Draft:Hugh Stoddart

Hugh Stoddart (born 28 June 1947) is a British writer, known mainly for his screenplays for film and television between 1978 and 2015.

Early Years

Stoddart attended secondary school in Worthing, West Sussex and went on to study at Keble College, Oxford University, graduating with a degree in law in 1969. He spent a year as an articled clerk in a small firm of solicitors in London then left that profession to work in the arts. Stoddart was front of house manager at Greenwich Theatre and also manager of the art gallery in the theatre which at that time received a separate grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Career as a Curator

Stoddart moved from London to Devon in 1972 to take up a new appointment at South West Arts, one of a number of regional arts associations at the time that were funded jointly from local government and from the Arts Council of Great Britain. He was their first Visual Arts Officer and travelled widely across the region in support of artists and galleries; he also began an expansion of the work covered by the organisation, developing support for craft and then film.

In 1978 Stoddart was appointed Director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and achieved a move to new premises. Following a conversion at minimal cost, this allowed an expansion of the programme both in the number of exhibitions and the scale of work that could be shown. He travelled both in the USA and Europe to invite artists to show their work, giving first exhibitions in the UK to Bernard Bazile, Chris Burden, Jochen Gerz, Noel Harding, Pieter Laurens Mol, Dennis Oppenheim, and Agnes Denes. Oppenheim’s sculpture Vibrating Forest was later restored and shown by the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds. Denes’ work was subsequently toured to the Institute of Contemporary Arts London.

Stoddart encouraged UK artists at the start of their careers such as Paul Graham, Mali Morris and Hugh O’Donnell. He also included in the programme artists working in the area broadly referred to as installations art such as Ron Haselden, as well as those engaged in performance art. His policy was to have more than one exhibition on in the gallery at any one time, each lasting rarely more than six weeks. Details of his programme and that of his successor, Antonia Payne, are recorded in an Ikon Gallery publication As Exciting As We Can Make It.

Stoddart left the Ikon Gallery at the end of his three year contract, and moved back to London where he worked as a freelance art critic in the early 1990s. His reviews were published mainly in Contemporary Visual Arts, a magazine then edited by Keith Patrick.

Career as a Writer in Film and Television

Stoddart was active in amateur drama while at school and continued this interest at university where he was active both as an actor and director. Having written short stories previously he began to write drama while at university and sent his first scripts to the Royal Court Theatre, who invited him to join their Writers Group. He was drawn more to the screen than the theatre, however, and began writing scripts speculatively and seeking interest and reactions in his spare time.

A breakthrough came when Dartington Arts Trust agreed to fund his first original screenplay for a film to be shot in Cornwall. Co-written with the director Colin Gregg, Begging the Ring concerned a young man who faces conscription into the army during the First World War. Its title comes from a term used in Cornish wrestling. The film was selected for inclusion in the 22nd London Film Festival, November 1978. It won the Grierson Award (then still open to drama as well as documentary.) It was then bought by the BBC but only screened in 1983; it led however to interest in other projects: Melvyn Bragg wanted to commission a film to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of D.H.Lawrence’s death and for this Stoddart adapted his early novel The Trespasser, with Alan Bates starring opposite Pauline Moran. It was a feature-length film and screened in a specially extended edition of the South Bank Show in January 1981.

Stoddart's focus on single films, rather than on series drama, continued. His second original screenplay, Remembrance, was submitted to Channel Four. The film was shot on location in Plymouth during the autumn of 1981, shown in film festivals internationally during 1982 before its transmission in November 1982 during the first month of Channel Four’s schedule. It starred Gary Oldman in his first film role.

Continuing the connection with the West Country, Stoddart’s adaptation of To the Lighthouse was a project he had worked on for some time. He chose to locate the film in Cornwall ather than the Hebrides where the novel is set, as it was clearly inspired by Virginia Woolf’s holidays there. The project was taken up by the BBC, directed by Colin Gregg in 1982 and transmitted in March 1983. Stoddart’s next film Hard Travelling (BBC 1986) was from an original screenplay drawing on his ten years of involvement with contemporary art. This was followed by an adaptation of We Think The World Of You for Channel Four. Gary Oldman, whose first film was Remembrance was cast by Simone Reynolds again, this time opposite Alan Bates.

The Big Battalions, a five part original series, was commissioned by Brian Eastman then running Carnival Films. Starring Brian Cox and Jane Lapotaire, it was shown on Channel Four in 1992. Another adaptation followed, also commissioned by Brian Eastman, of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss starring Emily Watson. It was transmitted on New Year’s Day 1997.

Stoddart was commissioned to write a two-part episode in the long-running series Dalziel and Pascoe. This was Dialogues of the Dead, transmitted December 2002. His final film, Waiting For You, was co-written with director Charles Garrad and starred Fanny Ardant and Colin Morgan. It was screened in 20 film festivals internationally.

Filmography

Year	Title	Genre	Credit
2017	Waiting for You	Feature	Co-writer
2014	Moth Dust	Video	Director, Writer, Producer
2013	My Passage Through a Brief Unity in Time	Short	Writer
2010	Lifetime	Video	Director, Story, Producer
2007	Eucalyptus	Short	Writer
2002	Dalziel and Pascoe (Series 7, Episode 5 - Dialogues of the Dead: Part 1, Episode 6 - Dialogues of the Dead: Part 2	TV Series	Screenplay
1997	The Mill on the Floss	TV Movie	Screenplay
1992	The Big Battalions (5 episodes)	TV Mini Series	Writer
1988	We Think the World of You	Feature	Screenplay
1986	Hard Travelling Screen Two (Series 2, Episode 12)	TV Series	Writer
1983	To the Lighthouse	TV Movie	Writer
1982	Remembrance	Feature	Screenplay
1981	The Trespasser	TV Movie	Writer
1978	Begging the Ring		Co-writer