As a critic noted, "from Michael Grigsby back to John Grierson runs an unbroken tradition in British documentary-making: a passionate commitment to the poetry of everyday life.

After leaving Abingdon, he gained his first job as a trainee assistant editor at Granada Television in Manchester, working with Harry Watt, who had co-directed the short film Night Mail (1936).

Along with a bunch of disaffected Granada colleagues, he set up a filmmaking collective, Unit Five Seven, and spent several years shooting and editing Enginemen, a short film about work in a locomotive shed, in his spare time.

Thus, whether he's filming trawlermen (Deckie Learner, 1965; A Life Apart, 1973), the survivors on both sides of the Vietnam War (I Was a Soldier, 1970; The Search, 1991; Thoi Noi, 1993), ordinary inhabitants of Northern Ireland (Too Long a Sacrifice, 1984; The Silent War, 1990; Rehearsals, 2005), families facing up to social disintegration in Thatcher's Britain (Living on the Edge, 1987) or the traumatised Lockerbie community 10 years after the Boeing 747 disaster (Lockerbie, A Night Remembered, 1998), Grigsby does his utmost to let people speak for themselves.

Grigsby's documentaries have also been compared to free-form jazz; he liked working instinctively, and the structure of his films generally came to him only after he had built a real understanding of the place, the landscape and the people.

Instead, he utilises the documentary genre in a unique fashion, bringing his humanist vision to bear on problems in society, so that viewers become participants too - involved, engaged and thinking.

1953: Ut Proficias 1955: No Tumbled House 1959: Enginemen 1962: Tomorrow’s Saturday 1965: Deckie Learner 1965: Pommies 1967: Death by Misadventure: SS Lusitania 1969: If the Village Dies 1969: Deep South 1969: Stones in the Park (one of 5 directors) 1970: I Was A Soldier 1971: Freshman 1972: Working the Land 1973: A Life Apart: Anxieties in a Trawling Community 1974: A life Underground 1976: Bag of Yeast 1976: The People’s Land 1979: Before the Monsoon - Roots of Violence 1979: Before the Monsoon - State of Emergency 1979: Before the Monsoon - Seeds of Democracy 1981: For My Working Life 1984: Too Long a Sacrifice 1987: Living on the Edge 1990: The Silent War 1990: Dear Mr Gorbachev 1991: The Search 1993: Thoi Noi 1994: The Time of Our Lives 1994: Pictures on The Piano 1995: Hidden Voices 1996: Living with the Enemy 1998: Lockerbie, A night Remembered 1998: The Score 1999: Billion Dollar Secret 2001: Solway Harvester – Lost at Sea 2005: Rehearsals 2012: We Went to War