Norman Swallow's career in British broadcasting, from his joining the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1946 through to his continuing involvement in independent production, was that of a major pioneer of the British television documentary and, more broadly, a significant contributor to public service television.

Swallow went to school in Manchester, England, and studied history at Oxford before entering wartime military service. His first work for the BBC was in radio "drama-documentary," where he tackled a number of historical and social themes as a writer and producer. After moving to television, Swallow was a producer of the general-election broadcast of 1951, which marked a decisive shift in television's treatment of elections, to a distinctive form of extended national coverage and commentary. One year later, he became the series director of Special Enquiry, a BBC documentary series that concerned itself primarily with investigation into contemporary social issues. The series ran from 1952 to 1957 and was undoubtedly one of the most important innovations in television journalism of the period, acting as an influence on a whole range of later work. In devising the series with his colleagues, Swallow was influenced both by the work of the 1930s British documentary film movement (as represented in films such as Housing Problems [1935)) and by the kind of feature journalism, making extensive use of location interviews, developed within BBC Radio.

Special Enquiry started with a program investigating life in the slum tenements of Glasgow. Following this program, newspapers expressed widespread and positive appreciation of the new series. Special Enquiry went on to engage with a variety of issues to do with housing, poverty, health, aging, and education, among other topics. As quoted in Popular Television in Britain, Swallow described the response the first program received: "We had many phone calls, even letters, from people who, because they know nothing about it, hadn't seen that sort of thing before, wouldn't believe it. They thought we were lying. That it was somehow fiction. So this was a television breakthrough."

One of the most controversial programs in the series, "Has Britain a Colour Bar?,'' investigated racial prejudice against immigrants, taking the city of Bir­mingham as an example. Like all the programs in the series, it consisted of a filmed report by an on-location investigative reporter (here Rene Cutforth), together with interview sequences. Following a convention of the period, interviews in Special Enquiry were often presented as direct-to-camera testimony, giving the series something of the feel of an "access program" and linking it back to the precedent of direct address by ordinary people in the 1930s "classic" Housing Problems. The "Colour Bar" edition caused extensive public discussion, not least for the frankness with which racial prejudice was revealed in the speech of some of the participants, including trade union officials. There was also a powerful, partly dramatized scene in which a newly arrived immigrant looked for lodgings, to be repeatedly turned away by landladies, sometimes with the reason made perfectly clear. The Daily Express thought the program to be "one of the most outspoken ... ever screened."

At the time, Swallow was also the series producer of The World Is Ours, made in cooperation with the United Nations and produced within the BBC's new documentary department, headed by the distinguished filmmaker Paul Rotha. In 1960, Swallow became assistant editor of Panorama at a time when this series was establishing itself as the leading current affairs program on British television. Three years later, he signed to set up an independent company with Denis Mitchell, one the most brilliantly original documentary directors ever to work for British television. Together, the two did a series for Granada called This England, which further extended television's exploration of working-class life through a relaxed approach  that kept commentary to a minimum. During this period, Swallow made A Wedding on Saturday, a film about a wedding in a northern mining village, which won the Prix Italia in 1965.

Going back to the BBC in 1968, after a period of work that included the first Anglo-Soviet co-production, Ten Days That Shook the World (on the Russian Revolution) for Granada, Swallow became series editor of the arts program Omnibus. During his first year, editions of this series included Ken Russell's much­ admired biographical film on Delius and Tony Palmer's pathbreaking program on popular music, All My Loving. Swallow went on to become the BBC's head of arts features before shifting northward again, to rejoin Granada, where, among other things, he worked on the 1985 series Television, an ambitious attempt at tracing the history and significance of the medium across the world.

Swallow wrote extensively on the medium for newspapers and journals, and his widely cited book Factual Television remains one of the most thoughtful and sustained reflections on its subject by a practitioner. He was television adviser for the planning of the British Film Institute's Museum of the Moving Image, established in London's South Bank arts complex. The career of Swallow was both distinctive and representative. It was distinctive in his contribution (particularly in the shaping and supportive role of series editor) both to the investigative documentary and to arts programming, where his interests, enthusiasm, and creative empathy extended well beyond the confines of southern middle-class England. It was representative insofar as his ability to be both popular and serious, intellectually engaged yet fully aware of the need to address a general audience, displayed the best qualities of British public service television. Swallow died in 2000.