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Bill Klages, a trailblazer in the field of television lighting design and a seven-time Emmy recipient, died Sunday at his home in Santa Monica, his son, Jonathan Klages, told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 97.

Klages in 2012 became the only lighting designer inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. His six-decade career spanned the early days of black-and-white live television through the sophisticated high-definition productions of today.

The native New Yorker lighted the Emmys, the Tonys, the Grammys and The Kennedy Center Honors as well as a range of high-profile entertainment programs that included Kraft Music Hall, My Name Is Barbra, Sills and Burnett at the Met, Baryshnikov by Tharp and The Dorothy Hamill Special.

Nominated for 22 Emmys, Klages collected his first trophy in 1974 — when he won for The Lie, an Ingmar Bergman-written telefilm that starred George Segal and Shirley Knight — and his last in 1991, when he was honored...

Television director in the glory days of the BBC, who went on to make feature films

Alan Bridges, who has died aged 86, was a leading director during the glory days of the BBC, from the mid-60s to the early 70s. Today, whenever media pundits analyse the history of television drama, they wax lyrical about The Wednesday Play and its successor Play for Today, bemoaning the virtual disappearance of the single play.

By the time Bridges started working in the Wednesday Play slot, he was already one of the BBC's most experienced TV directors – he had directed excellent 10-part adaptations of two 19th-century classics, Great Expectations and Les Misérables (both in 1967) – but he relished the "right to fail" ethos at the BBC, enjoying working with exciting contemporary writers.

While continuing to have a distinguished television career into the 80s, adeptly moving from the popular to the experimental, from the modern to the classical,...