Roger Murray-Leach

Roger Murray-Leach is a British Production Designer, who is probably best known 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 one of the most, if not the most, imaginative and resourceful designers on the BBC staff. Murray-Leach designed several Doctor Who serials under Hinchcliffe's reign, many of which remain amongst the most popular serials in the show's history. For the serial Planet of Evil, Murray-Leach designed an alien jungle at Ealing studios that 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.

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 Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years. 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.

Biography from the Wikipedia article, licensed under CC-BY-SA