence. Rose was the original producer of Z-Cars (1962–65). Broadcast live at Rose's insistence thinking the excitement generated by avoiding pre-recording was integral to the production. Rose was responsible for ending its original run thinking the format had become exhausted.Softly, Softly (1966–69) was a spin-off series also produced by Rose.
Appointed by David Attenborough in 1971 to be head of the newly established autonomous English Regional Drama department at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham in 1971, Rose produced work by established writers like Alan Plater and encouraged new creative talent such as playwrights Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell, David Hare and Mike Leigh. Some of this work appeared in the Play for Today (Peter Terson's The Fishing Party, 1972) or Second City Firsts anthology series.
In 1981, Rose left the BBC for Channel 4 where he was appointed the Commissioning Editor for Fiction by Jeremy Isaacs, the channel's founding Chief Executive. In particular, he is identified with the Film on Four strand. With an initial overall budget of £6million a year, Rose invested £300,000 in twenty films annually. Originally, the project's films were intended for television screenings alone; the "holdback" system prevented investment in theatrical films by television companies because of the length of time (then three years) before broadcasters could screen them. An agreement soon concluded with the Cinema Exhibitors Association though, allowed a brief period of cinema exhibition if the budget of the films was below £1.25 million.
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