Tristram Powell, who has died aged 83, forged a career of two halves as a television director. He made arts documentaries celebrating Thomas Hardy, Ralph Richardson, Marcel Duchamp and other greats before switching to drama with productions by some of the screen’s finest writers.
The move was not a total departure from the programmes he had made for 17 years, but more a change of gear. He described the first television play he directed, No Country for Old Men (1981), as a “dramatised literary programme”. David Nokes’s account of the satirist Jonathan Swift’s “exile” in Dublin starred Trevor Howard as Swift, with Cyril Cusack playing his lifelong friend, Tom Sheridan.
