Malcolm Craddock, who has died aged 77, was a co-founder of Picture Palace, the television production company behind the swashbuckling adventure series Sharpe (1993-2008) and the Bafta-nominated documentary A Life for a Life (1998), about the miscarriage of justice that saw Stefan Kiszko jailed for 16 years for a crime that he did not commit.

Malcolm’s first venture into mainstream television came after producing TV commercials for 14 years. When an offer came from the celebrated director Jon Amiel to produce Tandoori Nights (1985-87) for Channel 4, Malcolm leapt at the chance. Written initially by Farrukh Dhondy and later by Meera Syal, the comedy about the rivalry between two Indian restaurateurs went on for two series over two years and spawned a chain of curry houses of the same name.

The task of producing Sharpe, in partnership with Muir Sutherland, was considerably more challenging. Based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels and largely set in the Napoleonic wars, it ran for five series with two extra films – 16 episodes in all, each two hours long. “It was mainly shot in Ukraine,” Malcolm told me. “Our hosts were very helpful and supplied all the things that we wanted, including the Ukrainian army. It was a long slog, mind you. We were away for 16 weeks at a stretch, working six days a week and staying in sanatoriums.”

Sharpe starred Sean Bean and also featured Daniel Craig, Brian Cox, Pete Postlethwaite and Elizabeth Hurley, with whom Malcolm had also worked on The Orchid House for Channel 4, in the Caribbean. “Liz was a real trouper in Sharpe,” he recalled. Bean was “a producer’s dream as a leading actor because he was always ready to go and didn’t keep everybody waiting”.

For BBC1 Malcolm produced Rebel Heart (2001), a four-part mini-series filmed in Dublin and set during the Irish War of Independence. It was a subject close to his own heart; he had specialised in Irish history at Cambridge.

He was born in London, the oldest of three sons of Gilbert Craddock, an insurance investigator, and his wife, Eveline. Malcolm recalled a sheltered upbringing in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, and he attended St Alban’s school. Before arriving at university after a grim two years of national service, he had seen only three films, including Bambi and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. “I had a lot of catching up to do,” he admitted, “and luckily there were some wonderful fleapits in Cambridge.”

As treasurer of the university’s film society, he inherited a budget of £12,000 and set off to make a documentary about displaced Poles unable to return to their homeland after the second world war. “That gave me a calling card at a time when it wasn’t easy to get a start in the film industry,” he recalled.

His first taste of the cutting room came on Modesty Blaise (1966) under Joseph Losey. It was Losey who gave him his really big break by asking to see a film that Malcolm had made in his spare time – “a shaggy-dog story set in London bedsit-land” – and then putting it on as a short during a season of his own work at the National Film Theatre.

Amid all his television work, Malcolm found time in 1986 to make a feature film of his own. Ping Pong was the first movie to be shot in Soho’s Chinatown, just around the corner from Picture Palace’s headquarters in Dean Street. It made its debut at the Venice film festival in 1987, having been made for Film Four International. Ping Pong was ultimately about reconciliation within a Chinese family coming to terms with their cultural roots.

Kiszko’s roots were in Slovenia, but he was living with his mother, Charlotte, in Rochdale when he was wrongly charged with the murder and sexual assault of the schoolgirl Lesley Molseed in 1975. When the story of his innocence came out, sympathy for Kiszko and outrage at the police were particularly strong in the Craddock household. “I distinctly remember meeting Stefan and his mum for the first time and talking to her about the difference between wisteria and clematis,” Malcolm said. “There were six other TV production companies lining up to make the documentary about her son’s life, but I think she chose us because I knew something about plants.”

A Life for a Life, made for ITV, was the work of which he was most proud. As well as the Bafta nomination for best single drama, it won awards for best writer (Peter Berry) and best network newcomer in the Royal Television Society awards, 1999, and best single drama in the Prix Italia. The wronged Kiszko never lived to see the documentary. He died from a massive heart attack the year after his release and before he could receive his compensation in full. Malcolm found the funeral particularly harrowing.

From 2010 until shortly before his death, Malcolm was a church warden at St Mary’s Primrose Hill and was involved in a project to offer refuge for those caught up in north London gang rivalry. He was a lifelong supporter of Tottenham Hotspur and Middlesex CCC who found his way to Lord’s whenever work permitted.

He is survived by his second wife, Rachel (nee Glaister), a television executive, and their children, Archie and Lily, and by Sam and Ben, the sons of his first marriage to Jeannie Maclay. A daughter from that marriage, Emily, predeceased him.

• Malcolm Gordon Craddock, television and film producer, born 2 August 1938; died 15 August 2015