Administrator
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This is taken from The Independent:
Sir David Hatch Brilliant BBC radio producer and performer turned administrator Published: 14 June 2007
David Edwin Hatch, actor, producer, writer and radio executive: born 7 May 1939; Radio Network Editor, BBC Manchester 1974-78; Head of Light Entertainment (Radio), BBC 1978-80; Controller, BBC Radio 2 1980-83; Controller, BBC Radio 4 1983-86; Director of Programmes, BBC Radio (later Network Radio, BBC) 1986-87, Managing Director 1987-93; Vice-Chairman, BBC Enterprises 1987-93; Adviser to the Director-General, BBC 1993-95; CBE 1994; Chairman, National Consumer Council 1996-2000; Chairman, Services Sound and Vision Corporation 2000-07; Chairman, Parole Board of England and Wales 2000-04; Kt 2004; married 1964 Ann Martin (two sons, one daughter), 1999 Mary Clancy; died Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire 13 June 2007.
David Hatch was a brilliant radio producer, writer and performer who became a hands-on BBC administrator and was able successfully to negotiate the shark-infested waters of the Corporation, eventually becoming head of the entire radio enterprise, or in BBC bureaucratic jargon "Managing Director, Network Radio BBC".
On his way to the top he endeared himself to staff and colleagues generally by championing radio at every opportunity and showing little inclination to use his various posts as stepping-stones to what some might think of as the greater glory of television. Hatch remained a radio man, pure and simple.
Yet he was essentially an easy-going, sociable man with a droll sense of humour who, especially in his early days, fitted perfectly the role left empty by the death of Kenneth Horne, another superlative radio performer. Hatch was a superb "straight" man: never more so than in the comedy programme he inherited as producer when he joined the BBC in 1965, I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which was stuffed with up-and-coming comics such as John Cleese, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Jo Kendall and Tim Brooke-Taylor.
While the rest of the cast engaged in extravagant and hilarious foolery, Hatch played the classic lone figure of sanity in a mad universe, by turns avuncular, stern, unflappable. At the end of one series, in 1969, the I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again survey (a regular feature) examined "Love":
Hatch: What is that certain something that first attracts a boy to a girl? No one can say.
Bill Oddie: I can.
Hatch: Not on radio you can't. I suppose really the special allure of a woman was probably best summed up by an eminent psychoanalyst when he said . . .
John Cleese: Phwoooar!
David Hatch was born in 1939, the fourth and youngest son of a country vicar. He was educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, in Surrey, and then Queen's College, Cambridge, where he gained an MA and a Diploma in Education. Originally he planned to read theology, to follow in his father's footsteps, but got sidetracked into the Cambridge Footlights company, which then included Cleese, Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, Oddie and Jonathan Lynn.
It was a comic melting-pot which later produced Monty Python, The Goodies, Yes, Minister (co-created and co-written by Lynn) and a multitude of other classic comedy shows and radio and TV programmes.
Leaving Cambridge, Hatch successfully toured America with Cambridge Circus and broke into the West End for a run. He joined the BBC in 1964 through a scheme run by radio's "Light Entertainment" department, and cut his producing teeth on magazine programmes such as Roundabout (an early evening show).
After I'm Sorry, he produced numerous light entertainment shows, including The Tennis Elbow Foot Game (a "lost" programme collectors of old radio shows would give their eye-teeth to be able to hear again) and Just a Minute, as well as adaptations of the novelist Richard Gordon's Doctor in the House, and television-to-radio transfers (a flourishing trade in the 1970s) like Brothers in Law and All Gas and Gaiters. He also created and launched the Friday late-night satire show on Radio 4, Week Ending, which began unpromisingly po-faced (and voiced) but soon became a cutting-edge programme to which most of today's best comedy writers contributed at one time or another.
After a while Hatch discovered (somewhat to his surprise, as he later recalled) that he was no longer "getting a buzz out of studio work. Management seemed an obvious move".
Following a stint in Manchester and then a couple of years as Head of Light Entertainment Radio, he was made Controller of Radio 2. During his three years there he let commercial stations mount full-scale and frenzied assaults on Radio 1 while he quietly built up "personality" presenters on his own network, replacing the old "announcer" system. Seeing that there was a dearth of female presenters, he captured and built up Gloria Hunniford into a star performer.
In 1983 he moved from Radio 2 to Radio 4, again as Controller. He found an enormous listener-loyalty which was immensely enthusiastic, but could also be immensely ferocious. Changing the steady morning schedules into an overall "running" show, Rollercoaster, proved fairly disastrous, as Hatch ruefully realised in short order. "[It] brought me tremendous abuse", he recalled years later. "I'm sure they'll find the word 'Rollercoaster' on my heart when I die".
He survived, and gradually brought round most of his critics and the vast Radio 4 audience to the view that change was really inevitable, and could often be liberating.
In 1986 he was made Director of Programmes, Radio, and finally Managing Director of the entire Broadcasting House enterprise. He finally retired in 1995, having been Adviser to the BBC Director-General from 1993.
From being a BBC apparatchik (though a friendly and approachable apparatchik) Hatch became Chair of the National Consumer Council from 1996 through to 2000, joining the ranks of the great and the good. He helped to run the British forces broadcasting network and was a JP, sitting regularly at Aylesbury and Amersham. In 2001 he was made a governor of his old school, St John's, Leatherhead.
Jack Adrian
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