Kenith Trodd (born 1936, Southampton, Hampshire) is a British television producer particularly noted for a long association with television playwright Dennis Potter.
The son of a crane driver, Trodd was raised in the Christian fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren.[1] A graduate of Oxford University, Trodd began his career in television as an assistant to Roger Smith, script editor of The Wednesday Play in 1964.[1]
In 1968, with colleagues Tony Garnett and Ken Loach, he set up Kestrel Productions, a company which was affiliated with London Weekend Television. 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 it.
Trodd returned to the BBC, and worked on Play for Today. On an annual freelance contract, it was not renewed in 1976. The BBC's Personnel Department objected to Trodd's political contacts; he had attended meetings of the Workers' Revolutionary Party, briefly fashionable for a small minority in the media, in the early 1970s, but had never joined the organisation. A letter signed by Trodd's colleagues was sent to Alasdair Milne and Ian Trethowan, Director General of the BBC, and the BBC backed down and Trodd was reappointed.[2]
Following the success of Potter's serial Pennies from Heaven in 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. .
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 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 recently 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.