This is taken from The Times, April 9, 2008:

Mike Hill
BBC writer and producer who remained fiercely anti-Establishment

Mike Hill was a much-liked and sometimes quirky presence at BBC television in a golden period of its satirical - and serious talk show - heyday.

He was the deputy to Rowan Ayers for the groundbreaking Late-Night Line-up presented by Joan Bakewell and Michael Dean, and went on to be executive producer of a late-night discussion programme Up Sunday in 1972-73 which featured a glittering array of talkers and performers, including John Wells, John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, Barry Humpries, Clive James, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. The initial format of the show was to discuss the week's news critically and entertainingly, with a regular slot featuring James Cameron and Willie Rushton. Up Sunday was, in the words of a former BBC executive, so successful that “naturally, the corporation took it off”.

Hill subsequently became executive producer of The End of the Pier Show, transmitted in 1974-75, which was a mixture of satire and musical, with guests John Wells, John Fortune, Carl Davis and Madeline Smith, Peter Sellers, John Laurie, Ivor Cutler and John Bird. This was the first TV programme to mix cartoons with live performances and was thought of as pioneering in its time.

During the 1970s and 1980s Hill continued to be involved with subsequent programmes of a similar genre, mixing satire, current affairs and music, including In the Looking Glass, Rutland Weekend Television, and fantasy programmes such as The Snow Queen, The Light Princess - which won the Royal Television Society's Most Original Programme Award in 1978, Jane of the Mirror (a strip cartoon which won a Bafta for artwork), and two hour-long Angela Brazil-type schoolgirl films, Schoolgirl Chums in 1982 and St Ursula's in Danger in 1983.

Hill had an unlikely background for a media man, having been in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War - he flew Spitfires in a reconnaissance task over the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, and was a brave and sometimes reckless pilot. He had also seen service on Russian convoys during the war.

He was born in Yorkshire and, originally called Denys Michael Ryshworth-Hill, was the second of two sons. He first attended school in Ripon, Yorkshire, and then went to King's School, Canterbury. While at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, from 1945-48, he wrote the sports column for Isis. He never completed his Oxford degree as he was rusticated for insufficient attention to studies, or, as a contemporary remembers, for being a “general drunk and layabout”.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hill lived the kind of Bohemian life in London that was possible in those days when there were cheap lodgings in Chelsea and a man could survive somehow on the small fees paid by a series of fringe magazines. He was pleased to wangle a job as editor of Flight Deck magazine, for the Fleet Air Arm - especially, he told a friend, because the publication only came out four times a year. In this capacity Hill was employed by the Admiralty. He was subsequently employed as a journalist by Amalgamated Press.

In the 1960s Hill was introduced to the BBC by his wartime friend Rowan Ayers. He did some research work on The Great War, written by Correlli Barnett, which was broadcast in 1964. He worked on the Tonight programme and went on to become Ayers's deputy on Late-Night Line-up, a legendary live discussion programme which mixed the serious with the provocative, and was finally taken off the air in 1973 after 3,000 memorable transmissions. He also worked with Ned Sherrin on That Was the Week that Was.

Hill's naval background earned him the nickname “The Commander” at the BBC. Joan Bakewell considered him a warm and encouraging presence in the Late-Night Line-up studio, as did many colleagues. A BBC colleague, Ian Keill, remembers Mike Hill as “optimistic, witty and cheerful - even when everything about us seemed to be falling apart at the seams”. Those with a more corporate view of BBC structures were more inclined to judge Hill as genial but irresponsible: yet the presenters and performers felt he protected them somewhat from “the less encouraging noises emanating from the sixth floor at TV Centre”.

Hill certainly had his eccentricities. Despite, or perhaps because of, his background he was chronically anti-Establishment, and all but concealed his family's double-barrelled name (or his own true given name, Denys). He had an obsessive hostility against Wykehamists, whom he considered snobbish, Civil-Service-minded and having an insufferably superior air. This may have derived from an adversarial view of Alasdair Milne, sometime Director-General.

In his bohemian days Hill had been an habitué of such Soho shebeens as the Colony Room and the Gargoyle drinking club, but in his middle years he curbed his drinking habits and latterly he eschewed alcohol altogether.

Hill retired to Deal, Kent, in the 1980s, prompted by the presence there of his friends Alan Brien and Jill Tweedie, and where his sometime neighbours included Simon Raven and Charles Hawtrey. He retired from the BBC mainly to care for his wife, Patricia Montague-Brooks (neé Ferguson), who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Despite - or perhaps again, because of - a reputation in earlier days as a ladies' man, Hill was devoted to his wife and her two daughters from a previous marriage, whom he came to regard as his own family. He was devastated when Patricia died in 1984, from a bout of pneumonia.

In retirement he maintained a cheerful friendship with pals from his BBC days, and particularly with Ned Sherrin - a loyal friend from Oxford days. He had always wanted to be a writer, and privately he wrote poetry as well as several unpublished novels. He published three books, including Duty Free: Fleet Air Arm Days, drawn from his diaries kept during the Second World War, and a word-of-mouth success with military veterans; Right Royal Remarks - 1066 to 1996, from research done with Ned Sherrin on strange quotations from royalty through the centuries; and A Little Local Difficulty, a roman à clef about life at the BBC, which he self-published, and which featured, barely disguised, characters such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Grace Wyndham Goldie.

Michael Hill, BBC producer and writer, was born on June 17, 1923. He died on March 16, 2008, aged 84