Mitchell, James

1926

James Mitchell's eyes - framed by black rimmed glasses - have seen a lot in their 68 years. They've seen the terrible hardship of the 1930s' depression, the wonderful benefits of a good education (first at grammar school and then at Oxford), and the bizarre excesses of Hollywood - a place which he describes as "a city of fear". He's probably best known as the creator and scriptwriter of Callan, the late-Sixties TV series, and the hugely popular When the Boat Comes in, which was first broadcast in 1976. He accounts for the incredible success of the latter programme, about a family's life in Tyneside in the 1920s, with one word: "nostalgia". "People always look back over their shoulders on what they thought was a golden age," he says. "There were things that happened in When the Boat Comes in that were quite appalling: people being evicted, young women dying of tuberculosis, exploitation, lock-outs, strikes and everybody would watch them all, then at the end of the day say, 'Oh, those were the days'." Yet the script was about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity, a theme present in a lot of his work. His father was a fitter who became a union man and eventually the mayor of South Shields, James's home town, in 1940. Born in 1926, the year of the General Strike, James Mitchell was encouraged by his family to concentrate on his education — which he did to great effect by first going to grammar school and then to Oxford to study English. "I loved it," he says enthusiasti

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