Career
He trained as an architect and joined the British Broadcasting Corporation design department in the 1970s, quickly gaining a reputation for great imagination and flair. He began working on Doctor Who when Philip Hinchcliffe took over as producer in late 1974. Hinchcliffe"s vision for the series included giving a high priority to set design and he quickly realised that Murray-Leach was one of the most, if not the most, imaginative and resourceful designers on the British Broadcasting Corporation staff
Murray-Leach designed several Doctor Who serials under Hinchcliffe"s reign, many of which remain amongst the most popular serials in the show"s history.
David Maloney, a director who had worked on a number of the Doctor Who serials designed by Murray-Leach, went on to produce Blake"s 7 for the British Broadcasting Corporation and immediately secured the services of Murray-Leach to design the interior of the Liberator spacecraft. Murray-Leach was eventually nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for his design work on the 1981 series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years.
His talent was finally being recognised and he broke into feature films, working as production designer on Local Hero, Defence of the Realm, Clockwise and A Fish Called Wanda. His movie career extended into the 1990s with The Mighty Quinn, Twenty-One and Fierce Creatures.
In recent years he has appeared in a number of television and Digital Video Disc documentaries discussing his work on Doctor Who, including A Darker Side, a retrospective feature included in the 2|entertain/British Broadcasting Corporation Digital Video Disc release of Planet of Evil, in which he and Hinchcliffe returned to Ealing studios to discuss the story"s design and production.
He lives in Wiltshire, England.
