Roger Murray-Leach

Infobox Person


image_size = 150px
name = Roger Murray-Leach
birth_date = 25 June 1943
occupation = Film & Television production designer

Roger Murray-Leach (born 25 June 1943) is a British Production Designer, who is probably best remembered for his work on British television series' "Doctor Who" and Blake's 7 in the 1970s, although he went on later to work on major feature films.

He trained as an architect and joined the BBC design department in the 1970s, quickly gaining a reputation for great imagination and flair. He began working on Doctor Who when Philip Hinchcliffe took over as producer in late 1974. Hinchcliffe's vision for the series included giving a high priority to set design and he quickly realised that Murray-Leach was the one of the most, if not the most, imaginative and resourceful designers on the BBC staff, his versatility and ability to make the most of a small budget making him very useful for the low-budget series. Murray-Leach designed several Doctor Who serials under Hinchcliffe's reign: The Ark in Space, The Sontaran Experiment, Revenge of the Cybermen, Planet of Evil, The Seeds of Doom, The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Many of these remain amongst the most popular serials in the show's history. For the serial The Ark in Space, Murray-Leach produced one of the best futuristic sets the series had seen, and for Planet of Evil he designed an alien jungle at Ealing studios. These two designs in particular so impressed Hinchcliffe that he wrote to the Head of the BBC design department, suggesting that Murray-Leach should be nominated for a BAFTA or a Royal Television Society Award. His final design for the series, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, was a beautiful Victorian setting which could easily have been mistaken for the sets of a high-budget costume drama.

David Maloney, a director who had worked on a number of the Doctor Who serials designed by Murray-Leach, went on to produce Blake's 7 for the BBC and immediately secured the services of Murray-Leach to design the interior of the Liberator spacecraft.

Murray-Leach was eventually nominated for a BAFTA award for his design work on the 1981 series . His talent was finally being recognised and he broke into feature films, working as production designer on Local Hero, Clockwise and A Fish Called Wanda. His movie career extended into the 1990s with The Mighty Quinn, Twenty-One and Fierce Creatures.

In recent years he has appeared in a number of television and DVD documentaries discussing his work on Doctor Who, including "A Darker Side", a retrospective feature included in the 2|entertain/BBC DVD release of Planet of Evil, in which he and Hinchcliffe returned to Ealing studios to discuss the story's design and production.

He lives in Wiltshire, England.

External links

*imdb name|id=0385472|name=Roger Murray-Leach