A television director who knew that when the script was thin, the picture had to do the work. His early Avengers episodes are where that series learned to be strange, and the rest of a long career in British television never asked him to be quite so odd again.
Fi1m perspective
An Avengers episode from the early years opens on a set that would look thin under honest light, and Don Leaver declines to light it honestly. He tilts the camera, pushes a face too close to the lens, fills the corners of the frame with something bizarre, and a scene about very little comes out looking like a scene about something. The reason was practical. The scripts were often thin, and the pictures had to make up the difference. He directed the first episode in 1961 and stayed for twenty, through 1966, and those twenty are a fair part of why the series turned from a plain thriller into the offbeat fantasy we scored 83 and still recommend.
The sharpest example is The House That Jack Built (1966), where he shoots the claustrophobic passages as a nightmare rather than a puzzle, with angles that make the walls look as if they are leaning in. It unsettled us more than anything else in the series, because the camera stops being playful and starts being cruel, and the wit that Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg usually bring to the room is not enough to keep it out. The series worked both live and on film in his time, and he directed in both, which is rarer than it sounds. Live television gave a director one take.
After that came the long middle of a working British television life: Van der Valk, The Protectors, Bergerac, Lovejoy, Hammer House of Horror, through the 1970s and 1980s. The Gold Robbers (1969) opens with a heist he stages cleanly, proof that he could handle action as well as atmosphere. He directed the final two series of A Fine Romance (1983), with Judi Dench and Michael Williams, and in the 1990s he moved partly into producing, running the first series of Prime Suspect (1991) and directing the pilot and three further episodes of A Touch of Frost from 1992. There were commercials too. He retired around 2000.
Sydney Newman brought him in to direct; Peter Hammond directed alongside him on The Avengers, and it is not always easy to say where one man's work ends and the other's begins. The reputation is uniformly kind, and the nearest anyone comes to a complaint is that the live-era productions were fraught, which is a complaint about the conditions rather than the man. We will add one of our own: the invention was born of necessity, and we have not seen enough of the later work to know whether it survived better scripts. Watch the early Avengers for the moment the plot goes slack and the camera tilts. That is a director doing the writer's job with a lens, which in those years was most of the job.
Biography
Don Leaver was an English television director and producer. Born in London in 1929, he trained as an actor at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art before moving into television production and direction.
He directed the first episode of The Avengers (1961) and a total of 20 episodes of the series. Leaver also directed episodes of Public Eye (1965), Bergerac (1981) and Lovejoy (1986). As producer of the first series of Prime Suspect (1991), he won a BAFTA award. His other credits include A Touch of Frost (1992), Hammer House of Horror (1980) and The Bill (1984). Leaver's career spanned from 1960 to 2000.
