Welcome, Guest. Please Login
YaBB - Yet another Bulletin Board
  To join this Forum send an email with this exact subject line REQUEST MEMBERSHIP to bbcstaff@gmx.com telling us your connection with the BBC.
  HomeHelpSearchLogin  
 
Page Index Toggle Pages: 1
Send Topic Print
Pamela Howe (Read 3297 times)
Administrator
YaBB Administrator
*****
Offline



Posts: 3253

Pamela Howe
Mar 18th, 2004, 9:07am
 
This obituary on the radio producer Pamela Howe appeared in The Guardian:

BBC producer who programmed her passions

David Heycock
Thursday March 18, 2004
The Guardian

In the late 1960s, while working in Bristol on a regional edition of BBC Woman's Hour, the producer Pamela Howe, who has died aged 75, received a memoir about a childhood. Handwritten, in dog-eared exercise books, it dealt with the vanished 1920s world of the Forest of Dean, that remote area between Gloucester and Wales.

Pamela was so fascinated by the story that she drove to the Forest to meet the memoir's (self-educated) writer, Winifred Foley. From that meeting, and others that followed, came a Woman's Hour serial, read by June Barrie. By 1974, the memoir had become a BBC book, A Child In The Forest. Out of that came a bestselling trilogy.

Story Time, Talking About Antiques, and A Good Read were all programmes Pamela produced during a career that lasted more than four decades. Her delight in the social observation and humour of Richmal Crompton's Just William resulted in her first producing Martin Jarvis's reading of the stories and the documentary Richmal Crompton: The Woman Behind William.

That sense of humour and her literary judgment were behind her efforts in the 1970s - with David Cecil and Philip Larkin - to resuscitate the reputation of Barbara Pym, through a radio documentary and readings of her novels. Her delight in autobiography led to happy collaborations with Arthur Marshall and Kenneth Williams through serialisation of their memoirs. Among other of her series were Four Romantic Heroes - studies of such characters as Jane Austen's Mr Darcy and Daphne Du Maurier's Maxim de Winter, and Thriller, which focused on the work of PD James, Frederick Forsyth and Ruth Rendell.

Pamela never lost her common touch. She understood the listener's need not to be talked down to. She found stories about situations and feelings with which people could identify, and effective, original ways of bringing them to their attention. And everyone in her productions was made to feel they were special. The most reticent newcomers to the studio and microphone were coaxed into giving performances of which they would never have believed themselves capable.

Born in London, the only child of Thomas and Molly Howe, a civil servant and journalist, she suffered the loss of her father when she was seven. She and her mother moved from Wimbledon to Edinburgh before the war, and she was educated at George Watson's Ladies' College. There, a love of reading and the English language, which were to be so important in her work, became a passion.

In the late 1940s, 18-year-old Pamela joined the BBC as a secretary. Working with the BBC features group at Broadcasting House in London was to have a lasting effect on her subsequent career. Through producers like Laurence Gilliam and Jack Dillon, and writers such as Rene Cutforth and Louis Macneice, came an understanding of the skills and tensions involved in broadcasting.

She learnt practical efficiency and human understanding, the need to encourage, persuade and reassure contributors so that their scripts and performances could be written, rehearsed and made ready for transmission. Fraught discussions, writer's blocks and long lunch breaks in the George public house near Broadcasting House would be followed by moving and witty broadcasts.

During that period in London she spent time with the BBC in Leeds, and by the late 1960s she had become a producer with the BBC West Region in Bristol, where she was based for the rest of her career.

Pamela was great fun, often irreverent, sitting with her pug in the office, unwilling to give up smoking and impatient with demands for political correctness.

She wanted to make programmes celebrating the enjoyment reading had given her and that she hoped radio would enable her to share with many more people. She retired in 1988.

Pamela, never competitive, was popular with her many friends and colleagues. She was a very special person with whom jokes, gossip, differences of opinion - and unexpected discoveries -were great to share. She was unmarried.

· Pamela Mary Howe, radio producer, born January 23 1929; died March 8 2004
Back to top
 

The Administrator.
 
IP Logged
 
Page Index Toggle Pages: 1
Send Topic Print