Memorial Service To Be Held For Richard Broke

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The distinguished television producer was associated with St Michael and All Angels church for many years

A memorial service will be held at St Michael and All Angels Church, Bath Road, next week for Richard Broke, the BAFTA-winning television producer who died recently, aged 70. The service will take place on May 1st at 2.30 pm.

Richard Broke was an active member of the church as a reader and supporter of the fundraising campaign for its new organ.

Torin Douglas wrote recently that Richard Broke took particular pleasure in blogging about the Hymnathon two years ago, when the choir and congregation sang all 542 hymns in the New English Hymnal through the night, describing it as a "wonderful, slightly crazy venture".

Throughout a long and distinguished career, he produced many dramas for the BBC and ITV, including 32 episodes of 'Where The Heart Is', and a landmark dramatisation for Southern Television of Martin Gilbert's biography 'Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years'.

Richard Broke received the BAFTA award (with Richard Eyre and Charles Wood) in 1989 in the Single Drama category for 'Tumbledown' (which starred Colin Firth as a British Army officer disabled during the Falklands War and facing official indifference) one of two controversial dramas with which he was involved in the 1980s. The other was 'The Monocled Mutineer' (1986) a series of plays written by Alan Bleasdale and starring Paul McGann as Percy Toplis, a deserter in the First World War.

He served on the Bafta council from 1992-1997 and later on its TV committee for six years. He was the first chair of its Interactive Entertainment Awards (1998).

Injured in a car accident in 1970, he was confined to a wheelchair and became a campaigner for access to theatres for wheelchair users, and also supported efforts to improve the portrayal of disabled people on television.

He is survived by his wife Elaine and two daughters Anna and Bella.

April 22, 2014