When Eleanor Scoones was studying history at Cambridge she was taught mainly about men, by men. And when she embarked on a career directing history documentaries she discovered a genre flooded with male presenters evangelising about soldiers, corrupt kings or noblemen.
Most of her career was geared towards changing that. The past, Scoones felt, needed colouring in — which meant digging up stories about women and materialising history through the female lens. In a documentary about how ill health affected British kings, for instance, she examined postpartum depression; and a series about the history of the home looked at how the invention of the public lavatory in the 19th century posed a challenge to women, particularly pregnant and working-class ones.
In 2015 she directed a BBC2 documentary by the historian Amanda Foreman, The Ascent of Woman, which uncovered the stories of women who changed history from 10,000BC to the present day — including Enheduanna, the high priestess of an ancient Mesopotamian city in the 23rd century BC who was credited with “inventing” literature.
In 2012 she dressed Lucy Worsley up as a Tudor wench in billowing frocks for Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: 17th Century History for Girls, a series that showed how women emerged from the shadows of Cromwell’s prudish Commonwealth during the Restoration period as pioneering, modern and delightfully licentious. Employment as a mistress — Charles II had 13, some very influential — was a chance to shrug off financial dependence on men; a royal mistress might be bankrolled up to the equivalent of £10 million by the Treasury.
Eleanor Scoones was born in Stepney, east London, in 1981 and moved to Hammersmith aged four. Her father Philip taught English to foreign students, later setting up a string of schools in central Europe, and her mother Francesca (née Barran) worked for the National Trust.
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She was a bright student at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, where a history teacher sparked her interest in the past, and after Trinity College, Cambridge, she landed a job at a production company called Silver River. Almost immediately she began to reconstruct the female experience in a two-part documentary series she wrote and directed for BBC2 in 2014, Russia’s Lost Princesses, about the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II who were shot by Bolshevik thugs in July 1918. The film included rare and unseen footage of the girls and included interviews with historians including Orlando Figes and Douglas Smith.
After the success of Harlots, Housewives and Heroines, Scoones directed episodes for the BBC1 genealogy documentary Who Do You Think You Are? between 2016 and 2020 — including one in which the comedian Greg Davies unveils a family past of drunkenness, debt and jail and the actress Naomie Harris of slavery and poverty in the slums of Kingston. When she directed the comedian Jack Whitehall with his father Michael, in an episode that explored their ancestors’ role in opposing the Chartist movement for wider voting rights, it was for many viewers the first glimpse of the father-son comedy duo.
That so many of her programmes were irreverent was unsurprising. Scoones had a dry sense of humour — that she channelled into relentless teasing — and she was always armed with a witty one-liner. When necessary she could be brisk with talent, once calling Giles Coren an “arse” when working for his Supersizers series, but she also had an unfortunate tendency to blush, which meant that Coren and his co-host Sue Perkins were wont to drop rude words to get a rise.
The blushing, universally acknowledged in the television world, came to the fore when filming a documentary in 2012 for Channel 4 in the wake of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey that examined the history of erotica and brought Scoones to a “spanking class” and into the home of an S&M couple.
There was, one friend remarked, a touch of Bridget Jones about her — she was fun and funny, beautiful and clumsy, once falling down a staircase on the way to an interview at Trinity College. She even met her husband Xavier, who works in finance, at her parents’ Christmas party. He survives her with her daughters: Ada, who is six, and Juno, two.
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Never ostentatious, she preferred to be behind the camera, which was partly what made her such a good director.
Eleanor Scoones, documentary maker, was born on January 20, 1981. She died of ovarian cancer on July 2, 2023, aged 42