Hugh Burnett

Who is Hugh Burnett?

Richard Hugh Burnett was a British television producer and cartoonist.

Born in Sheffield, the son of a journalist who eventually became editor of the Methodist Recorder, Burnett studied at the London School of Economics. After finishing his National Service serving in India with the Intelligence Corps, Burnett joined the BBC's Far Eastern Service at Bush House in 1949. Personal Call, a radio series in which Burnett visited public figures of the day, was later developed into the series he produced for television, Face to Face, which consisted of interviews by John Freeman with prominent people from around the world.

Later he became a documentary maker and made a sequence of films, often shot secretly, about apartheid: South Africa Loves Jesus, outling the attitudes of Christian denominations to the South African government's race policies, and The Colour Line, in which a blood bank labels its stock according to the race of the donor. During the 1970s he made three programmes about the supernatural and ghostly occurrences. These were The Ghost Hunters, The Mystery of Loch Ness and Out of This World, about UFOs.