Hugh Thomson trained as a film-maker at the Bristol University Film School (the ‘RFT’), under the gifted teaching of George Brandt.

He stayed in Bristol (still his home) and began his career as a cameraman and director of numerous shorts, including two promos for the gloriously under-rated Blue Aeroplanes. Sadly he didn’t realise that many of the DJs at the local clubs were going to become the Nellee Hooper/Massive Attack conglomerate and failed to invest money in them.

After joining BBC Television Features Bristol in 1989, he was there for an exciting period of expansion when an innovative range of documentaries were being made by film-makers such as Peter Symes. Particular attention was given to the idea of the ‘authored documentary’ in which directors worked closely with writers.

For the series Words on Film, Hugh made Devices Of Detachment with the Irish poet Damian Gorman, an unusual verse commentary on the ‘Troubles’, as they were euphemistically called, made in a highly collaborative way: sometimes Gorman would write verse directly to images Thomson shot and likewise he would sometimes shoot to Gorman’s pre-written verse commentary.

He later made a further film with Gorman in Mexico following the route Cortés and his conquistadores had taken, and went to Argentina with the writer Andrew Graham-Yooll for an emotive retrospective look at what the junta had done to his country in War Stories.

BBC Bristol was a hotbed of productivity at the time. Series such as Small Objects of Desire and Byline gave room for an experimental style of film-making few other areas of the BBC would allow. Thomson proposed that an annual British Documentary Festival was needed, as none existed, and with the considerable support of the respected Peter Symes, this was set up in Sheffield, where it is currently flourishing.

He was BAFTA-nominated for his award-winning series Dancing in the Street: A Rock and Roll History in 1996. He has also been nominated by Broadcast Magazine as Best Producer of the Year.

He is currently working as a freelance.

His many films for the BBC include:

Surf City. A light-hearted, music-driven film about surfing (such as it is) around Britain.

Byline: "Cathy, Where are You Now?". An "authored" documentary with 60s survivor and maverick, Jeremy Sandford, who wrote the original Cathy Come Home, looking at the continuing problems of housing in Britain.

Small Objects of Desire (The Passport). Innovative graphics-led series that used (and abused) archive extensively in its telling of the curious history of small domestic objects. This programme looked at how the passport started as a way to help people travel and has become a method of stopping them.

Words on Film: "Devices of Detachment". Acclaimed ground-breaking documentary about the troubles in Northern Ireland, with a commissioned verse commentary from the poet Damian Gorman.

British selection for INPUT FESTIVAL

"A television masterpiece" - Sean Day-Lewis, Sunday Telegraph.

War Stories: "Andrew Graham-Yooll". A personal look at the military regime in Argentina prior to the Falklands War, in which the human rights campaigner and writer, Andrew Graham-Yooll, himself Anglo-Argentine, returned there after many years of exile to confront some of the generals.

"Emotionally charged" - Time Out. "Last and best in the series" - Daily Mail

Great Journeys: "Mexico". Account of Cortés' epic journey across Mexico, again with the Irish poet Damian Gorman, who followed the conquistador’s difficult route overland from the beaches of the Yucatan to the site of the final Aztec defeat in the mountains and reflected on the current situation in Mexico.

"Lyrical" - Peter Patterson, Daily Mail. "A treat" - The Guardian.

Omnibus: "Oscar", controversial BBC1 film in which the writer Michael Bracewell presented a very personal account of Oscar Wilde’s life and legacy as the first of the century’s rock and roll stars, helped by Stephen Fry, Tom Stoppard and the Pet Shop Boys.

"mounts a daring commando-style raid on the reputation of Oscar Wilde." Observer

"fascinating" Standard "Intensely sincere and thoughtful" Time Out

Dancing in the Street: A Rock and Roll History

Major 10-hour series (as series producer and director), which set out to tell the history of the devil’s music from the 1950s to the present day.

BAFTA NOMINATION; EMMY AWARD WINNER; also winner of Peabody Award, special medal-winner at New York Film Festival

"Hugh Thomson’s magnificent ten-part history is the most ambitious and the most radical history of rock ever attempted on television" Daily Telegraph

"anecdotal, evocative and authoritative, this is a treat " Sunday Times

"superb" London Evening Standard "fine pop chronicle" The Guardian

"absorbing" The Mail "a very fine new history of rock music" Independent

"The line-up of interviewees is mind-boggling...a spectacular ten-part series" The Daily Star

"easily TV’s most perceptive analysis of popular music" Daily Mirror

"Four years in the making, Hugh Thomson’s accessible, erudite series is an intelligent, superbly edited overview of this thing called rock and roll....unmissable." Birmingham Post

"A palpable hit on the subject.... .as good as television gets." The New York Times

Joanna Lumley in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon [Icon Films]

70-minute BBC1 Special in which Joanna Lumley travelled across the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in the footsteps of her grandfather, who had made the same journey in the 1930s when he was a British political officer.

"The archive her grandfather had taken seemed to flower into colour in this film." Guardian, Nancy Banks-Smith

"Beautiful sights in her journey - in particular prayer flags rippling like a land-locked armada of devotion - and some comedy as well; in one scene a member of the Bhutanese royal family gossiped about Newmarket racing and took a phone call as if impersonating Patsy ("How are you doing? Absolutely fabulous!")." Tom Sutcliffe, Independent

Most recent Production [Spring 2000]:

Indian Journeys [Icon Films]. 3-part series for BBC2 (as both series producer and director) with the travel-writer William Dalrymple, who journeyed across India looking at the country’s great spiritual past and troubled present.

1 Shiva’s Matted Locks

Following the Hindu pilgrimage route up to the source of the Ganges in the highest reaches of the Himalayas;

"this is as wonderful a film as I have watched since I started writing this column and I cannot imagine not being moved by it and by the devotion of the pilgrims, particularly of the man who, even as he justifies leaving his family for ever in the name of his God, wipes away his tears. The soundtrack is marvellous, too"

John Peel Column (in Radio Times)

2 City of Djinns

A journey into the soul of Delhi, where the ancient rites of Sufism sit uneasily beside modern, disturbingly nationalistic currents;

"This brilliant series - as good-looking as it is thought-provoking - continues with another eye-opening report." Daily Mail

Doubting Thomas

A re-tracing of the epic voyage supposedly undertaken by Christ’s apostle St Thomas in the first century, when he sailed from Jerusalem down to the south of India.

"filmed with a beautiful lyric eye that is now rare in documentaries, where too often the words are supposed to paint the picture and the pictures are just to remind you that this isn't radio." A.A. Gill, Sunday Times