Biography

August 17, 1935 · Sale, Cheshire, England, UK

March 11, 2012

In 1968, he went to America to conduct an interview for BBC-TV with the legendarily crusty director John Ford. At first, Ford (whose dislike of interviews was well-known) refused to appear before cameras, claiming he had assumed it would be an interview for radio; then he sat Jenkinson on his deaf side; then he replied as briefly as possible, or else pretended that he couldn't remember anything about his films; then he became aggressive and attacked Jenkinson for being English, and the English for their actions in Ireland fifty or sixty years earlier. When the interview was finally shown - some two years later - it was most noticeable that there was relatively little footage of Ford, with the time padded out with many extracts from his films. Jenkinson nonetheless said that he and Ford had ended up good friends.

A former child actor in radio, he was a keen amateur film-maker before becoming a film critic on BBC television programs in the 1960s.

Brother-in-Law (1956-2003) of Antony Jay.

Notorious for his extreme vindictiveness towards Audrey Hepburn, whom he once likened to "a demented gerbil"; his dislike was so palpable, and so obviously personal, that there were many complaints to the BBC about it.

He was very busy on BBC Television from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, presenting and writing film programs, and also writing about films for BBC publications, notably the "Radio Times"; then he seemed abruptly to vanish from the airways and from print, with only a handful of subsequent TV appearances, mostly for ITV and Channel Four. By the time of his death, he had largely been forgotten, and obituaries revealed that he had actually been sacked by the BBC, reputedly because of a series of questionable expenses claims. One of his obituaries remarked that he "did not take easily to a life of obscurity".