Paddy Russell

Biography

Patricia "Paddy" Russell (4 July‌ 1928 – 2 November 2017) was a British television director. She was among the earliest female directors at the BBC.

She was the first female floor manager to work for the BBC, her non-gendered credit being a means of avoiding problems with prospective technical crews. Although she appeared in the first two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment (1953), her main role was a production assistant for television director Rudolph Cartier. She worked on the later Quatermass science-fiction serials, as well as the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the Studio 4 series, she appeared on screen in the Cartier-directed Holocaust drama Doctor Korczak and the Children (1962), instructing the actors on the roles they were to perform. The production was made in the unadorned studio without sets or the actors in costume.

She progressed to becoming a director herself, one of the first two women directors in BBC television, along with Julia Smith. She directed many television programmes from 1962. She became the first woman to direct episodes of Doctor Who when she directed The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve (1966). She directed three further Doctor Who serials: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974), Pyramids of Mars (1975), and Horror of Fang Rock (1977). The last two Doctor Who serials featured Tom Baker in the title role. Her other work included Out of the Unknown (1965), Pere Goriot (1968), The Moonstone (1972) and The Omega Factor (1980).