This is taken from The Guardian:

Leonard Lewis

Gifted television producer with hidden directorial talents
by Alan Plater
Wednesday January 11, 2006

Two years ago, I gave a talk at the National Film Theatre and was invited to screen something from my back catalogue of television work. I chose a 1979 play called The Blacktoft Diaries, made by Yorkshire Television at a time when single plays were a regular part of the schedules and celebrities mud-wrestling in the jungle would have been regarded as a perverted dream.

The play was directed by Leonard Lewis, who has died suddenly, aged 78. It was totally characteristic of his work and of the man: quiet, sensitive, modest and mischievous. Discretion, on this occasion, was a sound tactic. Blacktoft is a village on the Humber with a jetty, a pub and a cluster of houses. The play was presented as a documentary by the great James Cameron, and it purported to explain that the Burgess/Maclean cover-up was masterminded by a spy who came ashore at Blacktoft in 1955.

The whole piece was a pack of lies. We were deconstructing the genre years before those words had become common currency. The NFT audience, most of whom were not born in 1979, greeted the piece with great enthusiasm, amusement and total bewilderment that such work ever existed as part of the bread and butter of popular viewing.

The anecdote is important because it places on record Lewis's talent as a director, something frequently overlooked in the context of his achievements as a producer of such BBC series as Softly Softly (he was the only one capable of cutting the captions to match the music), When the Boat Comes In and Juliet Bravo. He later produced The Good Companions and Flambards for Yorkshire Television, and EastEnders, in its fledgling days of the mid-80s.

Leonard was born in Tottenham, north London, moved to East Barnet when he was about seven, and was educated at the local grammar school (where he met his future wife Jean). Like many of his generation of producers and directors, his background was in the theatre. After national service in the RAF, he worked in rep in Morecambe, Ashton-under-Lyne and at Manchester Library Theatre. He joined the BBC on a three-month holiday attachment in 1957, and stayed until 1976.

After work with BBC Scotland, he moved to London in 1963 and, as a staff director, cut his teeth on Z-Cars, when transmissions were live, nerves shredded and talents honed. He brought with him a respect for text and for writers which brought him both acclaim and a personal and professional crisis on the 1976 series of When the Boat Comes In.

He assembled a brilliant team comprising the diverse talents of Sid Chaplin, Alex Glasgow and Tom Hadaway - perhaps the only occasion when all the writers lived in the area where the series was set. The details of what happened next are complex, painful and distant, but essentially Lewis was ordered to scrap his writing team for the next series. Unwilling to betray good colleagues and good friends, he resigned from the BBC. It was a time when people still resigned on matters of principle.

He discovered - perhaps to his surprise, since he was a modest man - that his skills as an organiser of shows were in great demand, and he was snapped up by Yorkshire Television. Suddenly he had an office in the West End instead of Shepherd's Bush. He loved it. "I suddenly feel as if I'm in the entertainment business," he said.

Subsequently, fences were fixed and he returned to the BBC as a freelance, working on shows ranging from The Chinese Detective to The Prisoner of Zenda. In a sometimes cavalier age, he actually believed that his job was to bring a show in on time and within budget. This is actually tougher and braver than being cavalier.

Lewis's belief in the principles of public service broadcasting remained intact, and he left EastEnders when the then controllers demanded an extra episode a week. He argued that producing an hour of reasonable quality drama a week was the maximum that any broadcasting system could generate without loss of integrity. Discuss.

He retired in 1995 and moved to Somerset, where, despite health problems, he remained active. He and Jean travelled regularly to strange-sounding places with faraway names and we received frequent postcards in his immaculate handwriting - calligraphy was one of his many activities as well as ice-cream making and involvement in the local community. Three weeks before his death, Lewis's production of She Stoops to Conquer for the South Petherton Drama Group won rave reviews.

An unfailingly generous man, every time we worked together he gave me books that I still treasure. These include a life of Buster Keaton, a History of Musical Theatre and Fowler's Modern English Usage; but my knowledge of grammar and syntax is the least of the many things I owe Leonard Lewis.

Jean, whom he married in 1950, survives him, as do his daughters, Sian, Tessa and Maria.

·Leonard Jack Lewis, television director and producer, born November 29 1927; died December 2 2005