This is taken from The Guardian:

David Myerscough-Jones
Idiosyncratic set designer renowned for his opera productions for BBC television
by David Jays
Tuesday 4 May 2010 19.01 BST

Talent can flourish only in an ideal environment. For the set designer David Myerscough-Jones, who has died of cancer aged 75, the ambitious BBC television of the 1970s and 80s represented the perfect time and place. Piercing original drama, opera and Shakespeare were central to the programming, especially on BBC2, and Myerscough-Jones approached each with idiosyncratic flair, bringing his signature sombre palette and ingenuity to every project.

Such ambitious programming challenged the BBC's designers. Myerscough-Jones was unashamedly consumed by his work; he liked to quote Edgar Allan Poe's scornful description of sleep as "those little slices of death".

His entry to television coincided with the rapid expansion of the BBC's design department. Up to 150 designers were hired upon the advent of BBC2 and colour television. Many recruits came from interior design, so his theatrical sensibility was immediately distinctive. The BBC – mostly – was hospitable to his maverick talent. He swept young colleagues into fervent discussion of design, often over a good bottle in the BBC restaurant. "You were left mentally exhausted. He was like a large planet, and you were drawn towards him," remembers the designer Brian Sykes, who entered the department as an apprentice. "He would construct a set like a conductor." Myerscough-Jones would instruct from a rostrum but was equally willing to pick up a paintbrush.

He collaborated closely with many cameramen; others found obstacles in their paths to enforce his preferred angles.

He grew up in Southport, Lancashire, the only child of parents who encouraged a love of classical music. While studying at the Central School of Art and Design in London, he visited the Bayreuth festival in Germany, absorbing Wieland Wagner's minimalist opera productions. His own first professional designs at Leatherhead, in 1957, were notably stark and ruffled the repertory theatre, which was unaccustomed to such modernity. "Not battleship grey again!" the director lamented.

Confident in his aesthetic, he moved on to the Citizens theatre in Glasgow (1958-60) and the Mermaid in London (1960-65). Exuberant shows such as Alfie and Lock Up Your Daughters transferred from the Mermaid to the West End. In 1963 he married a design assistant, Ursula (known as Pelo); they had met at the Queen's theatre in Hornchurch.

Devoted to opera, Myerscough-Jones was a natural for the new BBC music department. Peter Grimes (1969) was an early triumph, filmed in Britten's theatre at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. Avoiding absorbent materials to preserve the acoustic, he projected abstract images on to gauze, so they shifted like the sea. Hostile townsfolk emerged from the shadows with hallucinatory intensity; Grimes's hut was ribbed like the belly of a whale. In 1970, Britten completed Owen Wingrave for television, and Myerscough-Jones shrouded his ghost story in mystery, the hero burdened by a world of grey and black.

Wagner was his great passion (his house guests would frequently wake to one of his many recordings). To his great regret, the BBC abandoned a projected Ring cycle, but a cherished design was The Flying Dutchman, for which he won a Royal Television Society award in 1976. His model for the Dutchman's infernal vessel hung from his ceiling at home in Saffron Walden, Essex. He also responded keenly to Mozart; in his ravishing Così Fan Tutte for Jonathan Miller (1985), a blue gauze Bay of Naples shimmered behind a villa built from polished, deep-grained plywood.

Like his fellow BBC designers, he worked on everything from Z Cars to Ronnie Corbett's Saturday Special. His heart was not always in it. One set for a variety show was compared to The Battleship Potemkin. Popular TV immortality was assured through several Doctor Who episodes. In Day of the Daleks (1972), Jon Pertwee's Doctor confronts refurbished Daleks with pupils on their eyestalks, and Myerscough-Jones created a time tunnel from a bridge over the Grand Union canal.

His audaciously simple modular sets brought coherence to complex dramas about military figures. Orde Wingate (1976) offered stylised flashbacks to the zealous British officer's career; Bomber Harris (1989) concluded with the huge back doors of the studio opening and John Thaw's hero walking out into blinding white lights.

Myerscough-Jones brought lustre to the BBC Shakespeare series. Early episodes had been uninspired, but his handsome work for director Elijah Moshinsky drew on 17th-century artists. Clive James wrote that, in All's Well That Ends Well (1981): "You could have fun sorting out the Vermeers from the De Hoochs." His quiet compositions presented dark-panelled rooms, powdery daylight filtering through latticed windows. Myerscough-Jones insisted that naturalistic exteriors "look dreadful in the studio, so phoney. We deliberately eschewed any sort of exterior – not even landscapes through windows."

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1981) also opened in a sombre world, with the fantasy emerging from enforced marriage and the threat of execution. The forest offered delectable romanticism: moss greens and silvered pools beneath a cloudy ink-blue sky. Helen Mirren's milky Titania settled into a bower modelled on Rembrandt's Danaë, all dusty light and mushroom shadows, infant fairies bundling about her.

His fervid designs for Thérèse Raquin (1980) won a Bafta, while his austere Theban trilogy by Sophocles (1986) brilliantly distilled ancient and modern. The plague-haunted chorus shuffled into a damaged arena for Oedipus Rex, while a fascist chill inflected Antigone – Juliet Stevenson's heroine confronted an intimidating forum dominated by steep banks of steps.

He rarely provided the expected. The Importance of Being Earnest (1986) resisted frivolity, Joan Plowright's Lady Bracknell easing into oppressively decorated rooms under a frieze depicting Arthurian ordeals. His refusal to compromise could spark confrontation – he almost came to blows with Steven Berkoff over Berkoff's adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis (1989), insisting that they should indicate a known domestic world before spinning into nightmare. He got his way.

As the BBC's commitment to the classics waned, his later designs were for Ibsen's The Master Builder (1988) – all Scandinavian steel and shadowy greys – and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1989) for debutant director John Clive, who felt "he embodied all that was right about the art and industry of production. His designs ... reflected not just a deeply cultivated mind but also a powerful imagination."

After his retirement from the BBC, the family moved from Essex to Bath, where a chance meeting in the swimming baths led to several opera productions in the region. A luscious set for La Bohème (1992), starring Renée Fleming, provoked spontaneous applause. Undaunted by a tiny budget, he created roller-blind designs, adaptable to any theatre, for the plays Mrs Warren's Profession and You Never Can Tell, staged by Michael Friend's touring company.

Even after moving to Burgundy, Myerscough-Jones kept in close contact with former colleagues. He is survived by Pelo, four children – Frances, Richard, Ellen and Madeleine – and seven grandchildren.

John Pascoe writes: The Owen Wingrave that David designed for television, starring Janet Baker and with Britten conducting, remains one of those searingly powerful experiences where one became aware that the highest level of art had been achieved for consumption by the maximum quantity of viewers. This was taking opera to the people – decades before anyone had even thought of HD live broadcasts.

David played an integral part in my foundation of Bath City Opera in 1990, for which he designed the scenery of the first production, La Bohème, with the young superstar Renée Fleming as Mimi. She adored his designs and has his Act I rendering hung in pride of place within her private collection of designs that have been created specifically for her.

David had a highly individual style that was always rooted in the music and drama. His work will continue to serve us all as an object lesson in operatic design that reaches to the very heart of a subject. He managed to achieve design work of the highest international level while emanating a modest but honest sense of his own worth, combined with a totally disarming humour. This combination was an essential part of what made him the centre of a warm and loving circle of friends. We all doted upon him.

• Arthur David Myerscough-Jones, set designer, born 15 September 1934; died 21 April 2010