Radio 4 reported at 6pm today (May 26) that Aubrey Singer, former Managing Director of BBC Radio, had died aged 80. He was also a former Controller of BBC2.

This is taken from The Independent:

Aubrey Singer
Energetic BBC television producer who rose through the ranks to become Deputy Director-General
Published: 28 May 2007

Aubrey Edward Singer, television and film producer and broadcasting executive: born 21 Janua ry 1927; television producer, BBC Scotland 1951-53; staff, New York Office, BBC 1953-56; producer, BBC Television 1956-59, Assistant Head of Outside Broadcasts 1959-61, Head of Science and Features 1961-67, Head of Features Group 1967-74, Managing Director 1982-84; Controller, BBC 2 1974-78; Managing Director, BBC Radio 1978-82; Deputy Director-General, BBC 1982-84; CBE 1984; managing director, White City Films 1984-96, chairman 1984-96; married 1949 Cynthia Adams (one son, two daughters, and one daughter deceased); died London 26 May 2007.

Aubrey Singer was an early victim of the convulsions that rocked the BBC in the mid-1980s. His enforced resignation as Deputy Director-General and Managing Director of Television, at the early age of 57, naturally came as a blow - yet in retrospect he was extremely lucky to have escaped, with a generous settlement package, shortly before the John Birt era, in which he certainly would not have flourished.

A plump, genial man, fond of the good things of life, he could also be a ruthless office politician and was far from universally popular at the BBC: when people spoke derisively of the panjandrums in its hierarchy, it was often him they had in mind. Though his career through the executive ranks was punctuated by mishaps and disputes he rose above them, apparently effortlessly, to fill many of the Corporation's most senior positions until he was peremptorily asked to leave by the Director-General, Alasdair Milne, just a few years before Milne himself was ejected in much the same way.

The blow fell in January 1984 when he had been Milne's deputy, as well as Managing Director of BBC Television, for less than two years. Milne had never really wanted him in the job - they had clashed much earlier in their careers - and was keen to appoint his friend Bill Cotton. But Singer had been effectively forced on him by George Howard, chairman of the board of governors. Howard and Singer had become close in 1981 when they went to China together to discuss a proposed tour by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, on an itinerary that allowed ample time to indulge Howard's enthusiasm for Ming tombs.

BBC Television had been performing poorly during Singer's tenure, wilting under a two-pronged assault from a thriving ITV and Channel 4, just starting to recover from an ill-starred launch. In particular, Singer had been blamed for the failure of 60 Minutes, an early evening current affairs programme on BBC1. There was already talk of approaching Michael Grade to take over as head of BBC 1 - which he did later that year - and the two would have been unlikely to get on. And crucially, Howard's term as chairman had come to an end in 1983, when he was replaced by the less biddable Stuart Young.

All the same, Singer had no inkling of what was to come when he and Milne set out early on a mild winter morning for a day's shooting on the Berkshire Downs. A keen raconteur - he listed talking as one of his recreations in Who's Who - he enjoyed telling the story of how the blow fell. They shot until 2pm, then enjoyed a convivial lunch before loading their share of the dead birds into the boot of Milne's car and heading home. They had just joined the M4 and Singer was starting to doze off when Milne asked conversationally: "Have you ever thought of taking premature retirement?"

It was soon apparent that the question was rhetorical, for Milne and Young had already made up their minds to dispense with his services. He was out within a month - yet it was by no means the end of his career in television. Some time earlier, as an insurance policy, he had registered the name of an independent production company, White City Films. As part of his severance agreement the BBC agreed to fund the development of its programmes for five years and gave him a consultancy contract for the same period. He remained managing director of White City Films until 1996.

Born in Yorkshire in 1927, Singer left Bradford Grammar School when he was 17 and joined a company that made training films for the Armed Forces. After working for film companies in Africa and Austria he joined the BBC in 1949, initially working in outside broadcasts.

As a producer he specialised in making programmes about science, and from the beginning developed a strong instinct for defending his territory. That was when he had his first falling-out with Milne who, as a producer on the Tonight programme, had commandeered some as yet unscreened footage from one of his programmes and broadcast it without permission, prompting an exchange of pompous memos. In 1961 he was made Head of Science and Features, a job that was upgraded in 1967 to Head of the Features Group.

His promotion helped him resist the temptation to leave the BBC that year, when he was part of the consortium that bid successfully for the commercial TV franchise for his native Yorkshire. He decided in the end that the BBC was his natural habitat. Among the notable series that he oversaw in subsequent years was BBC2's The Ascent of Man, written and presented by Jacob Bronowski and broadcast in 1973.

In 1974 Singer became head of BBC2, but his chief skills lay in programme-making rather than administration. Colleagues complained that he favoured his own ideas and pushed them through with great energy, elbowing others aside. Four years later he was appointed Managing Director of Radio, where his failings as a negotiator were exposed in a dramatic and public fashion, when it fell to him to try to cut down the number of BBC house orchestras.

His bull-headed approach led to a strike by musicians and a consequent delay to the start of the hallowed season of Proms. The musicians won public sympathy by organising a floating concert on the Thames outside the Houses of Parliament, where they played Handel's Water Music. The strike was settled only after Singer - who protested all along that he was only carrying out the policy of the board of management - was persuaded to stand down from the negotiating team. Yet, through his cultivation of Howard, he made sure that the debacle did not prevent his appointment as Milne's deputy two years later.

He married Cynthia Adams in 1949 and they had four children. He was appointed CBE in 1984. From 1984 to 1996 he served on the council of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford.

Michael Leapman

This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Aubrey Singer
Last Updated: 1:23am BST 28/05/2007

Aubrey Singer, who died on Saturday aged 80, was a senior BBC television and radio executive noted for his boundless enthusiasm and his fund of programme ideas.

"Aubrey makes a thousand flowers bloom," said his boss at BBC Television, Sir Huw Wheldon. Another colleague summed up Singer's contribution to broadcasting: "Aubrey has roughly 100 ideas every day, of which 98 are quite useless. The other two more than justify his salary."

In his 35 years at the BBC Singer was associated with a remarkable range of pioneering programmes and technical developments.

As head of television's Science and Features he inaugurated Horizon, still holding its own after 43 years as television's premier science series, and the only slightly less venerable Tomorrow's World. As Controller, BBC2 he presided over that channel's heyday of high profile documentary series, beginning with Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and continuing with America; The Ascent of Man; The Body in Question; and Men of Ideas. Collectively this unique contribution to high culture television was known as "Aubrey's big bangs".

In BBC Radio, of which he was managing director from 1978 to 1982, Singer's enthusiasm transferred itself to the expansion of the VHF network and juggling with as many as seven different channels when three of his nominal four regularly split their dual wavelengths.

Aubrey Edward Singer was born on January 21 1927 at Bradford, where his mother, Elizabeth, was head of music at the Girls' Grammar School. After Giggleswick, Aubrey went to Bradford Boys' Grammar School, and at 17 got a job in the film industry. He directed films teaching the armed forces how to shoot and worked in Africa and Austria.

He joined BBC television as an outside broadcasts producer, becoming at 22 one of the youngest ever appointed. He spent some time with BBC Scotland and then with the BBC's New York office. On his return to London he produced a number of scientific programmes before being appointed head of the newly-created Science and Features department. In 1962 he masterminded the BBC's first satellite broadcast.

Promotion to Controller of BBC2, in the wake of David Attenborough and Robin Scott, followed. For Singer this was the most creative, and probably the most exciting, period of his career.

Besides a string of memorable factual series, he was closely involved with some of BBC2's strongest drama, including I, Claudius, based on the novels by Robert Graves, and an original serial for television by Frederic Raphael, The Glittering Prizes. Following standard BBC policy in the 1960s and 1970s of switching executives between Television Centre and Broadcasting House, Singer was next given charge of radio, though he had no previous experience of the medium.

Characteristically, he was able to switch enthusiasms with barely a tremor, speaking of his new charge as if it had been a lifelong obsession. "Radio," he declared, "is the most exciting and the most flexible medium of the lot. If only it had been invented after television instead of before, think how people would love it."

In no time the former television wunderkind was grappling with the challenge of a wavelength upheaval and redressing what he described as the "run-down" condition of radio.

He inaugurated a seven-year, £50 million plan to put all BBC radio on VHF, and laid the foundations for 24-hour broadcasting and the acquisition of a fifth radio channel, though these did not arrive until after his period at the head of the service. But the worst trauma of his career was lying in wait. Singer had the misfortune to be called on to deal with the BBC musicians' strike. The dispute over the future of the Corporation's 11 in-house orchestras had been a running sore for years. In 1980 it erupted.

As part of a general economy drive, BBC management proposed to axe five orchestras and cut Radio 3 broadcasting hours, with a loss of 172 jobs and a projected saving of £500,000. The Musicians' Union responded swiftly and furiously, declaring the move to be "unacceptable not just to the union, but to the music profession as a whole".

The BBC's position was that it could no longer sustain the burden of so many orchestras. But both the public and the press were unequivocally on the musicians' side. An all-out strike took live music off the air and delayed the start of the Proms season, something only Hitler had previously achieved. With respected figures such as the septuagenarian Sidonie Goossens picketing Broadcasting House, and distinguished conductors such as André Previn and Giulini lining up to support the strike, Singer was cast as an ogre.

The dispute ended in an inevitable compromise, but Singer had clearly lost the day; some commentators believed that he had come close to losing his job.

By 1982 he was back at Television Centre, this time as managing director, with the title of deputy director-general thrown in. True to form, he was off on the inauguration trail again, ushering in breakfast television ("You can't know if you are for it until you have actually seen it," he pronounced, drawing on his American experience), and putting forward a case for a BBC "soap" as the service's answer to ITV's long-running Coronation Street.

Breakfast Time was an instant success, trouncing the rival TV-am; EastEnders had to wait until after Singer's time.

Singer's longed-for tenure at the top of BBC television lasted only two years. At 57 - three years short of BBC retiring age - he was summarily removed from office by the BBC Governors. For his own part, he maintained that he had been looking for an opportunity to go into independent production.

Most onlookers believed he had been caught up in an unprecedented wave of top-level sackings which was to involve his successor in BBC Radio, Dick Francis, his rival for the top job at television, Brian Wenham, and ultimately the director-general himself, Alasdair Milne.

Justly or otherwise, Singer was blamed for a disastrous fall in the BBC's audience ratings, and a general feeling that BBC Television was not measuring up to the opposition, then riding on the crest of a wave created by The Jewel in the Crown.

With a handsome golden handshake - said to be £200,000 - Singer embarked on his declared ambition of setting up an independent production company, White City Films. It made a number of programmes, including a series about Michelangelo, but eventually became dormant.

Rotund, moon-faced and bespectacled, Aubrey Singer presented a distinctly Billy Bunterish appearance. Some of his BBC colleagues regarded him as an affable buffoon, but most recognised him as an outstanding innovator and a force to be reckoned with. Singer himself had no illusions about the extent of his talents. He told an interviewer: "I'm a great generalist. I'm good at grasping general principles, but the details tend to bore me. It's one of my great faults, but I think it gives me a sense of audience. If something's going to bore me, then it will bore them."

Normally an easy-going man, he could display temper when his views did not prevail. He would thump the table and then apologise for what he called "my General Patton act".

His many enthusiasms embraced a lovel of travel which, as a top-ranking television executive in search of new material, he was regularly able to indulge. China especially fascinated him.

A series of visits to Beijing, sometimes in the company of the BBC's chairman, George Howard, who could boast a girth even more generous than Singer's, inspired another of "Aubrey's big bangs". He wrote a well-received book, entitled The Lion and the Dragon, about the earliest British embassy to Beijing.

He was appointed CBE in 1984.

Aubrey Singer married, in 1949, Cynthia Adams. They had a son, Adam, who followed his father into television with notable success, and two daughters. Another daughter predeceased him.

This is taken from Ariel, w/c June 11 2007:

Obituary: Aubrey Singer
tribute by: Stephen Hearst

Huw Wheldon used to say that 'Aubrey carried big guns'. He thus accurately pictured a powerful broadcasting activist dangerous to a few adversaries but greatly beneficent to the causes he supported.

He was the father of BBC tv science in the sixties, the creator of Horizon, the man who helped launch Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. From 1967 he headed a formidable features groups including science features, general features, arts features and a Man Alive department. More often running than walking he was fearless in standing up for the public interest when threatened, as he often was, by heads of big firms who objected to one or other of the programmes he was responsible for.

Those were the years often described as the golden age of television. With Kensington House near Shepherds Bush as its centre, there was much cross fertilisation among producers who floated their trial balloons over a lunchtime drink. Aubrey managed to convert count-less ideas into practical propositions.

In the seventies he presided over BBC Two at a time when money was short and expenditure threatened to exceed rises in the licence fee. Simultaneously, dozens of producers left the BBC for greener pastures in the commercial sector. Although Aubrey had tempting offers, he stayed and, towards the end of the decade, became managing director of BBC radio. Here his tenure proved controversial, particularly his encounter with the musical profession. It was clear that the BBC had too many orchestras. Aubrey, with his usual energy, set about reducing their number. This appeared to powerful interests like the end of civilisation. Even John Gielgud could be seen standing in protest outside Broadcasting House. The eventual outcome was a kind of draw, all the main orchestras being saved and a few smaller units being discontinued.

The apex of Aubrey's BBC career was his brief tenure of the tv service and being deputy director general. Mrs Thatcher was prime minister and displayed no love for the BBC. She once argued fiercely with Aubrey when he, with some spirit, defended the BBC, even holding his shirt sleeves.

Eventually he was famously, and rather abruptly, retired. He made freelance programmes with his company, well into the nineties.