Denis Mitchell

World in Action was Granada Television’s flagship ITV current affairs series, running from 7 Jan 1963 to 7 Dec 1998, and built a reputation for film-led investigative reporting and a forceful editorial stance. Its journalism produced major public and political repercussions—including investigations associated with miscarriages of justice such as the Birmingham Six—and it also served as a platform for landmark documentary projects, including the first broadcast of “Seven Up!” as part of the strand in 1964.

Follows Francis Essex as he puts together a variety special for television.

Five years before the TV adaptation of The Naked Civil Servant made him a household name, Quentin Crisp - dandy, raconteur, life model and former prostitute - welcomed celebrated filmmaker Denis Mitchell into his dusty London bedsit. Crisp recalls the violence and fascination his extraordinary appearance once provoked, offers tips on avoiding housework and subsisting on a diet of stout and meal replacement powder, and ruminates on life as a "minority within a minority - an effeminate homosexual".

A BBC documentary by Denis Mitchell offering an impressionistic portrait of Chicago, filmed circa 1960. Structured as a “city symphony” with recorded speech, it presents street-level observation and voices from the city. Assisted by Studs Terkel, the film became locally controversial: though originally intended for Chicago’s WBKB (Channel 7), its first Chicago-area broadcast was delayed until 1966, when it aired on WFLD.

1979 documentary profiling the town and residents of Maryport, Cumbria, England.

An impressionistic BBC documentary portraying a northern English city at dawn through street scenes and recorded voices, blending observation and sound montage to capture postwar working-class life.

A sports documentary about association football that follows a week in the life of West Bromwich Albion football club.

Mac the busker talks about his life, as a painter and entertainer of theatre queues in Soho for twenty years.

In Prison (1957) is a BBC documentary examining daily life inside HMP Strangeways Prison in Manchester. Filmed within the institution, the film observes prisoners and officials as part of a closed system housing hundreds of inmates, focusing on routines, discipline, confinement, and the psychological effects of incarceration. Avoiding dramatization, the documentary presents prison life as an enclosed social world, shaped by regulation, isolation, and repetition, offering a rare contemporary view of Britain’s penal system in the postwar period.

“Grim, dull, grimy, working-class Gorton”, as it's described by one local, hosts a heated by-election and the Granada TV team is there in the north Manchester town to capture the action. While the local male electorate is disenchanted by the downsizing of industry and unemployment in the area, some local women are smitten with the dashing Conservative candidate Winston Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson.

Denis Mitchell talks to some of the Rhodesians, both black and white, he met on his journey through the country and tries to assess the mood of the country.