[1] His radio and television career can broadly be characterised by the constant interest Mitchell displayed in "giving voice to the voiceless" and in the rhythms and prosody of everyday vernacular speech.
After some time spent at RADA pursuing an unsuccessful attempt to become an actor, at the age of 18 he moved to South Africa, the country his parents had emigrated to several years previously.
At the outbreak of war he joined the South African Army, first in the artillery, and later in Cairo, where he attained the rank of captain, and organising entertainment for the troops from visiting celebrities such as Bob Hope and Noël Coward.
He befriended Mitchell and suggested to him that he should come back to Britain to work in Laurence Gilliam's Features Department, alongside such poetic talent as Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas.
[4] In 1955, Mitchell was sent on a training attachment to the BBC's Lime Grove Studios, where he worked on his first television documentary, a 15-minute contribution to an edition of the pioneering current affairs Special Enquiry, about teenagers.
[8] Nevertheless, in 1964 they made The Entertainers, temporarily banned by the ITA for a brief shot of a topless dancer, and A Wedding on A Saturday, a memorable evocation of a Northern mining community, which won the Prix Italia that year.
After This England Mitchell's reputation for innovation began to wane (he was by that time in his late fifties), yet he continued to make documentary films on a wide variety of themes for all the major television companies.