The son of BBC Foreign Correspondent Ivor Jones, he attended Westminster Public School, London, St John's College, Cambridge and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, before training as a theatre director with the Prospect Theatre Company in the 1970s. After further theatre work and novel writing, he joined HTV and then moved to Granada Television where, as well as Coronation Street, he both directed and produced Brass and was the first producer of the station's short-lived soap Albion Market. He then went on to write Fighting Back and write and direct Shalom Salaam. His work since then has been a mixture of writing and directing films and television movies including Bonhoeffer - Die letzte Stufe, Made in Heaven and the trilogy Desire, Delight and Delirium.