This is taken from The Guardian:

Stephen Peet

Filmmaker behind Yesterday's Witness
by Steve Humphries
Friday February 17, 2006

In 1967, when Stephen Peet, who has died aged 85, joined the BBC documentary department, he sent a memo to the then BBC2 controller David Attenborough. "I have an idea," he wrote, "for an inexpensive film series of ordinary people talking about their memories of historic events or periods." The immediate result was the first six Yesterday's Witnesses. Stephen had become the founding father of television oral history.

Between 1969 and 1981 Yesterday's Witness popularised history from below. The series - ordinary people telling extraordinary stories, usually with broader social significance, using family photos - ran to more than 80 programmes and documented events, now mostly beyond living memory, which form an important document of life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Soldiers of the Queen, two British soldiers recall the Boer war; The Great Blizzard of 1891 is the extraordinary tale of a freak snowstorm that hit the west country in mid-spring; Two Victorian Girls is about what it was like to be a typist and an art student in the "naughty 90s"; in The Levant Mine Disaster, a 1919 Cornish tin mine tragedy is movingly recalled; and The Burston School Strike is about an action in 1914 by Suffolk village schoolchildren in support of their socialist and pacifist teachers.

Stephen's films were precursors of the video diary, an observational documentary approach that is now part of television grammar. He and his collaborators Mike Rabiger, Ian Keill and Rex Bloomstein, wanted their subjects to speak directly into the camera - a privilege of presenters and newsreaders. To achieve this, the interviewer crouched beneath the camera and this technique created a more intimate relationship between interviewee and audience.

Stephen was born in Penge, south London, the son of a Quaker journalist and conscientious objector who had been imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs during the first world war. He was educated at the Quaker School at Sidcot in Somerset, where he met his lifelong partner and wife-to-be Olive, when he was 16 and she was 11.

The moral and pacifist principles of Quakerism hugely influenced their lives together - and Stephen's career. In the late 1930s, he became a camera assistant in the documentary unit run by Marian Grierson, sister of the legendary documentary maker John. During the war he served with the Society of Friends ambulance unit in London, north Africa and Greece, where he was captured. He was subsequently a prisoner of war in Germany. Postwar, as a director-cameraman with the Central African Film Unit, he made educational films with black people for black people.

By the early 1960s he was directing ITV current affairs programmes such as This Week and World in Action. Then in 1967 came BBC2. The continuing success of Yesterday's Witness led to a broader approach, which included American alongside British social history.

It later emerged that Stephen had earlier been blacklisted by the BBC and MI5 as a security risk on the spurious grounds that his brother, a communist sympathiser, was living in East Germany. Stephen was always bemused by the idea that he might have been a red under the bed. A gentle, self-deprecating and liberal-minded man, he was passionate about people's stories but never a member of any political party.

After Stephen retired from television in the early 1980s he lectured all over the world on documentary film-making and oral history. He became a well-known and popular figure at Bafta. He also played an unseen but much valued role in my own television oral history programmes in the 1990s and up to the present day.

Stephen's beautiful house in Highgate, north London, became one of my favourite film locations, the perfect place for someone who could not be filmed in their own home to be put at ease. Before they were filmed, Stephen and Olive would entertain my interviewees with tea and biscuits and start to unlock their secrets. There was nothing Stephen liked more than to say to me just before we began the interview, "you should ask him about ... it's an amazing story."

Stephen is survived by Olive, whom he married in 1948, and their sons Graham, John and Michael. Their daughter Susie died earlier this year.

· Stephen Peet, filmmaker and oral historian, born February 16 1920; died December 22 2005.