A designer who became a director, Colin Cant spent the 1980s and early 1990s making supernatural serials for children look better than their budgets, and spent as long again keeping two soap operas on the air without anyone noticing him do it.
Fi1m perspective
The Cant habit is easy to spot once you know it. Give him a children's script with a ghost or a crack in time in it, and he gets it out of the studio and onto a real location, drains some of the colour from the picture and uses the weather and the light to set the mood. Moondial (1988), a gothic time-travel serial, is the one most people remember for this, and it is the one that fixed his reputation: a children's programme placed and lit like an adult one.
He did not start there. Cant trained as an architect, then went into television design in the 1960s as a scenic designer on programmes such as BBC Scotland's This Man Craig. A colleague called Ridley Scott told him to try directing, and an unsolicited letter to Coronation Street arrived just as the programme needed new directors, so his first directing work was there in 1971. Episodes of Z-Cars followed in the 1970s, and then the move that defined him: BBC children's television from the late 1970s, as the first director and later producer of Grange Hill (1978), where he did much of the original casting himself. He has described the career as a pinball machine: "you're fired off from the bottom right hand corner and you bounce off various things." It is a modest account of a man who kept landing in the right place.
The best bounce was Russell T Davies. Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993) are early Davies scripts, dense with ideas, and Cant's job was to get them made on children's department money and children's department time, which he did, with David Ferguson scoring and Paul Stone producing. He cast a young Kate Winslet in Dark Season, one of her first leading roles. We will own that the look of these serials, the drained colour and the location filming, unsettled us in a way children's television rarely bothered to, and the reason is simple: Cant lit them as if the threat were real. The limits are real too. Moondial has gaps in its story that the direction smooths over rather than fills, and Century Falls lost material to cuts, which shows.
Then he went back to the soaps: Emmerdale from 1994 to 2001, and Coronation Street again from 1995 to 2005, more than 150 episodes of the Street across three stints in all. Our review of the programme stands at 74 and does not mention him, which is how soap direction is supposed to work; nobody is meant to see the join. On its good nights the Street is funny, humane and sharply observed, and some of those nights were his. We cannot tell you which. That is either the quiet achievement of his later career or the price of it, and on the evidence of what he did when the light was his to set, we would say the price.
Biography
Colin Cant is a British television director, producer and scenic designer. He began his career as a designer before directing episodes of series including Z-Cars (1962) and Coronation Street from 1971.
Cant directed extensively for BBC children's programming. He was the first director on Grange Hill in 1978 and also directed serials such as Moondial (1988), Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993). He worked on other series including Emmerdale and returned to Coronation Street in later stints through 2005. Cant received a BAFTA award for his work on Grange Hill.
