Richard Taylor: Award-winning film-maker who made documentaries in locations as varied as Antarctica, Vietnam and Glasgow

Taylor made around 50 films in 61 countries, and brought to his films a rare integrity and commitment

Taylor, bottom right, in Vietnam; he joined the BBC during a golden age when directors were free to follow their passions

During a long and distinguished career as a documentary director for the BBC, Richard Taylor made around 50 films in 61 countries, several of which won international awards. He then went on to make successful films as an independent and was working right up until his death at the age of 81. He brought to his films a rare integrity and commitment, and his background as a cameraman rather than university graduate marked him out from many of his BBC contemporaries.

He was born in Newbury in 1933, the eldest of four sons born to Dennis and Kathleen Taylor. His father was a farmer with whom he had an abrasive relationship. He went to Bloxham, a public school which left him a lifelong socialist with a suspicion of authority and a need for good food and wine to make up for the privations he had experienced.

Following national service in Korea and a stint at Rada, he joined the British Antarctic Survey and spent a year on Horseshoe Island shooting a documentary single-handedly, subsequently selling it to commercial television. This launched both his career and interest in exploration: he was later to make films with the Arctic explorer Sir Wally Herbert and about the Empty Quarter, Rub' al Khali, retracing Wilfred Thesiger's epic journey.

While working with British Transport Films he met a 16-year-old music student, Allegra Honig, who had a small part in one of their films and was to become his lifelong companion. They married in 1958, and two years later they went together to Nigeria, immediately after independence, and stayed for three years, the beginning for both of them of a long love affair with Africa. Allegra came across two orphaned twins whom she adopted alongside her own three children; they were later also to adopt a girl from Kenya.

Back in London and now with a large family to support, Taylor joined the BBC in 1963 as a director for Television Features and for the next 25 years worked for the Corporation on documentary and current affairs programmes. The early days of BBC2 under David Attenborough can now be seen as a golden age of television documentary in which directors like Taylor were given considerable licence to follow their passions and convictions, very different from today's "top down" style of commissioning.

His controversial Equal Before the Law? was the BBC's first film to address the question of the relationship between the Metropolitan Police and the black community in Britain. Initially banned, it led to picketing at the BBC, questions in Parliament and its eventual screening. The Fight for Clydeside followed events surrounding the doomed work-in at Scotland's UCS shipyard; in the trade union leader Jimmy Reid Taylor found a subject as pugnacious and determined as himself.

His films were driven by a deeply felt sense of social justice and determination that those who had got "a raw deal in the world" should be given their own voice, whether on Clydeside or in the Caribbean. He made films in Vietnam, returning so exhausted that he collapsed at the door when met by his family, and in Korea, where he had served as a military policeman during national service days, an experience he compared to Orwell's in Burma, and one which likewise opened his eyes to inequalities.

The coming of colour television towards the end of the 1960s gave documentary-making a deeper immediacy, and with the creation of The World About Us, launched by the BBC2 Controller Aubrey Singer as a series that would "make people both wonder at the world and wonder why", Taylor was given the opportunity to make a wide range of films with a large audience that today's documentary makers can only envy in a more multi-channel environment.

During the 1970s he made 16 films for The World About Us, criss-crossing the globe for stories such as the deforestation of the Himalayas and the ecological impact of the Trans-Amazonica Highway in Brazil. His documentary on the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster in India revealed the full extent of that tragedy to the world. With the reporter Onyeka Onwenu he made "Nigeria: A Squandering of Riches", which won first prize at the 1985 Geneva International Television Festival.

His final film as a staff producer at the BBC was The Unleashing of Evil (1988), which examined the complicity of Western democracies in the use of government-instigated torture around the world; as with so many of his films, it was ahead of its time. He was only able to make it, he told me, by shooting a large part of it on the back of other films when he happened to be in a country. When he then presented the BBC with a film which they had, unwittingly already paid for, they felt an imperative to screen it which was as much financial as moral.

Like many directors, the moment came at the BBC when he had to choose between becoming an executive or leaving to continue making films. Never a man to sit behind a desk, he left to form Orpheus Productions.

He was able to make several more films on Africa, including one for the BBC on Ethiopian music for Under African Skies at a time when world music was not yet fashionable. He made a film supported by Band Aid for the charity Safe Hands for Mothers and many other films for NGOs and causes which he passionately believed in.

At his 80th birthday he danced a tango with his wife, Allegra (they had gone to Buenos Aires together to take lessons) in front of their 13 grandchildren, and he was still making films right up until his final illness and death.

HUGH THOMSON

Richard Taylor, film-maker: born Newbury, Berkshire 10 August 1933; married 1958 Allegra Honig (one daughter, two sons, two adopted daughters, one adopted son); died London 24 February 2015.