Veteran filmmaker, Chief Tunde Oloyede, has died. He was 70 years old.
According to emerging reports, the celebrated filmmaker died in his sleep this morning in at his home in Festac Town Lagos.
Oloyede was married to veteran broadcaster, Bimbo Oloyede. He was also the former President of ITPAN.
He is reputed as the producer and foremost director of the Popular NTA series ‘The Village Headmaster’ amongst several other productions.
The drama series was famed for being Nigeria’s longest running television soap opera. It aired on Nigeria’s oldest television channel, NTA from 1968 to 1988.
The drama stars Justus Esiri and Femi Robinson, the drama was produced in 1958 and aired on radio station for six years before its format was transformed into a Television series on NTA.
A full series began in 1968 with an initial order of 13 episodes and ran until 1988. The original recordings are not known to have survived.
On February 2013, Oloyede was quoted on a national daily to have said; “Before the Ambassador (Olusegun Olusola) died, we had been working on bringing back ‘The Village Headmaster’ in three possible formats, on film; on stage and back to television.”
Until his death, he ran his own production outfit known as ‘Media International Production’.