John Frankau
TV producer
JOHN FRANKAU, who has died at 96, was one of the prolific producer/directors who in the late 1960s and early 70s helped establish the newly-founded Yorkshire Television as a leading supplier of popular drama.
His productions at the Kirkstall Road studios in Leeds included the long-running legal series The Main Chance, in which John Stride played an improbably dashing solicitor who juggled his caseload with romancing women at his offices in Leeds and London; and Kate, in which Phyllis Calvert played a magazine agony aunt who became personally involved in her readers’ troubles.
He also made episodes of Hadleigh, starring Gerald Harper, perhaps the most popular Yorkshire drama of its day.
Frankau had been brought to YTV by its founding head of drama, Peter Willes, with whom he had previously worked at the outgoing London contractor, Rediffusion TV. Among his many directing credits there was the extremely long-running crime procedural drama, No Hiding Place, in which Raymond Francis portrayed the snufftaking detective, Chief Inspector Lockhart.
Perhaps Frankau’s finest work was the 1973 YTV play, Sarah – the title character was an eight-year-old girl – which was nominated for an American Emmy award. A year later, he went one better with Mr Axelford’s Angel, starring Julia Foster and again made by YTV, which was nominated again and this time won.
John was the second child of Ronald Frankau, a popular comedian in the interwar years, and his wife, Hilda (nee Petley). Born in Cambridge, he would return there to university, where he studied engineering.
But, like his father, he was drawn to the stage, and although he realised his talent was for directing rather than acting, he made his way around several repertory theatres before gravitating to early TV and a long-forgotten series called Hotel Imperial, starring the wartime comic, Vic Oliver. In an era of live drama, he was seldom short of work.
He married the actress Barry Wildblood, and their son is the actor Nicholas Frankau. He survives him, along with three grandsons and two greatgrandchildren. Barry, who acted under the name Jennifer Stuart, died in 2010.