For nearly two decades my friend Ken Locke, who has died aged 79, was the chief film editor of BBC Film Examination, Programme Acquisitions, making sure feature films were suitable for transmission on television. During this period BBC TV screened more movies than any other broadcasting organisation.
The maze of BBC censorship rules included a barrage of committees. It took Ken more than a month to cope with Apocalypse Now (1979). He enjoyed reading the original notes obtained from Hollywood studios such as: “Will the limeys understand this?” The Americans themselves could make strange substitutions for swear words: “Nobody calls me melon farmer”; or “Holy shit” for “Holy Jesus”. Extreme violence coupled with misogyny was unacceptable to Ken.
Censorship was not at all Ken’s primary concern. He had loved movies, especially from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, since his early days, when he was expelled from school at 14 for bunking off to help out in the local cinema.
The son of Jessie-May (nee Testro) and Mervyn Locke, Ken was born in Brisbane, Australia, where his father worked as a rubber processor. Ken’s early jobs included being an apprentice cartographer, and engraver at David Jones department store in Sydney, where he met Annette Moody.
They married in 1961 and, after the birth of their first child, moved to the UK. Ken had an overwhelming desire to work in the British television industry, at the BBC in particular. He was taken on in 1964 as a trainee, despite heavy competition for the job, because of his encyclopedic knowledge of film.
When he joined, he said, “the Beeb was mostly upper middle-class. You always presumed there was nepotism, until proved otherwise. Many of these people were pleasant and talented, but no more so than other people who didn’t get a look in.”
To transmit films on TV, Ken had to dissect them in order to restore them, to try to reproduce the look and the original qualities of picture and sound. He became an expert not only on colour print processes, but on film music and sound recordings. He had a budget to get stereo tracks duplicated in Hollywood “for BBC censorship purposes.” He re-dubbed. He would consult Hollywood studios, retired technicians and directors, and private collectors who might hold illegal prints.
After he took early retirement in 1995, Ken was constantly at the National Film Theatre (now the BFI Southbank) in London, watching for the umpteenth time the films he loved. He collaborated with another BBC film editor, Keith Wilton, on British Film Collectors Conventions and on DVDs such as Armchair Odeons, celebrating people who love old movies.
Ken was one of those who recorded his memories for the British Entertainment history project.
He is survived by Annette, their son and four daughters, and eight grandchildren. Another son predeceased him.
