Background
The son of a crane driver, Trodd was raised in the Christian fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Kenith Trodd
Edit ProfileEducation
University of Oxford.
Career
A problem with the script of Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton first brought Trodd into contact with Dennis Potter, the play"s author A desire to adapt a short story for an episode of British Broadcasting Corporation 2"s Thirty-Minute Theatre, led to a phone call from its author, Simon Gray, beginning Trodd"s association with him and Gray"s work in drama. From now on Trodd worked as a producer, and the short-lived Kestrel saw the beginning of Trodd"s professional relationship with Dennis Potter with Moonlight on the Highway (1969) and Lay Down Your Arms (1970), Potter"s first play produced in colour.
British Sounds (aka, See You at Mao, 1970), a film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, which Trodd produced, had a particularly deleterious effect on Kestrel"s relationship with LWT, who banned lieutenant
Trodd returned to the British Broadcasting Corporation, and worked on Play for Today. On an annual freelance contract, it was not renewed in 1976.
The British Broadcasting Corporation backed down and Trodd was reappointed. Following the success of Potter"s serial Pennies from Heaven (1978), Trodd and Potter reasserted their desire for autonomy and formed a new production company which had an arrangement with LWT. Budgetary problems meant that the connection was again short-lived, and only three Potter-scripted productions were completed, Blade on the Feather, Rain on the Roof and Cream in My Coffee (all 1980).
.
Unlike Potter, Trodd was committed to the move to shooting television drama on film, instead of the multi-camera television studio, and oversaw nearly a dozen productions in the BBCs Screen Two strand.
At the end of the 1980s, Trodd fell out with Potter over his Blackeyes project, but the two men repaired their professional relationship shortly before Potter"s death from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Trodd"s other credits include the film A Month in the Country (1987) adapted from the J. L. Carr novel by Simon Gray and Stephen Poliakoff"s Caught on a Train (1980). On 11 December 2011, Trodd attended a screening of Potter"s rediscovered Emergency – Ward 9, on which he worked as script editor, at the BFI Southbank in London, introducing the play and answering questions afterwards about its production and his broader working relationship with Potter.
Politics
The British Broadcasting Corporation"s Personnel Department objected to Trodd"s political contacts. He had attended meetings in the early 1970s of the Workers" Revolutionary Party, which attracted a small minority in the media, but had never joined the organisation.
