Background
Nigel Randell Evans was the eldest son of Air Chief Marshal Sir Donald Randell Evans (1912-1975) and Pauline Evans.
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Nigel Evans
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In 1973 he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to explore new approaches to raising public awareness to the plight of marginalised people. As a result he founded a charity One-to-One that aspired to break the marginalisation of people in mental hospitals. His campaigning work with people with disabilities has been a regular theme in his film making since the start of his career at the beginning of the 1970s.
He has subsequently made over 40 social documentaries including Silent Minority (1981) which received national attention in the United Kingdom with its exposure of the neglect and abuse of patients in British mental hospitals.
When Channel 4 was launched in 1982, as the fourth national television service in the United Kingdom, joining the two public British Broadcasting Corporation channels and commercial network Independent Television, his film ‘Walter’, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Ian McKellen, was the feature film on its inaugural night. The film"s other awards include the George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award from the University of Georgia.
He was commissioned by Channel Four to make its first documentary drama in sign language, Pictures in the Mind, in 1987. In 1995 Evans was asked to make the British Broadcasting Corporation"s contribution to World Aids Day.
The resulting film, "The Age of Innocence", was reviewed in the Times as "the best programme yet made about Aids in this country".
He marked his retirement from television in 1996 with a celebration of life for the over sixties, Grey Sex After two decades of film making, he then qualified as a psycho-geriatric social worker in the mid 1990s and practiced in West London. His first book, The White Headhunter, an historical study of castaway James Renton in the Pacific"s Solomon Islands, was published in 2003 under the name Nigel Randell. He published his second Pacific book, Boys from the Sky – the curious genesis of the world’s first ethnography, also as Nigel Randell, in 2013.
Evans retired to the Pacific island of Tonga.
