Jeremy Summers, who has died aged 85, enjoyed a 40-year career as a director that went through several clearly defined phases. He made film comedies with Tony Hancock, Barbara Windsor and Ron Moody, as well as two screen musicals, and worked on the TV mogul Lew Grade’s action-adventure series aimed at British and US markets. There were also films for the prolific low-budget producer Harry Alan Towers, and a string of other popular television series, then soaps.
With only one feature film behind him, he was entrusted to direct The Punch and Judy Man (1963), with Hancock in his second starring role for the cinema after phenomenal success on television with Hancock’s Half-Hour. However, the star had just left the BBC for ITV and dropped his writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, as well as most of his co-stars. Over the six-week shoot in Bognor Regis, his drink and marital problems also provided challenges for Summers.
The story harked back to Hancock’s own childhood in another seaside town, Bournemouth – and debunked the bachelor persona he was known for on TV. He was seen as a sullen, morose beach puppeteer in a crumbling marriage to a social-climbing wife (played by Sylvia Syms) and happy only with his puppets. Summers was given great assistance in capturing the ambience and detail of a seaside setting by his director of photography, Gilbert Taylor, in a melancholic film that received poor reviews at the time but kinder reassessments in the wake of Hancock’s decision to take his own life in 1968.
Summers made the 1964 musical Ferry Cross the Mersey, the first film to be shot on location in Liverpool after the Beatles’ global success. Starring another local group, Gerry and the Pacemakers, it suffered from being in the shadow of the Fab Four’s film A Hard Day’s Night, released earlier in the same year.
On television, as one of those who formed the backbone of Grade’s ITC-produced dramas, Summers benefited from better-quality material – and high production values even though, like most television shows of the time, they were shot predominantly in the studio. He directed episodes of shows including The Saint (1962-66), Danger Man (1966), The Baron (1966-67), Man in a Suitcase (1968), Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-70), Jason King (1971-72), The Protectors (1972-74) and Return of the Saint (1978). This proved to be his best and most satisfying work.
He was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, to Dora (nee Bird), an actor, and Walter Summers, a film director and screenplay writer who bridged the silent and sound eras, and whose own father had written stage pantomimes. Summers’s older sister, Jill, became a BBC makeup artist.
He left Bedford school at the age of 16 when his parents separated and his father stopped paying the fees. Summers began working as a runner at Elstree studios, and rose to become an assistant director on pictures such as The Dam Busters (1955) and Moby Dick (1956). While shooting the latter, he was attached to the front half of a dummy white whale that was towed into the Irish Sea from Fishguard – and was left adrift when the line snapped.
His first work as a director was in television, on ITV’s International Detective (1960-61), but he also directed feature films – the comedy Crooks in Cloisters (1964), starring Ronald Fraser and Windsor, and the “pop and cop” B-movie musical Dateline Diamonds (1965), which combined performances by the Small Faces and Kiki Dee with a story about smuggled jewels. The comedy San Ferry Ann (1965), with Moody, Joan Sims and Windsor playing British tourists sailing to France, was notable for being wordless.
For the first of four films he made with Towers, Summers directed Christopher Lee in The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), which was enhanced by attractive sets and costumes. Five Golden Dragons (1967), again with Lee, had rare footage of 1960s Hong Kong and, for House of a Thousand Dolls (1967), starring Vincent Price, Summers added substance and atmosphere to the story of white women kidnapped and held in a rundown brothel by filming in Tangiers’s back streets, scrapyards and a railway “museum” of derelict carriages and rusting engines. The Face of Eve (1968), with Lee in a supporting role, was typical of Towers’s early sexploitation period, featuring Celeste Yarnall as a woman lost in the jungle and worshipped by Amazon tribes as a goddess.
In a different vein, Summers made the seven-part cinema serial The Ghost of Monk’s Island (1968), a superior production for the Children’s Film Foundation.
For the next three decades, he was a steady hand directing episodes of popular television series such as A Kind of Loving (1982), Strangers and Brothers (1984), Tenko (1982-84) and All Creatures Great and Small (1988), as well as the soap operas Coronation Street (1977-94), Albion Market (1984-86), Howards’ Way (1989-90), Emmerdale (1989-93), The Bill (1989-98), Hollyoaks (1996) and Brookside (1993-2002).
When he finally retired at the age of 70, he joked that he had kept going so long by dying his hair and lying about his age.
In 1955, Summers married Shirley Davies, who survives him, along with their four children, Nick, Julian, Emma and Ben.
• Jeremy Summers (Walter John Jeremy Summers), director, born 18 August 1931; died 14 December 2016
