In praise of … Ken Russell at the BBC

Inevitably for someone whose creative life stretched more than half a century, Ken Russell's long career had its peaks and troughs. But Russell's work for the BBC – in particular for Huw Wheldon's Monitor programme – from 1959 to 1970 was a whole mountain range, a before and after of the arts on television. The Russell who developed from the short early films about the likes of John Betjeman and Shelagh Delaney to the full-length and increasingly cinematic programmes on Delius and Richard Strauss was a director who was stretching his medium to the limit. But his BBC work had a heady mix of individuality, creativity and – until the Strauss film – a passionate seriousness that has never been surpassed in arts television. Russell's film on Elgar was not just a minor black-and-white TV masterpiece; it also triggered a wider rediscovery of the composer that has never faltered since. The Delius film was arguably the finest of all, with unforgettable moments ranging from Percy Grainger (whose reputation would not have survived the full Russell treatment) running through Delius's house, to the ecstatic scene in which the almost blind Delius is carried up a Norwegian mountainside to see the sunset. A group of these films are now available on DVD in North America, but there are copyright issues for some of them here. With Russell's passing, the BBC should strive to make the entire canon of one of the 20th century's great creative programme makers widely accessible in his own country.