The word "showbiz" seems to tell the whole story. It sounds so dismissive and it is easy to see these two moments as moments of blockage and failure. There is, however, a very different way of seeing them. The books on mesmerism and Sherrington were never finished but the research and thinking fed into a series of lectures during the Seventies and into both his work in television and the performing arts for years. In 1978-79 Miller (together with producer Patrick Uden) made the BBC series, The Body in Question, a hugely successful account of the human body and illness. The same kind of ideas, and the reading he had done for both spells of academic research, fed into his later BBC2 series, Madness. The former, in particular, was Miller at his best: learned, supremely articulate and deeply compassionate.

Less well known are two superb documentaries Miller made, again with Patrick Uden, during the mid-Eighties and Nineties. The first, Ivan (BBC2, 1984), was a documentary made for Horizon about Ivan Vaughan, a man who had been struck down with Parkinson's Disease in his early forties. The second, Prisoner of Consciousness, made for Channel 4, was about a gifted musician with devastating memory loss. In both programmes, what was so moving was the relationship Miller struck up with these men, the warmth, empathy and even humour, in the face of terrible medical conditions.

However, it was in Miller's work in theatre and opera, over almost half a century, that his medical and philosophical reading has really come together with his artistic creativity. Miller is one of Britain's most gifted directors. He has received acclaim in three different areas: theatre, opera and television drama. He started out in television and theatre in the early Sixties, immediately after his success as a performer with Beyond the Fringe. He made his debut as a theatre director at the Royal Court in 1962, directing Osborne's Under Plain Cover. But his best work during that early period were five black-and-white television dramas for the BBC, filmed between 1965-68: The Drinking Party and The Death of Socrates, both about Plato, Mr Sludge the Medium, about the Victorian obsession with spiritualism, his iconoclastic Alice in Wonderland, aired to wide acclaim on Boxing Day 1966, and M.R. James's ghost story, Whistle and I'll Come to You. They already showed Miller's signature interests in adapting non-fiction as drama, using unconventional settings and placing classic texts in an unusual and illuminating setting.

Alice was a fascinating mix of Victorian clutter and Sixties satire, complete with a score by Ravi Shankar and famous contemporary actors and comedians, from Peter Cook and Alan Bennett to John Bird, John Gielgud and Peter Sellers. The Drinking Party, filmed at Stowe, turned Plato's Symposium into a reunion of public school scholars. Alice had no cute white rabbits. The Plato plays had no togas.

From the mid-Sixties, however, Miller turned to theatre and opera. He is perhaps best known for taking a classic work and trying to bring it to life by putting it in a different setting. "I suppose I have a reputation as a bit of a messer — around with untouchable masterpieces," he told one interviewer. "But what I like to do with works like this is try to restore them — scrape away two centuries of varnish of the wrong sort of tradition so that the music can really speak." The most famous examples are his Mafia production of Rigoletto set in 1950s Little Italy (English National Opera, 1982), his posh and very English Mikado, staged in a dazzling white grand seaside hotel (ENO, 1986), and the Armani Così fan tutte, complete with mobile phones (Royal Opera House, 1995).