Broadcaster who brought Westminster politics to life as parliament entered the television age
In an age when many Westminster MPs were fiercely opposed to having their debates broadcast, Howard Anderson, who has died aged 64, played a crucial part in pioneering the televising of parliament.
Known as the "electric ferret" for his ability to uncover stories and get them on air against all the odds, Howard was a man of passion, enthusiasm and occasional explosive rages. His work as a broadcaster covered UK politics, architecture, wild life, the secret service and music. But it was at Westminster as editor of The Parliament Programme (1988-93) for Channel 4 that he made his greatest impact.
Amazing though it seems today, there was huge resistance, not least from Margaret Thatcher, to the televising of the Commons; the first time TV lighting went up in the chamber, protesting members turned up in dark glasses. As Howard put it: "MPs had to be dragged screaming or at least, droning on, into the TV age." To accompany the first Commons TV broadcast in November 1989, he made a film, The Commons Touch, to show viewers how the place worked. He proved adept at negotiating camera access to places and people never before filmed.
The Parliament Programme had launched in January 1988. Working first from a portable building in the House of Lords' garden and then from a bunker in the QEII centre opposite the Commons, he put together a daily half-hour programme of interviews with MPs plus footage from the Lords – which had allowed the cameras from 1983 – and eventually from the Commons.
"Howard's understanding of the place meant he knew how to make parliament come alive on TV," said David Lloyd, former Channel 4 commissioning editor. "He was also one of the rare intellectuals in British television who thought it should have a sense of journalistic purpose." Such was his editorial panache and ability to cajole even the most recalcitrant politicians to appear, that the Parliament Programme soon won plaudits even from broadcasting refusniks. As he himself would have put it: "We made them happy budgies."
Life with the exuberant Howard brought daily dramas behind the cameras. On one occasion, the Labour politician David Blunkett walked into the cable-strewn gallery just before the show. "Someone help the poor bloke – I don't want him tripping over the wires," shouted Howard. Blunkett, who hated being pitied for his blindness, walked over and thwacked him hard with a rolled-up Hansard.
One of the programme's triumphs came with the fall of Thatcher in 1990. The team polled Tory MPs to see if she would win an outright victory in the first round of the leadership election. Howard recalled: "MPs who pompously refused to say how they were voting would happily tell us which way their colleagues would go." The poll forecast that she would be four votes short of an outright win – in Howard's words, "spot on".
The following year he made Mr Major's No 10 for Channel 4's Dispatches – the first film to show Downing Street as a centre of government and the first to show footage of a real, as opposed to staged, cabinet meeting. The film had to be vetted by No 10 security and they wanted to cut shots of one particular, perfectly ordinary, grey filing cabinet. Howard erupted at this stupidity – but was delighted by the absurdity of it all.
Born in Woodford, Essex, Howard came from a modest background. His father left home when he was small and his mother, a primary school teacher, scrimped to send him to Kingswood, a Methodist boarding school in Bath, which he hated. He spent a year on an Israeli kibbutz – which gave him an abiding interest in Middle East politics – before returning to read philosophy at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
A child of the 60s, he acquired a penchant for floral shirts that never left him. He was a man of strong leftwing views and, as a student, marched against apartheid. Years later, he staged a sit-in in the dining room of a five-star hotel when they dismissively told him they couldn't find him a table. After stints on the Leicester Mercury, LBC radio in London and the BBC's Breakfast Time, he moved to Newsnight, where he acted as mentor to many, including Michael Crick.
In 1980 he married Fiona Chesterton. The couple had two daughters, Sarah and Rachel. Based initially in London, they later moved to an old rectory near Huntingdon and Howard became chairman of the parish council.
His later career included the Midnight Special talk shows on the first Gulf war for Channel 4, with a stream of guests arriving at all hours and no set finishing time. Howard eventually set up his own company, Alpha, and made an astonishing range of films including a two-part documentary on the architect Antoni Gaudí (2002).
In the mid-1990s he went to Russia to make a three-part series called Soviet Echoes and uncovered rare footage of dissident Russian musicians including Mstislav Rostropovich. Years later, he used this in the film Rostropovich: The Genius of the Cello, which was directed by John Bridcut and shown at the Aldeburgh festival last summer and on BBC4. By then Howard had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. He was, he said, so pleased that his last credit would be for the Rostropovich film.
He is survived by Fiona and his daughters.
• Howard Anderson, journalist and television producer, born 16 August 1947; died 18 March 2012