Joan Kemp-Welch (original) (raw)

Even in the formative years of television, when a director might be responsible for a frothy comedy one week and Ibsen the next, Joan Kemp-Welch, who has died aged 92, displayed an astonishing versatility. For Associated-Rediffusion, the original London weekday ITV company, her successes ranged from Cool For Cats, a thrice-weekly pop music programme for teenagers - she was 50 at the time - to a network production of Electra, performed in Greek, and a passion play, Laudes Evangelii, without any words at all.

In between came A Midsummer Night's Dream and plays by Harold Pinter. All this at a time when women, though occupying quite a few senior posts in television, were rarely in the con trol gallery calling the shots as the show went out live.

Born in Wimbledon, south London, the daughter of Vincent and Helen Green - she took her mother's maiden name - Kemp-Welch was educated at Roedean and embarked on a career as an actress, making her debut in 1927 at the Gate, Notting Hill. At the New theatre, Northampton, she even played the dusky temptress, Tondelayo, wearing a low-cut sarong and a few hisbiscus blooms, in White Cargo, a popular melodrama about chaps going to the bad in the tropics.

By the 1940s she was beginning to direct, first in Colchester and then with the privately-owned Wilson Barrett company in Scotland, for which she directed more than 250 plays in four years. Wilson Barrett himself, a fruity actor-manager of the old school, recorded how Kemp-Welch ripped into his Rochester in Jane Eyre, which he had been doing his way for a quarter of a century. "I was torn to pieces ... every single intonation that I had used before was changed, but by the end of the first week's rehearsal I was beginning to see the light, and by the end of the second I was ashamed to think of my past performances in the part."

As such theatre began to disappear, television providentially offered an alternative. Set up at short notice in 1955, the founding ITV companies had to compete for whatever talent was available. If enough wasn't forthcoming, they had to home grow it, and as well as her own productions for Associated-Rediffusion, Kemp- Welch was kept busy training new directors.

After Cool For Cats she concentrated on drama. Pinter's The Birthday Party was his stage play adapted for television, but The Lover (1963) was written for TV, an erotic charade in which Alan Badel and Vivien Merchant seemed to be afternoon lovers but were eventually revealed to be husband and wife keeping their sex life charged up by playing games. It carried off all sorts of awards (although not the one I suggested, from the Marriage Guidance Council).

The Electra in Greek (1962) was a brave gesture; the Midsummer Night's Dream (1964) had Benny Hill as Bottom; and Laudes Evangelii (1962) was a television version of Leonid Massine's dance-and-mime story of the Crucifixion. Between these landmarks there were always plenty of unsung productions, such as a powerful one of Arthur Miller's The View From The Bridge or a play by the now-forgotten but excellent Paul Jones, The Trouble With Girls, which anticipated by 30 years the laddish goings-on of Men Behaving Badly.

When, in the 1968 contract reshuffle, Rediffusion was merged with ABC to form Thames Television, Kemp-Welch continued to produce and direct for them, but also worked for her old chief Peter Willes, who had moved to Yorkshire TV, and for the BBC. Ukridge (1968) was a seven-part comedy series featuring one of PG Wodehouse's lesser-known characters, a con-man. Anton Rodgers took the part.

For a BBC series called Menace (1970), she directed Freddie Jones and Jane Hylton in a script by Alun Richards, The Straight And Narrow. One of her last credits was as producer of a season of half-hour plays for Thames in 1973, Armchair 30.

In the cinema archives, she lives on only as an actress. She was in the Queen Victoria biopic Sixty Glorious Years (1938), They Flew Alone, and two popular movies starring Robert Donat, The Citadel and Goodbye, Mr Chips.

Joan Kemp-Welch was married twice, to Ben H Wright and then to Peter Moffatt, who survives her.