These plays, taken from the short stories of such luminaries as William Trevor, Rumer Godden and Elizabeth Taylor and which starred such actors as Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright and Jean Simmons, exemplified Roberts’s affection for work of outward quietness and delicacy but which could still strike the deepest and most reverberating chords.Roberts was the youngest of three children – he had an older brother and a sister – but an element of mystery attended the circumstances of his birth. Granada actively encouraged him and between 1978 and 1989 he was responsible for some outstanding drama productions to which he brought the same discriminatory qualities of taste and sensibility that informed everything he did. Between 1982 and 1984 he produced a series of 13 television films under the title “All for Love”. The fact that he had been briefly an actor himself and could therefore share the uneven splendours and miseries of an actor’s life made him an unusually sympathetic judge of talent.After 15 years in Granada’s casting department Roberts applied to become a producer. Roy Edward Roberts, television producer and casting director: born Plymouth 14 May 1935; died Bath 27 April 2004. Roy Roberts became head of Granada’s casting department during the great golden decade of the 1970s when the company’s drama productions matched and often surpassed, in quality and originality, those of the BBC.Roberts had joined Granada as a casting director in 1963, a year in which their drama output included a version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a trio of plays by J.B. Priestley and the beginning of a splendid series of plays by Tennessee Williams featuring The Rose Tattoo, The Glass Menagerie and the rarely revived Camino Real.

They were studies of peonies, their purple buds and the white flowers fully opened against a dark background.Simon Fenwick. She continued to paint as long as she was able, and her final pictures, exhibited at the New English Art Club and the Royal Watercolour Society, were nearly all sold. To find elegant solutions, as a mathematician might say, to the problems of a representation truthful to the light, colour and spatial relationships of the subject.Stylish and articulate, Josp?lso served for many years as Secretary to the Analytical Psychology Club of London, for whom she designed a club logo and letterhead. If this signified modesty, it also showed an intellectual curiosity.

If she regretted not having received a full technical training in her years at Radcliffe College, she had learnt the crucial “economy of means” – never to do too much, never to overelaborate. From 1985 to 1997 she attended classes at the Slade and the Royal College of Art. Even after she had received the accolade of election to professional art bodies, Josp?ad no qualms about still attending painting courses when she thought they might help her in her work. What man would photograph an ironing board or a stack of shirts? And, even if he did, would he photograph them with such irony? These household objects – arranged with an instinctive eye for order – told the story of her life.Gradually she stopped working as a serious photographer and returned to earlier interest in drawing and painting. Marriage and children prevented her from working as a creative artist but in 1979 she began to study for a degree course in Professional Photography at the Polytechnic of Central London. Study also provided a lifeline to the world outside.Yet when at last she was liberated from her role as a full-time housewife, it was domesticity which provided her with inspiration for her pictures: the most mundane objects could also be objets d’art. By that time, it is possible that many universities will have moved out of part-time teaching altogether, and that those part-time students remaining will be concentrated in institutions that cannot fill their full-time places, and are seriously less well-funded than their peers.

It was thought that the ambiguity of the name would offer her an advantage in life. In 1951 she gained a BA in Art History and the Theory and Practice of Drawing and Painting from Radcliffe College (Harvard University) In the early 1950s she lived in New York. This was the time of the great Abstract Expressionists but although their influence could sometimes be found in Cecil Josp? work, she remained a representational painter.With her Belgian husband, Roger Josp?she moved to London, where she was to live for 30 years until her death. We risk a second-rate education for part-timers.For a price, Government could put this right, by extending loans to part-timers on a pro-rata basis. But what we really need is a fundamental review of university funding – and the support of students – that is not dependent on an arbitrary full/ part-time division. But with the Bill currently going through the House of Lords, time is getting very short.The writer is professor of education, and co-director of the Centre for Policy and Change at the University of Surreyeducation independent.co.uk. The artist Cecil Josp?ecame a photographer in middle age.