AS THE executive producer of Waking the Dead, the BBC’s stylish series about a team of detectives investigating “cold cases” — murders long classed as unsolved — Alexei de Keyser was one of the most exciting young talents in television. He worked with passion, commitment and flair to provide high-quality scripts, bravura performances, dark wit and visual style. And he took the series from strength to strength.
Alexei de Keyser was born in London in 1967 and educated at St Christopher’s School in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, and William Ellis School in Highgate, London. He studied drama at Hull University for a year before taking a job as a barman at the Groucho Club in Soho. There he met a number of luminaries in the television business, and eventually he was offered a job as a script reader by the producer Verity Lambert.
He read; he edited. In 1995, at the request of Jane Tranter, the head of drama at Carlton, he became the story editor on London Bridge, a twice-weekly soap. Although there wasn’t much money to make the series, there was creative freedom, and de Keyser stretched his wings. As ever, he was surrounded by a group of admiring and admired women. In his fug-filled office he paced in front of his giant story-board, working through storyline choices. These normally seemed to consist of stalk, shag or sack; but every so often a quintessentially Keyseresque idea would pop up: the chef killed off by being locked in his fridge/freezer, the taxi driver run over by his own taxi. De Keyser was the antidote to the obvious or the cheesey, and the king of making the ludicrous feel moving or real.
He liked to smoke while writing. He claimed to be left-handed, but some friends suspected that he was right-handed and just wanted to use his best hand to smoke with. His distinctive, untidy scribble would be everywhere — on the walls, the backs of old envelopes, and all over the scripts that somehow took him ages to get round to reading — but once he got started, he would tear through them at high speed, hitting quickly and surely on what was essentially wrong.
He would persuade writers to do rewrites they never knew they were capable of; would dash on to the set doling out pages of revisions to actors only minutes before shooting; and through it all he was inclusive and without ego.
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In 1997 he went to the BBC to work on Casualty. Within a year he rose from story editor for the series to one of its producers, eventually becoming the youngest series producer in the BBC. It was a huge undertaking and, guided by his boss, mentor and friend Mal Young, de Keyser breathed new life into the show.
Again, his distinctive style came through in his work. He helped to dream up an episode about animal activists entitled Benny and the Vets; he introduced a pacier filming style, brought in contemporary characters and expanded the sets. On one occasion he expanded them to the other side of the world, when he created a story that cross-cut between Holby and Australia. This was a massive logistical undertaking, involving two directors filming simultaneously and de Keyser having to fly to Australia without being able to smoke. He coped with this fairly well: when he changed planes at Bangkok and realised that there was a $20 fine for smoking, he simply handed $60 to a waiting security guard and puffed his way through three cigarettes before getting back on the aircraft.
Waking the Dead is the achievement for which de Keyser will be best remembered. In 1999 he saw the potential in its pilot and seized the opportunity to bring something genuinely different, intelligent and contemporary to the police genre.
Every year he would do battle to improve on the previous one. He was tough on himself, he set the bar of excellence high and he cajoled everyone else into aspiring to it with him. Although instinctively self-deprecating, even de Keyser was excited and moved by the terrific audience and critical response to his last series of Waking the Dead, which finished this month. It is BBC One’s most popular returning drama series, with viewing figures that recently hit eight million.
De Keyser was hugely popular in the BBC; he was impossible not to like. One friend described him as a cross between Orson Welles and a young Jack Nicholson. In 2002 he pioneered one of the first drama series for BBC Three, Grease Monkeys, which appealed to the quirkier side of his talents, allowing him more prominently to exercise some of his more left-of-centre instincts. It was on that project that he first worked with his partner, Muirinn Lane Kelly. De Keyser always worked well with others. He listened, he was responsive and encouraging, and more than anything he made people feel indispensable. For him the personal was frequently professional, and the professional was always the personal — it was what gave his work humanity, empathy and edge.
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Alexei de Keyser, TV producer, was born on September 21, 1967. He died suddenly on July 28, 2004, aged 36.