The documentary producer and TV executive Grant McKee, who has died from cancer aged 67, led the media campaign to free the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, convicted in connection with the bombing of pubs in Guildford and Woolwich in 1974 in one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.
As head of documentaries at Yorkshire Television, Grant was later to oversee programmes that won Bafta, Emmy and Prix Italia awards, but it was his involvement with documentaries about the pub bombings that established him as a leading film-maker.
These were neglected cases until, for Yorkshire Television's First Tuesday strand, Grant made the films Aunt Annie's Bomb Factory (1984), The Guildford Time Bomb (1986) and A Case That Won't Go Away (1987), and – with Chris Mullin for Channel 4 – Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1986), about the Guildford and Birmingham bombs.
Along with public pressure, the new evidence this work uncovered led Douglas Hurd, the home secretary, to announce a fresh appeal for the Guildford Four in 1989. But the Crown threw in the towel without hearing it.
The police had concealed the existence of an alibi for Gerard Conlon, and the lord chief justice, Lord Lane, overturned the convictions. In due course, all four and the Maguire Seven were wholly exonerated with formal apologies from the prime minister, Tony Blair.
Grant was born in Torquay, Devon, the second of four children of Eric McKee, a Royal Navy commander, and his wife, Betty (nee Dean). He spent much of his childhood in the far east and then at Clifton college, Bristol. He graduated in law from Exeter College, Oxford, and began a career in journalism at the Goole Times in Yorkshire. After two years on the Yorkshire Post he joined Yorkshire Television as a researcher in 1979, working with Jonathan Dimbleby on a string of documentaries about the cold war and the arms race.
Grant made films in the Middle East, central America and on the terrible Ethiopian famine of 1984, going undercover behind enemy lines in the civil war for The Unofficial Famine, a film in which he and the production team took particular pride.
I worked with him on the Guildford films and we co-authored a book on the case, Time Bomb (1988). So, when the Guildford Four were released in 1989, it was to us and to First Tuesday that Conlon, Paddy Armstrong, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson gave exclusive interviews for a final documentary, Free to Speak. It was a harrowing account of their 15 years in prison, and the only time they appeared together.
One less solemn consequence was an accusation by the former Master of the Rolls Lord (Tom) Denning in a live BBC programme that Grant and I were fellow travellers with the IRA. Invited by the presenter David Jessel to withdraw this remark, Denning did so – rather to Grant's disappointment. He thought it would have been fun to launch a libel suit against Britain's most famous judge.
After 1988, when Willis left for Channel 4, Grant ran First Tuesday for its last five years, promoted to controller of Network Factual in 1989. Awards continued for films including Peter Kosminsky's Afghantsi (1988), Kevin Sim's Four Hours in My Lai (1989) and Mark Galloway's Katie and Eilish (1992, about the separation of conjoined twins).
The ITV franchise auction of 1993 sent convulsions through Yorkshire TV, which in Grant's view had damagingly overbid. He became programme controller in 1994 but, although a resurgent Emmerdale, Heartbeat, Countdown and A Touch of Frost flourished, he found it uncomfortable working with the incoming managing director Bruce Gyngell, the idiosyncratic Australian famous for his union-busting stint at TV-AM. In 1995, when Gyngell cancelled a Kosminsky drama documentary about child abuse, Grant resigned.
Turning his back on major network jobs, he stayed in Yorkshire as a freelance executive producer, preferring to return to films and film-makers. Over the next 20 years he oversaw more than 120 documentaries on BBC and Channel 4, developing especially close relations with Ed Coulthard's Blast! Films and Sue Bourne's Wellpark Productions.
For Blast!, he helped Penny Woolcock overcome Channel 4's resistance to Tina Goes Shopping (1999), her revolutionary film in which criminal enterprise on an estate in Leeds is acted out by the tenants. His last film was Bourne's acclaimed A Time to Live (2017), which explored positive ways of dealing with impending death, particularly from cancer.
Grant was on the founding committee of the Sheffield documentary festival and worked closely with university film departments in Leeds and York. Outside work, he spent much time in the Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes, where he was on the management committee of the local RNLI station, whose official history, Stronger Than the Storm (2013), he wrote. He was also a founder and chair of the Staithes arts and heritage festival.
He loved travel, cricket and good food, and relished his role on tours across the UK as "companion" to his wife Jill Turton, a restaurant reviewer. Grant is remembered for his generosity, kindness and humour.
He is survived by Jill, whom he married in 1991, their daughter, Eleanor, and his siblings, Lizzie, Peter and Caroline.