Jeremy Isaacs had one of the most distinguished careers in the history of British television, from producer to channel controller, yet the top job which many anticipated he would earn-the Director-Generalship of the BBC-ultimately eluded him.

     From a humble background in Glasgow's Jewish community, he attended Merton College, Oxford, where he became President of the Oxford Union. Specializing in factual programming, his first television work was with Manchester-based Granada Television from 1958 to 1963, where he produced the long­ running stalwarts What the Papers Say and All Our Yesterdays, the latter beginning the association with archive-based history programs which was to become such an important feature of his career.

     In 1963 he moved to the London ITV franchise holder, Associated-Rediffusion, where he was a producer and editor on the flagship ITV current affairs program This Week for three years, covering major foreign and domestic issues of the time, from Vietnam and the assassination of President Kennedy to the reform of ho­mosexuality and divorce legislation, and Beatlemania.

     In 1965, he moved to the BBC as editor of the Cor­ poration's current affairs flagship, Panorama, a position he held for the next two years, before returning to Associated-Rediffusion in 1967 as Controller of Features. In 1968, the company was succeeded by Thames Television as the ITV London weekday franchise holder, and Isaacs continued in the same role for the new company until 1974. Isaacs made Thames's fac­tual output among the most admired in the British television landscape. He also continued to make programs himself, as producer and executive producer, and it was a project which became something of a personal crusade that was to become the undoubted highlight of his program-making career.

As series producer of The World At War, Isaacs oversaw an immensely talented group of writers, historians, and producers. The finished product, an extremely ambitious, 26-part history of World War II, set the standards that still apply today for the combined use of archive film and eye-witness testimony to tell the story of the past. Endlessly repeated down the years since its first appearance in 1973, The World At War remains a television classic. In a poll of TV industry professionals conducted by the British Film Institute in 2000, it was voted by a long margin the best factual program in British television history. It also remains a testament to the commitment to quality broadcasting that Isaacs instilled in the commercial company Thames Television. Isaacs strengthened Thames's reputation as its Director of Programs from 1974 to I 978. One production in particular serves to illustrate his achievement: the drama The Naked Civil Servant (1975), directed by Jack Gold and starring John Hurt as Quentin Crisp, which not only stands as a milestone of British TV drama, but also helped to influence changing public at­titudes to homosexuality.

     In 1979, Isaacs was invited to give the prestigious James McTaggart Memorial Lecture, which opened the annual Edinburgh International Television Festival. The biggest debate in the television industry at the time surrounded the new Conservative government's plans for Britain's fourth television channel. Isaacs used the platform he was given to set out his own ideas about how the channel should be created and run. Channel 4 was eventually set up largely along the out­ lines he promoted: it which would be funded by the ITV companies, who would sell its advertising space and cross-promote it, an ingenious formula which allowed it to be given a strong public-service remit with a particular duty to be innovative and cater for minorities otherwise underserved by television. It was also to act as a publisher, rather than maker of programs, commissioning its output from independent companies. Isaacs was duly given the job of Channel 4's first Chief Executive, with the channel set to start transmission in 1982. In the meantime, he acted as consultant on another large, archive-based series, Hollywood, transmitted by Thames in 1980, and as series producer of Ireland: A Television History, made for the BBC in the same year. He then embarked on the adventure of creating a completely new television channel.

     Channel 4 began broadcasting in November 1982 and immediately ran into a variety of troubles. It also changed the face of British television. The independent productions often had a raw edge not previously seen on the mainstream channels, the professional conventions of which were overdue for reconsideration. Programs for minorities included not only women and ethnic groups, but trade unionists. Youth programming such as Whatever You Want and The Tube caused a stir for its sometimes unrestrained energy.

     The controversies centered usually on matters of taste and language-with the channel's soap opera Brookside to the fore--or on the perceived ratings cri­sis. Isaacs knew what he was doing, however, and the channel certainly bore witness to his commitment to innovation and quality. The first night's programming included the filmed drama Walter, starring Ian Mc­ Kellen as a mentally retarded man, which kicked off Channel 4's film-making strand Film on Four, later to be credited with reviving the British film industry, giving work to major talents like Mike Leigh and Peter Greenaway. Another early and emblematic triumph was the television version of the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Probably the greatest success was the hour-long Channel 4 News, which combined a serious approach to news and in-depth analysis in a way that revolutionized the coverage of news on British television.

     Channel 4 became a vital part of the British television landscape. The then comparatively staid BBC 2 (seen as its natural competitor, as BBC I was for ITV) was forced to respond, and the result was a rise in the quality of output unprecedented in British television history. Many see the 1980s as an era of great energy and renewal in British television, which can be attributed, for the most part, to Isaacs. When he handed the task of running the channel over to the populist Michael Grade in 1987, it was with a strong warning not to allow the quality of output to suffer in the search for ratings.

     By then Isaacs had tried, and failed, to get the job he most coveted and which most industry professionals wanted him to have: Director-General of the BBC. British television was entering an era in which profits (or in the BBC's case, ratings), rather than quality, would be the prime moving force, and Isaacs was the first casualty of that sea change.

     Isaacs turned away from television and took a job that reflected another of his passions, becoming General Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, from 1988 to 1997. Controversies followed him there also, no more so than when in 1996 he invited a television documentary crew to make a series on the opera house for the BBC, which produced a highly unflattering portrait of an institution in crisis.

     He never completely severed his television links. From 1989 to 1998 he acted as the unseen interviewer in a revival of the classic Face to Face interview series, talking to the likes of Sir Peter Hall, Maya An­gelou, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Stephen Sondheim, and Anthony Hopkins. Then, at the end of the 1990s, he returned once more to the large-scale archive history format as executive producer on the 24-part The Cold War for Turner Enterprises. Consciously modeled on The World at War (it was narrated by the classical actor Kenneth Branagh, for instance, as the earlier series had been narrated by Laurence Olivier), it included testimony from most of the major political figures of the second half of the twentieth century, and was first shown in 1999.