Spencer Campbell

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Spencer Campbell

Occupation

Television producer

Years active

1980s - present

Awards won
BAFTA Awards
Best Drama Series 2002 Cold Feet (producer)

Spencer Campbell is an English television producer and director. Campbell's early credits include working as a researcher in the early 1980s on the Granada Television television magazine Chalkface. At the end of the decade he directed several episodes of The Krypton Factor and the soap opera Coronation Street.

One of his most notable works is the BBC television docusoap The Living Soap, a year-long series that put a group of students into a purpose-built house. In a 2000 interview Campbell noted that the series would have worked better if it had followed an existing group of students in a real house, comparing the situation the participants were put in to Big Brother, but in hindsight would not repeat the experiment: "It was a draining year both for the production team and for the people in the house. We were shooting a week's film and then showing it on TV, which made everything quite fraught."^[1] In another interview, he said he "should have chosen other people [...] partly because the people in the house were reluctant participants after a while, and chose quite deliberately not to do things after the initial five or six programmes", referring to one girl who would lock herself in her bedroom when the cameras arrived.^[2] Other credits in the 1990s include producing Jack Dee's Sunday Service, The Grimleys and the sitcom Sunnyside Farm.

In 2000 he became producer of Granada's comedy drama Cold Feet after the previous producer, Christine Langan, was elevated to the executive producer position. During his time on the series, Campbell oversaw an increase from six to eight episodes per year, cast Canadian-Australian actress Kimberley Joseph in a lead role when Fay Ripley left during the fourth series, and organised overseas filming in Sydney, Australia. The episode filmed in Australia won Cold Feet the British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Series, which Campbell received along with the writer, Mike Bullen, and the executive producer, Andy Harries.^[3]

Following Cold Feet's conclusion in 2003 Campbell produced Donovan, a psychological thriller serial starring Tom Conti, and the comedy drama Christmas Lights and its spin-off Northern Lights, both starring Robson Green and Mark Benton. In 2006 he co-produced Joanne Lees: Murder in the Outback, a dramatisation of the events surrounding the murder of Peter Falconio. Campbell pledged not to deviate from the facts of the case, saying "We've obviously researched it pretty thoroughly, so really it's a story about how difficult it was to bring Murdoch [the killer] to justice."^[4] In 2007 he developed Catwalk Dogs, a comedy television film written by Simon Nye and starring Kris Marshall.^[5]