A fascinating memoir looking back on a ground-breaking career.
Published posthumously, the book contains a number of colour photographs from Malcolm’s archives.
In a time before television had really started, the computer age had barely begun and there was only one domestic channel on the radio – the BBC Home Service. One of the few operators changing the discs was a 15-year-old boy from the East End of London. The year was 1944 and Malcolm Stewart had just embarked a career that would take him on a journey to leave a world of poverty and drabness behind him.
That journey would take him to Hamburg and forces broadcasting, a billet that would see him placed in charge of former members of the SS, and uniquely for someone destined for the film business give him the kind of security clearance that attracted the CIA. Malcolm’s book recounts a career spanning some of the most important British films of the twentieth century, being deported from Cuba and fleeing via the jungle from Ghana with help from the CIA.
In his garden shed, Malcolm also started Audio Systems, a company that would for a time, rival both Pinewood and Shepperton Studios for their sound services. He developed the world’s first portable multitrack recorder. He went from the film business to television news, covering some of the biggest stories of the 80’s. Through this long and distinguished career he met many world leaders, film stars and journalists, who knew him as Malcolm, one of the industry’s unsung heroes.
