When Jacqueline Davis was not producing popular television programmes, including Man at the Top and Rumpole of the Bailey, she could often be found in her kitchen baking a cake. She retired long before The Great British Bake Off hit the screen in 2010, but if ever there were a show she regretted not producing in her long career, it was surely the competition to find the nation’s best amateur baker.
Davis might have been a contender herself. She would produce exquisite cakes at the end of every series, piped with the names of each member of the cast and crew. Prominent among the names in perfectly rendered icing was Leo McKern, magnificently raffish as the barrister Horace Rumpole in one of Thames Television’s most popular productions, which ran for seven series between 1978 and 1992.
Yet McKern’s name was given no more importance on the cake than that of the lowliest floor hand. She took over as producer of Rumpole of the Bailey from Irene Shubik (obituary, October 9, 2019) and immediately struck up a strong creative partnership and enduring friendship with John Mortimer, the show’s writer. Together they set up New Penny Productions and collaborations included the 1986 ITV mini-series Paradise Postponed starring Michael Hordern and David Threlfall. It was followed by Under The Hammer (1994), a comedy drama about life at a London art auction house starring Richard Wilson. Mortimer noted admiringly that Davis “could win the hearts of that most brutal and intractable of bodies, a film unit on location”.
Davis was introduced to Mortimer by Verity Lambert, head of drama at Thames Television, and a feminist pioneer at a time when television executives and producers were almost exclusively male. Davis was a fellow trailblazer; her mixed race made her Britain’s first black female television producer.
Her own background read like one of the dramas she helped to put on screen. Born in 1932 during the Depression, at six weeks old she was found abandoned in a room in a guesthouse in Clapham, southwest London. She never found out who her birth parents were, but was adopted by the guesthouse owner, Muriel Purdy, who named her Una Jacqueline Muriel.
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When war broke out she was evacuated to Surrey. By the time she returned to London four years later, the Purdy family had moved to Palmers Green, north London, where she attended Winchmore secondary school, which she detested. She left at 14 to enrol at technical college, hoping to study drawing and dress design. To her dismay she found herself taking shorthand, typing and bookkeeping classes instead.
Escape came when at 18 she married her childhood sweetheart, Guy Davis, who worked for ICI. In 1956 he was posted to New York, where she landed her first job in television as a production secretary with CBS. Three years later she was back in London at ITV, working on Kenneth Clark’s groundbreaking series Is Art Necessary?
However, she still wanted to be a clothes designer and abandoned television to open the Jacqui Davis Boutique in Crouch End, selling her own designs. She was soon missing the hustle and bustle of making television programmes and by 1967 had returned to ITV as a production assistant.
Within a year she was a drama manager at Thames Television, acting as associate producer on Man at the Top starring Kenneth Haigh. As a producer during the 1970s Davis made more than 100 episodes each of the daytime dramas Harriet’s Back in Town and Rooms and also produced Armchair Thriller before taking over Rumpole and beginning her partnership with Mortimer. Her final production was the 1994 mini-series Love on a Branch Line based on the novel by John Hadfield and starring Michael Maloney, Leslie Phillips and Maria Aitken.
She retired to southwest London, where she had bought an empty greengrocer’s in 1963 and transformed it into an elegantly fashionable home. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1967 but she maintained a wide circle of friends. She entertained them at regal dinner parties at which a choice of three main courses and three desserts was the generous custom.
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Jacqueline Davis, TV producer, was born on July 10, 1932. She died after a short illness on September 28, 2021, aged 89