Cathy Come Home and Kes producer Tony Garnett is behind much of Britain’s best screen drama since the mid-60s. Only recently did the truth hit home – the secret of his success came from the traumatic loss of both parents when he was five, after a botched abortion

On the night that came to define Tony Garnett’s life, his mother tucked her little boy into her own bed with a hot water bottle, and promised she would be in to cuddle him soon. Tony’s father was working a night shift in the munitions factory and his little brother, Peter, was in his cot at the back of the house.

But Ida never did come to bed. Or if she did, she soon got up again.

Three days earlier, she had ended a pregnancy and as this was 1941, a quarter of a century before abortion was legalised, it was done by a back-street practitioner. Now, though, she was in agony: sweating, screaming, and doubled over in pain. Tony, who was five, was woken by the sound of his mum howling. She was banging on the bedroom wall, desperately trying to alert her brother Fred and his wife Janet, who lived next door.

Tony can’t remember any more about that night: events were simply too harrowing for his child’s mind to process. But by dawn, when his dad came home, Ida was dead. Tony and his three-year-old brother were motherless and Tom was a widower.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ida and Tom, Tony Garnett’s parents, on their wedding day in 1931.

You might have thought things couldn’t get much worse for this tight-knit, working-class Birmingham family, but they did. The police started to investigate and their first port of call was Tom. Instead of finding support and understanding, Tom was questioned by a detective and threatened with arrest and prosecution. Three weeks after Ida’s death, he turned on the gas, lay down with a bottle of whisky and killed himself.

These events have been locked in Tony’s heart through all the long decades since. Or in one sense they have been locked in his heart, because for years and years he never told his story. But in another sense, the tragic loss of Ida and Tom has been at the root of every film ever made by Tony, described by the former director general of the BBC Mark Thompson as “the best television drama creator and producer there has ever been”.

From Cathy Come Home (1966) to Up the Junction (1965); from Kes (1969) to Law and Order (1978), Tony’s dramas were game-changers. And now this amiable and courteous man, who seems far younger than his 80 years, has decided to reveal why.

“So many of my films, so much of my work, only happened because of my early life,” he says. “It wasn’t until I decided to write it all down that I made the connections. I thought I was making these hard-hitting dramas because of my political beliefs or because of the power of the stories. But now I absolutely know: the driving force for my life’s work was what happened to my mum and dad, and then what happened to me as a result of what had happened to them.”

The heartbreaking details are played out in Tony’s autobiography. He describes his final memories of both his parents: his mum, crouching on the bedroom floor that night in agony; his dad weeping at the loss of the woman he had adored since the first time he saw her at a dance class in the local masonic hall. The events of Tony’s own story are shattering: a true drama that puts even his most powerful screen dramas – and no one who has seen Cathy Come Home will have forgotten that searing story of a mother whose children are wrenched from her – into the shade. Because this, it turns out, is the secret of Tony Garnett’s extraordinary films: he got them right because he knew how his characters felt. Tony didn’t have to imagine, he didn’t even have to remember – he just knew.

The most striking example is Up the Junction, in which one of the three main female characters, Ruby, has a back-street abortion. Like Ida, things don’t go to plan; like Ida, she is left in agony. So when the camera closes in on Ruby’s sweaty, anguished face, the face we are looking at is also Ida’s. Unlike Ida, Ruby survives; but the message of the film is clear; and its screening came at a pivotal moment, in November 1965. “The Abortion Bill was going through the House of Commons and I knew how powerful it would be to show it,” remembers Tony.

“The producer went on holiday and I managed to manoeuvre things so that when he came home, the play had its slot and it would be difficult to move. It was devious and I told lies to do it, did things you’d never normally do, but I knew how much it mattered to get it on the air at that moment … that’s how important it was to me.” But no one around him knew why the issue was such a burning one for him. “I never spoke about my parents.”

After their deaths, Tony was sent to live with one aunt and uncle, and Peter with another – “so my brother became my cousin and my cousin became my brother”. But as the months and years passed, the tragedies were hardly mentioned. “It was the shame of it, you see. It’s difficult for us to imagine it now, but these were decent, honest, working-class people and not only was abortion illegal, suicide was illegal too.

“These were criminal offences, and they’d happened in the middle of our family, so they simply weren’t talked about.”

In his late teens, Tony decided to find out. “I was like a detective,” he says. “I talked to all my aunts and uncles and my cousins. They didn’t want to talk, because they were still ashamed and didn’t want to upset me or themselves, but I was like a terrier – I had to know the truth. In a sense, that was my training ground for the films I went on to make because what I’ve done has always been based on research. I’ve always said to my teams: we need to research and research the facts and then we’ll make it up. Because the fiction has got to tell the truth. I always wanted my films to uncover what is going on here, and how does it really feel?”

Remembering Ida and Tom in order to write the book has been extremely painful. “In their wedding photos, and in the pictures of them on the beach at Blackpool, they look so young and so hopeful,” he says. “There are lots of questions I’ll never know the answers to, but there are also things I can be pretty sure about. When my mum found she was pregnant, she already had two small children, and it was the middle of the blitz. She obviously thought it was just too much to bring another baby into the world at that moment. My dad did the research and found the abortionist in Handsworth. She came highly recommended; he did his homework on her.”

Tony’s search for the truth about his parents led him to turn up Tom’s suicide note, hidden in a drawer at his aunt and uncle’s house. “It is now three long weeks since my sweetheart was taken from me,” wrote Tom, “and I feel I cannot carry on without her … I know the step I am taking will shock a lot of people but time will heal, as it never will with me. I am going to try to find her.”

As Tony was growing up, his aunt and uncle and the wider family worried about how much he read. “They just didn’t understand it – they were always asking what was wrong with me,” he chuckles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony, right, aged six, shortly after his parents’ deaths, with his cousin Robert, who became his brother.

Reading stories led to an interest in telling those stories on stage, and one of the first people he met when he began to try out for roles with an amateur theatre group was a girl called Topsy Legge. “She was 15 when we met and I was still in the sixth form,” he says. “She was the love of my life.”

In his book he writes that he had closed down emotionally since he was five, but “with Tops I was defenceless. What really drew me to her and cemented my attachment was her inner beauty. It was innocent and guileless.”

It sounds like the “happy ever after” Tony so obviously deserved, but it wasn’t. Topsy’s acting career, like Tony’s, was moving fast and in 1962 she was cast to play opposite Tom Courtenay in John Schlesinger’s screen version of Billy Liar. In his book, Tony writes that he wished her luck and kissed her goodbye before she headed off to join the shoot. “That was the last moment I saw her,” he writes.

Tony did see Topsy again, but she was never again the person he had known and fallen in love with. She had become mentally ill and later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Schlesinger replaced her in Billy Liar with Julie Christie. From then on, Topsy only ever seemed to be “half with us … she had drifted off into another space”. In hospital, she was given electro-convulsive shock treatment and drugs, which Tony says produced a “functional lobotomy”. He stayed with her as long as he could – they even married and had a son, but Topsy was not better and the marriage was doomed.

It was more than 20 years before Tony found another wife; but he never forgot Topsy or what happened to her. In 1967 he produced In Two Minds, the story of a young woman with schizophrenia who is given ECT. The play was heavily influenced not only by Topsy’s story, but also by the ideas of the psychiatrist RD Laing, who was interested in the difference between madness and sanity, and in the impact family stresses have on mental instability. “I was absolutely determined to be brutally frank on screen about what was being done to these people by professional but misguided medics,” says Tony.

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When it came to Topsy, he wasn’t prepared to go public with the story in her lifetime. Her death, early in 2014, removed another bar to publishing his memoirs.

Part of what Tony has tried to achieve through his book, as he always has done with characters on screen, is to see the world through their lens – in this case, his parents’. Having lost them in the way he did, it’s particularly poignant, but it’s something we all need to do at some point, he says. “Our parents are always inside us and it’s coming to terms with them, and understanding their point of view, and forgiving them that makes you a grownup,” he says.

And so it has been for Tony. “I understand why they thought it wasn’t the right moment to have another baby and I can understand why my dad made the decision he made. I’m not angry with them. I’m not angry with him, even though others have said how could he have done that and left you and your brother without either parent?”

The catharsis is almost visible on his face. “All our lives we struggle to become who we are,” he says. “And I’m nearer to who I am because of working through all this.”

• The Day the Music Died by Tony Garnett is published by Constable, £20. To order a copy for £16, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

More information, tonygarnett.info