Taste for excess sadly turned serious talent into a joke figure

ANALYSIS:Russell's outrageous extravagance was on a par with visionary peers Pasolini and Fellini

IT IS hard to believe now, but there was a time when film directors were genuine media personalities. Back in the 1970s, The Goodies, a well-remembered TV comedy troupe, invented a parodic version of Ken Russell for one of their movie pastiches. A white-haired, rubicund man demanded more nudity, more explosions, more excess.

Even in his later years, when he had difficulty financing even humble projects, his face still turned up on mainstream TV. Which other British film-maker would – as Ken did in 2007 – have received an invitation to appear on Celebrity Big Brother? There was a downside to his celebrity. As time progressed, Russell came to be seen as a joke figure. This is a shame. From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, Russell established himself as one of Britain's most striking film-makers.

The baroque side to his personality came through in The Devils(1971), a notoriously lubricious tale of witchcraft, and Tommy(1975), a determinedly vulgar version of The Who's rock opera. But, with his early films on composers for the BBC's Monitorstrand, he demonstrated a soon-suppressed sensitivity. Elgar(1962) and The Debussy Film(1965) still come across as remarkable documents.

Born in Southampton to a violent dad, Russell started out as a stills photographer. His touching pictures of everyday life in 1950s London, subject of a recent retrospective, reveal an artist with a great eye for eccentric detail. He was snapped up by the BBC and went on to invent his own, still unequalled style of biographical arts docu-drama. His first two films for the cinema fit uneasily into the now-complete canon. French Dressing(1964) was a low-key take in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman. The Billion Dollar Brain(1967) was an only mildly deranged take on a Len Deighton espionage novel.

The complete Ken Russell brand was eventually launched with Women in Lovein 1969. Glenda Jackson won an Oscar for her turn in the lively adaptation of a D H Lawrence novel. But the film remains best known – not least because it pointed to future Russell excesses – for that nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. A debate ensued between Russell and the British Board of Film Classification.

That furore seems, however, negligible when set beside the hysteria that greeted the release of The Devils. An extravagant, furiously enjoyable take on the possessions of Loudon – featuring wonderful sets by a young Derek Jarman – the picture featured simulated masturbation, copious nudity and a particularly tasty corruption of the crucifixion. Alexander Walker, a haughty Northern Irish critic, called the film “monstrously indecent” in a TV debate with Russell. The director walloped the journalist with a rolled-up newspaper.

Various mad films followed in the 1970s and 1980s. Mahler(1974) starred Robert Powell as a surreally troubled version of the composer. Tommy made a great deal of money, but now looks fatally stranded in its period. Altered States(1980) was a belated, crazily compelling investigation of the mind-expanding, soul-destroying power of hallucinogenic drugs.

It is, however, hard to escape the notion that The Devilsremains the high point in Russell's erratic career. At a time when British cinema was obsessed with the kitchen sink and the dying throes of swinging London, Russell lit out in an entirely different direction. The film has all the outrageous extravagance of Federico Fellini's best work. It is as at home to decadence as were the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, that other Italian visionary.

Russell's talent was, perhaps, a little too wild and unruly to survive in the conservative, money-obsessed climate of the 1980s. Still, he did make the odd (very odd) curiosity such as Lair of the White Worm(1988) and Gothic(1986). Later years were, however, taken up with shooting diverting low-budget videos in his garden and failing to get more extravagant productions funded.

The world will seem quieter and duller without him.