Documentarian John McGreevy was driven by boundless curiosity

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All his life John McGreevy had a small dent in his head caused by a sadistic nun whacking him with her keys at the orphanage in the south of England where he spent his Dickensian childhood.

His parents’ names were lost with his birth certificate, though he knew that his mother was Irish Catholic – he himself had an Irish passport – and that his father was killed while fighting in the Second World War the week he was born in London, on Aug. 18, 1942. When it was time to leave the maternity hospital, his mother failed to claim him, presumably because she had died in childbirth, but he never knew this for sure. He was handed over to an orphanage in the south of England till he turned 15.

The nuns practised a capricious cruelty and did their utmost to suppress any sign of originality or talent in their young charges.

No one could have predicted that the abused child would grow up to become a leading figure in Canadian television, producing some 130 films over three decades, many of which were seen internationally.

John Peter Francis McGreevy died on April 24 in Toronto of Alzheimer’s disease, at the age of 83.

When the teenage John finally left the orphanage, he was apprenticed to an electrician and found lodgings in a rooming house run by a kindly Mr. O’Brien who was a former cook in the merchant navy, Mr. McGreevy recounted to his partner, Jennifer Puncher. Mr. O’Brien sent his eight young lodgers off to work every morning with packets of sandwiches for lunch.

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Postwar England was a dreary place and Mr. O’Brien advised him to leave, saying, “Your talents will never be recognized here.” He pointed out that the government of Canada was advertising for immigrants in the local newspaper and offering to loan him the fare, to be repaid later.

Mr. McGreevy followed this advice. At the age of 17, with no winter clothes for the Canadian weather, he arrived in Halifax, where he was given a Bible, a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and a train ticket to Toronto. There he found a rooming house in Yorkville, and employment in the mailroom of the CBC on Jarvis Street distributing mail throughout the building.

One day, through an open door he saw a studio with its gliding cameras and microphones and he knew instantly that this was what he wanted to do in life.

“He was transfixed,” Ms. Puncher said in an interview.

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He found out how to become a cameraman and producer: He would have to learn the contents of three manuals then take a test, which he did. At 19, he qualified, becoming the youngest cameraman at CBC-TV. Apart from this, he was spending all his free time reading at the library, trying to fill in the gaps in his substandard education.

The CBC then had a large religion department and Mr. McGreevy found work there on the show Man Alive. His first assignment was to set up an interview with the controversial English commentator Malcolm Muggeridge, who had recently found God and wrote a bestselling book about it. Mr. McGreevy created a set for the interview resembling a monk’s cell.

He was freelancing for Man Alive when, at a book launch, he met Ms. Puncher, who was working for a publishing house. “I thought he was too full of himself,” she recalled, “but he persisted and he made me laugh. I think a relationship can survive any amount of stress and strain if you believe in each other.”

After more than a decade, the pair formed an independent production company, John McGreevy Productions. She was a fine producer in her own right. His signature work was the Cities series, broadcast on CBC in 1979-80, in which various celebrities introduced viewers to their favourite places.

The series transported viewers to actor Peter Ustinov’s Leningrad, director John Huston’s Dublin, Melina Mercuri’s Athens, Elie Weisel’s Jerusalem and R.D. Laing’s Glasgow – 13 cities in all, each with its own flavour, unique culture and dramatic history. Shot on video, the segments were distinguished by skillful use of music to heighten their atmosphere and emotional appeal.

The outstanding episode was Glenn Gould’s Toronto. No one who had the good luck to see the celebrated pianist sing Gustav Mahler in German to an audience of elephants and baboons at the Toronto Zoo would ever forget it.

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Financing was not easy to find and most of the Cities episodes were made jointly with the firm Nielsen-Ferns (later Primedia). Ms. Puncher kept a tight rein on budgets.

He created documentaries for the BBC about novelist Robertson Davies and a docudrama about Gen. Douglas MacArthur for U.S. television, starring Huston, along with vivid series with Mr. Ustinov about Russia and others about China, Greek mythology and the Vatican. He directed a docudrama about Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook) intercut with interviews with people who had known him, and a four-part documentary, Born Talking, about the history of language, with the multitalented Jonathan Miller. He adapted Peter C. Newman’s Empire of the Bay, a history of the Hudson’s Bay Co., to the small screen (one of his last projects). He explored the rise and fall of Eaton’s and its founding family. His curiosity about the world was boundless.

Gilbert Reid, who met Mr. McGreevy when he was working at the Canadian embassy in Italy and eventually became a script writer for him, recalled: “He was not afraid to ask questions and he had no status anxiety. He was always fun to work with; he usually had a clear idea of what he wanted and was not always changing his mind, as some directors do. He was quick and decisive.”

And thrifty. Writer David Macfarlane, whose book about the First World War, The Danger Tree, Mr. McGreevy adapted for television, recalled how hard it was to find money for his productions. “I remember that when we had to paint the Danger Tree black so that it would stand out against the sky, John instructed the crew to paint only the side of the tree visible to the camera, thereby using an affordable amount of paint!”

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Cities won two prizes at the International Film and Television Festival of New York in 1978 and 1979: gold medals for best documentary TV series, two years running. He celebrated by taking the supersonic Concord flight to London with Ms. Puncher, an uncharacteristic indulgence.

Mr. Reid believes that it would be difficult today to make such serious documentaries motivated only by curiosity. “We’ve become uninterested in broad knowledge,” he lamented.

Most of Mr. McGreevy’s work is now archived in the Media Commons of the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library, preserved as part of this country’s 20^th-century cultural heritage. “We take Canadian cultural production and we look for outstanding work,” explained media archivist Rachel Beattie. Mr. McGreevy’s work “has research value for anyone who wants documentation about the Seventies and Eighties.”

The writer and film historian Eric Veillette believes that “McGreevy’s legacy lies in his extraordinary Cities television series. It broke the pretense of the stuffy, sponsored travelogues of the postwar years and inspired an entire industry of celebrity travel shows in this deconstructed, almost anti-travelogue vein. His best, most unforgettable work was Mr. Gould’s episode about Toronto.

“It is not only an incredible document of Toronto in the late 1970s, but serves as a reminder that the piano genius Gould was an incredibly funny man. The CNE, Eaton Centre, Toronto Zoo and ravines segments are laugh-out-loud funny.”

Mr. Veillette is working on a restoration of that program, to be screened at Toronto’s Fox Theatre in September, to coincide with what would have been the pianist’s 94^th birthday.

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