A new research room for film and television scholars was today opened at the University of East Anglia’s East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA).

This follows the donation of personal papers and material reflecting the life and work of internationally respected writer and producer John Chittock and his late wife Joy. Some of their collection will be housed in the new John and Joy Chittock Research Room, which was opened by John Chittock OBE and UEA Vice-Chancellor Prof Edward Acton.

The John and Joy Chittock collection at EAFA, which is based at the Archive Centre in Norwich, contains published and unpublished material, films, surveys, research papers, correspondence, interviews and other information that provides an invaluable perspective on the way in which film, television and related media have developed over the last half century – from multiplex cinemas, video, cable and satellite television, to technologies such as HDTV and DVD.

Spanning Mr Chittock’s life and work as a journalist, producer and champion of moving image media since the early 1950s, the collection also includes some rare technology, such as the first commercial 3D stills camera, as well as periodicals and journals dating from the 1930s.

John Chittock is a Fellow of the Royal Television Society, the Royal Photographic Society and the British Kinematograph Sound and Television Society, and in 1982 was made an OBE for services to the film and television industries. He was chairman of the British Federation of Film Societies, a founder and deputy chairman of the British Screen Advisory Council, founder and chairman of the Grierson Memorial Trust, and a founding trustee of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation.

Front L-R: John Chittock, Margaret Chittock, Richard Taylor (director of EAFA). Back: Murray Weston (chair of Film Archives UK) and Jane Alvey (head of collections at EAFA)