The director Roy Battersby, who has died aged 87 following a stroke, was one of the leftwing radicals who joined the BBC in the 1960s and sought to bring stories of working-class struggle to the television screen. But his overt political activism with the Workers’ Revolutionary party led to his being blacklisted by the BBC, a result of secret vetting carried out on the corporation’s employees by MI5.
The period of his finest work, at a time of political upheaval in Britain as trade unions took on the government, ended with Leeds – United!, a 1974 Play for Today, written by Colin Welland, about an unofficial strike by female textile workers in the north of England whose unsuccessful action was undermined by their own union.
