This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

The Reverend Cormac Rigby
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 28/03/2007

The Reverend Cormac Rigby, who died yesterday aged 67, was the original voice of Radio 3, the BBC's classical music network, and - as presentation editor for 14 years - the station's single most influential on-air figure; he later fulfilled a lifelong Christian faith by becoming a Roman Catholic priest.

It was said that Rigby patented the Radio 3 voice: civilised, measured, knowledgeable, unflappable. As presentation editor, he was also chief announcer, in charge of a team of about a dozen announcers, a term he preferred to "presenter": he disliked the cult of personality, which he regarded as an intrusion on the listener, and insisted that the programmes themselves - and not the people who introduced them - were paramount.

With Radio 3 having replaced the icily highbrow Third Programme in 1970, Rigby saw it as his job to "melt the tone" (as he put it) of the old formal style to "something more one-to-one". Nonetheless he insisted on attention to detail. To police standards on the network he would drive to Broadcasting House from his flat in Oxford listening to the previous day's continuity announcements on "snoop tapes", cassettes specially recorded for the purpose and which he stored for the rest of his life on his bedroom shelf.
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On arrival at the office Rigby would point out semantic or syntactic slips to offenders by dispatching small squares of paper on which he had written in his elegant sloping hand. He argued frequently with the BBC's then music controller, Robert Ponsonby, about pronunciation of such words as "opus" and "homosexual". Rigby's own presentation style was described by one admirer as "gentle and velvety-brown".

Although a stickler for standards, Rigby was professional enough to recognise that in radio, as in life, not everything always goes to plan. His favourite example of Radio 3's donnish wit was when the Hebrides Overture overran and crashed into the Greenwich time signal. With Olympian self-possession, the announcer, Tom Crowe, opened the microphone and apologised: "I do hope the Mendelssohn didn't interfere with your enjoyment of the pips."

In 1989 Father Cormac, as he had become, was the celebrant at a requiem mass in Westminster Cathedral for the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley. When the BBC asked him to introduce a recording of the service, Rigby pointed out that he could not do so because he was in it. Reassured that no one listening would realise this, Rigby stood in the vestry, clad in ritual vestments surmounted by a pair of headphones, setting the scene in which he would later play a central part.

A love of ballet was central to Rigby's existence - he found that the physical beauty of the dance resonated with the beauty of God's creation - and he admitted to being an obsessive balletomane. For the whole of his adult life he witnessed a performance of every ballet staged in London and Birmingham, sometimes attending five nights a week. He was also a serial theatregoer, and confessed himself overwhelmed by Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, which he saw 17 times.

Cormac John Rigby was born on May 5 1939 at Watford, and educated at Holy Rood RC primary school, Watford, and Merchant Taylors' school, Northwood. He read History at St John's College, Oxford, and spent a year at the English College in Rome. Finding the regime constricting, and upbraided by the rector for taking out a subscription to the Times Educational Supplement, Rigby returned to Oxford to work on a doctorate on Edward Thring, the Victorian preacher and headmaster of Uppingham for whom Rigby entertained a lifelong admiration.

In 1965, when his university grant expired, Rigby needed funds to allow him to complete his thesis. Leafing through the New Musical Express, he spotted two advertisements side by side, one seeking a disc-jockey for Radio Caroline and the other recruiting new BBC radio announcers. Rigby recalled that Tony Blackburn and he landed the respective jobs - "we're broadcasting twins", he later noted, not without pride.

Rigby's first night on the Third Programme, as it then was, was typical of the funereal pace still called for in the mid-1960s. "I had to leave a full minute of silence between one programme and the next," Rigby recalled. "The idea was to discourage people from casual listening. They were expected to look at their Radio Times, choose what they want, listen to it, and then go away and do all the other interesting things that their lives were full of."

He remained at the BBC for 20 years. After several years as an announcer, interrupted by a brief spell as a Radio 3 planner in 1968, Rigby became the network's presentation editor in 1971. His extraordinarily mellifluous voice had been evident at his audition, but only experience revealed his level-headedness in a crisis: when Pope John Paul II was shot in Rome in 1981, the duty Radio 3 announcer found himself stuck in the lift, and Rigby was obliged to start reading the news still breathless from the sprint from his office.

He considered that good radio continuity came from a well-stocked mind, and one that could fill spare minutes on the air in an interesting way.

Resigning from the BBC in 1985 to seek ordination at the age of 46 (he left on September 14, St Cormac's Day), Rigby's early ministry included postings to Ruislip and Stanmore as curate and later parish priest.

As in his broadcasting work, Rigby took his priestly responsibilities at Stanmore extremely seriously, particularly when dealing with bereaved families, whom he always made a point of visiting at home in order to prepare for a funeral. Intolerant of other people's laxity, he believed that modern seminaries were producing many priests inadequately prepared for the ministry, and was particularly critical of what he regarded as laziness in some of his fellow priests, a malaise he felt affected the Catholic Church in Britain.

However, he greatly admired the former Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, who ordained him as a priest in 1989. Another hero was Pope Benedict XVI, whom he regarded as a formidable figure; but Rigby privately opposed the British cardinals' intervention over gay adoption, and felt that the Church had misjudged the issue by picking a fight it was never going to win.

Rigby's Catholicism was never partisan, and he was concerned that the Church's Catholicity should not alienate people; fussy liturgists irritated him as much as bossy lay people, fresh from theological courses, who thought they knew better than anyone else. He could also be grumpy about people who fell down on the job: although he admired the present Radio 3 regime, he remained impatient of idle chatter between items of music, and on hearing lazy pronunciation would telephone the BBC from his presbytery to complain.

Owning neither television nor computer, Rigby filled his retirement by listening to the radio - mainly Radio 4 - and cultivating his enormous network of friends; last Christmas he sent more than 1,000 cards, excusing this prolific gesture by explaining that it would, after all, be his last.

During the last four years of his retirement - knowing that his prostate cancer was incurable - Rigby rekindled his ministry by publishing four volumes of his short sermons and writing a weekly column for the Catholic Herald.

Conspicuously relaxed about his illness, he refused to be frightened by it. Every day since going up to Oxford in the mid-1950s, Cormac Rigby had attended or celebrated Mass. A sister survives him.

This is taken from The Guardian:

The Rev Cormac Rigby
Cultivated broadcaster who revived his desire to join the priesthood
by Robert Ponsonby
Thursday March 29, 2007

Cormac Rigby, who has died aged 67 of cancer, had two distinct careers: as a BBC radio announcer, and later as a Roman Catholic priest. Both called for an easy mastery of the spoken word, and to both he brought a naturally cultivated talent.

As presentation editor of Radio 3 from 1972 to 1985, Cormac set the tone of the channel, supervising the work of established announcers such as Patricia Hughes and Tom Crowe, engaging younger ones (among them Tony Scotland) and himself taking a full share of the announcing and presenting load. After leaving the BBC in 1985, he trained for the priesthood, served first in Ruislip, Middlesex, and then in Stanmore, north London, where he was specially happy and very well liked.

He was born in Watford, Hertfordshire; his mother had been born Grace McCormack, and his first name was a conscious recollection of her Irish maiden name. Baptised on May 21 1939, he was to be ordained on the very same day, 49 years later, by Cardinal Basil Hume in Westminster Cathedral. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' school, Northwood, Middlesex, and read history at St John's College, Oxford.

But the church beckoned, and in 1961 he went to the English College, in Rome, to train for the priesthood. There, however, he found the regime unacceptably narrow-minded, and returned to Oxford to complete a doctoral thesis on Edward Thring, the 19th-century preacher and headmaster of Uppingham. In 1965, he he became an all-purpose announcer at the BBC, working for the Home Service and the Music Programme, which then preceded the evening Third Programme.

In due course he was permitted to announce for the Third Programme, and by 1968 Cormac was also engaged as a planner for that network. Here, he first tasted blood when an internal conflict arose over the relative artistic and financial merits of Solti's Die Meistersinger, from Covent Garden, and Goodall's The Mastersingers, from the Coliseum. Cormac's championship of the latter won the day and he confessed himself "jubilant".

In 1969 the BBC published Broadcasting in the Seventies, a document that heralded the "dumbing-down" of the Third Programme. Early the following year, 134 BBC staff members - all in breach of their contract - signed a letter of protest to the Times, and Cormac's name was, characteristically, among them. In 1972, he was nevertheless appointed presentation editor of Radio 3, where his regime was distinguished.

Cormac expected his colleagues to be cultivated personalities, at ease with musical terminology and correct pronunciation in whatever language was called for. He asked that their delivery be measured and accurately stressed. And he set an admirably urbane example. He was also fiercely loyal to his staff and, as I discovered during the musicians' strike over the BBC plans, eventually dropped, to disband five orchestras in 1980, heart-warmingly supportive of those in conflict with the Philistine tendency. In 1985, he introduced his last Last Night of the Proms for television, on which he was seen regularly, then left the BBC and began, for the second time, to train as a priest.

Apart from his faith and his skills as a broadcaster, Cormac had a passion for ballet, in which he was knowledgable and discriminating. During the 1970s he devised and presented a Radio 3 programme, Royal Repertoire, which complemented the current programmes of the Royal Ballet. He also wrote for Dance and Dancers, using the pen-name John Cowan. Even after his ordination he contributed to Dance Now, and he was always glad, a friend remarked, "to get his dog collar off and go to the ballet".

In three attractive books of sermons, The Lord Be With You (2003), Lift Up Your Hearts (2004) and Let Us Give Thanks (2005), he related without self-pity how his prostate cancer had spread and he felt obliged to give up his Stanmore parish. During a longer-than-expected remission, he went to Ireland and enjoyed "the most beautiful reprise of some of my happiest journeys up and down the Irish fjords". He was in every sense a good man.

· Cormac John Rigby, broadcaster and priest, born May 5 1939; died March 27 2007