Peter Phillips

During his 25 years at Granada, Phillips designed an impressive body of work which included plays by notable writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Noël Coward, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. His designs for Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976), directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, were among his most lavish studio-based sets. But the work for which he will remain best known is Brideshead Revisited (1981), directed by Charles Sturridge and starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick.

Peter Phillips with his Bafta

This lavish adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel was a huge and risky show for Granada to undertake at a time when the economics of television production were becoming a prominent issue. The projected production costs nearly caused its cancellation amid concerns that Brideshead would appeal to only a relatively small number of viewers. But members of the creative team, Phillips among them, persuaded Granada’s chairman Sidney Bernstein to proceed.

As production designer, Phillips was responsible for the Brideshead “look” which became so popular among the “young fogeys” of the 1980s, influencing everything from fashion to interior design. His sumptuous sets and choice of locations provided atmospheric backdrops for the actors and contributed significantly to the success of the series, winning him a Bafta award for Best Scenic Design.

The son of an officer at the School of Artillery, Peter Phillips was born in Kent on October 11 1925 and educated at various establishments, culminating in Canterbury School of Art. Towards the end of the war he joined the RAF and was sent to Stanmore camp for officer training, but was prevented by illness from entering active service.

Phillips’s career in design started when he was employed as assistant to Laurence Irving, to work on films for J Arthur Rank, among them the 19th-century costume drama Uncle Silas (1947). Unfortunately the job lasted for only two years, ending when Rank closed down.

After a period spent working on aircraft design, he was offered a job in Canada with the newly-established Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His arrival in Canada coincided with the beginning of a period in which television became an increasingly popular medium, giving creative people scope to innovate and experiment.
Initially Phillips worked on light entertainment shows, but he was then given the opportunity to design the sets for the world television premiere of the Benjamin Britten opera Peter Grimes.
In 1963, back in Britain, Phillips started to work for Sidney Bernstein at Granada Television. Bernstein recognised that in Phillips he had not only an excellent designer, but also a man whose knowledge and understanding of literature enriched his designs, enabling him to form close and productive working relationships with producers, directors and writers.
This was exemplified by the success of Granada’s production in 1963 of War and Peace (directed by Silvio Narizzano), which won the first Emmy to be awarded outside the United States. Although Phillips subsequently worked on other, better-known, productions, War and Peace remained the work of which he was most proud. The technical complexity of this four-hour studio-based epic, which was transmitted live, was an outstanding achievement for the production team and remains a landmark in the early development of television. Movement on the set, sensitive lighting and the stimulating use of colour, even before the advent of colour television, all contributed to the actors’ performance on camera.
Peter Phillips married, in 1957, Daphne Wilson, who survives him with their son and daughter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/8291572/Peter-Phillips.html