Michael Croucher
Michael John Croucher (17 January 1930 – 26 May 2006) was a British documentary film maker and television producer for the BBC. Life and career. Born in Maidstone, Kent, he was evacuated to Saskatchewan in Canada during the Second World War. In 1949, he undertook National Service in the Royal Air Force, before studying at the Royal College of Music. He started work in 1954 as a trainee sound technician at the BBC in Plymouth, where he made use of his experience in wireless telegraphy. After moving to BBC Bristol in 1958, he was able to transfer his sound  editing skills to television, and began to work on short documentary pieces on magazine programmes. He made short filmed documentary programmes, notably "The Bashers" about a boys' gang in the Lawrence Hill area of Bristol, and then worked on programmes with John Betjeman. Croucher became assistant director to John Boorman, and they worked together on the series "Citizen 63" and "The Newcomers". With Boorman, he pioneered the approach of "filming ordinary people telling their extraordinary stories straight to camera." After Boorman began working on cinema films, Croucher became head of documentaries at Bristol, and produced a series of films with  largely rural settings, including "The Curious Character of Britain", "Summer 67", "The Way of the Warrior", "Seven Ages of Man", and "Leap in the Dark". He also produced the semi-fictionalised "Diary of Anne Hughes" (1978), many one-off films, and the series "The French Way", "The Italian Way", "The Yugoslavian Way", and "The Irish Way". In technical work, he pioneered techniques of colour separation. He left the BBC in 1989, and in later years was a visiting lecturer at Bristol University. He died in 2006, aged 76.