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Administrator
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This is taken from The Times, August 12, 2008:
Sir Bill Cotton: BBC TV managing director and BBC1 controller
Bill Cotton was for years one of the best-known figures in British television. This was partly because, as he was always happy to acknowledge, his father had been a household name. The Billy Cotton Band Show had vanished from the screen long before the son of its boisterous compère climbed the ladder of success in the BBC, but the association stuck.
When Cotton was managing director of BBC Television in 1986, an old lady at a Buckingham Palace garden party asked him why he had stopped his television band show. “I’m too old,” said Cotton. “Not at all,” the lady replied, “you look just the same to me.” His father had been dead for 17 years, but he was much amused, and dined out on the story.
But if his father had given him a start, the son who originally called himself Bill Cotton Jr became a substantial television figure on his own merits. Unlike his father, he pursued a career behind the camera instead of in front of it, and he rose steadily up the BBC hierarchy, eventually being responsible for all television output.
He was no intellectual and was cheerfully aware of sharper and better educated minds around him. He dismissed any thought of disadvantage with a typical quip: “The great thing about being mediocre is that I am always at my best.” His showbusiness background may not have had the kudos of an Oxbridge degree but it gave him the common touch, and he was a shrewd judge of popular taste.
William Frederick Cotton was born in London in 1928. He spent a happy childhood mixing with the stars of the variety theatre before being sent as a boarder to Ardingly College in Sussex, “a miserable barracks of a place where the masters beat any cockiness out of me”. After National Service in the Army — he was commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps — he worked as a song plugger for Noel Gay, the music publisher, and in the music division of Chappells. He was later joint managing director of the Michael Reine Music Company.
He joined the BBC as a trainee producer in 1956 and was soon given his chance on mainstream programmes, including the pop show Six-Five Special. The one assignment he decided to steer clear of was The Billy Cotton Band Show, fearing that this might lead to arguments with his father. Cotton Sr talked him round and he worked on the show, without serious disagreements, for four years.
Much later in his career, when performers’ fees were being negotiated, he would explain to importunate agents that it had actually cost his father money to appear on television. BBC fees at the time were so ungenerous that they did not cover the wages of the Cotton Band. The elder Cotton used television as a shop window because the resultant fame made him bookable by theatres and music halls, where the real money was made.
When ill-health forced his father’s retirement, Cotton continued in the BBC as a light entertainment producer. This was the area of television where his true interest always lay and before long he was associated with almost every popular variety programme on the screen. By 1962 he was assistant head of light entertainment and from 1970 to 1977 he was head of the BBC Light Entertainment Group.
He was no administrator, as he freely admitted. In later years, as a member of the BBC board of management, he often complained that to get on in the corporation people had to climb further and further away from “the coal face” of programme making. It was not unknown for him to hand over an important meeting to a deputy and hurry away to visit the set of some new variety show in the making. This caused dismay among BBC bureaucrats, but Cotton’s good humour and his ability to produce a comical story for every occasion usually won them over in the end.
His forte was spotting and encouraging talent. During a trip to the Netherlands he saw a show called One Out of Eight which had been devised by a Dutch housewife. He brought the idea to the BBC, persuaded a somewhat reluctant Bruce Forsyth to be the host and The Generation Game became a Saturday evening staple. He was also instrumental in pairing Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett as The Two Ronnies and in launching Michael Parkinson as a talk show host.
To many television performers whose names were household words, he was something of a father confessor. When they arrived at his office to discuss their problems, they were likely to be whisked away to his favourite table in a dimly lit Chinese restaurant in Kensington where hours might pass before they emerged, problems often solved.
One of his biggest disappointments was losing Morecambe and Wise to ITV soon after he became Controller of BBC1 in 1977, the first person to reach such a position from a background in light entertainment. Back in the Sixties he had helped to bring the pair to the BBC and seen them reach their peak as entertainers, with their Christmas shows attracting up to 28 million viewers.
When Eric Morecambe mentioned at a BBC Christmas party that he and Ernie Wise had received a generous offer from Thames Television, Cotton assured him that the BBC would match it and they shook hands. Cotton was in America recovering from the flu when he heard that Eric and Ernie had signed for Thames after all, and he felt badly let down. He regarded their Thames shows as a squandering of talent, but took no pleasure from this.
As the head of BBC1 Cotton proved to be an astute scheduler, ensuring that programmes “inherited” an audience captured by those going before. This Cotton effect was particularly significant on Saturdays when weekend audience figures were regarded as being of the greatest importance in the ratings war with ITV. Later in his career, however, Cotton was to discount high audience ratings as the immutable gauge of a television station’s success. Once, when the BBC and ITV were locked in combat over audiences for the new breakfast programming, he brought an acrimonious corporation meeting to a sudden halt by shouting: “remember the battleship Potemkin!”
When his executives responded with uncomprehending stares, Cotton explained: “They put too much faith in the ratings.” During the pacifying laughter that ensued, Cotton gathered his papers and left them to it. It was often by such devices that he managed to retain the loyalty and affection of programme heads.
The lowest point of his 30-year BBC career came in 1982 when he was passed over for the job on which he had set his heart — managing directorship of BBC Television. He always maintained that he had been promised the post by the new Director-General, Alasdair Milne, but that Milne had been overruled by the BBC Chairman, George Howard, who preferred Aubrey Singer.
Cotton made no secret of his displeasure when he was given what he regarded as a “non-job” in charge of plans for a BBC satellite service. Banished from his beloved Television Centre, he fretted in some luxury in a separate building until early in 1984, when the tide of BBC politics turned in his favour. At last he found himself in the managing director’s chair.
From the start, he was determined to recruit to the BBC the man he admired most in television, Michael Grade, then working in America. Although the two were lifelong friends, negotiations proved long and difficult. When Grade was safely on the staff as Controller of BBC1, Cotton declared that if he had never done anything else for the corporation, that one appointment would have justified his existence. He was dismayed when Grade left after only a few years to take over Channel Four.
Cotton stepped down in 1988 on reaching the BBC’s customary retiring age of 60. Will Wyatt, an executive who worked under him, called Cotton “the last of the old era”, a man who loved the BBC, was sentimental about it and let it show. “He had a rare sense of the public mood and was able to communicate this to those around him,” said Wyatt. “He was combative, reassuring and streetwise in times of crisis, and alert to the dangers of overconfidence when things were going well — all in all, a fund of common sense.”
Cotton was held in great affection both within the BBC and outside. When he arrived at any gathering of showbusiness people, such as the press launch of a new variety programme, he would often be greeted with applause — an accolade ordinarily reserved for star performers and not accorded to BBC mandarins. This was partly because of the association with his father, but also because he was something of a performer in his own right as wit and raconteur.
He was certainly as superstitious as any theatrical. Nothing would persuade him to wear green or to get into a green car, even a limousine of that hue provided by solicitous hosts in a foreign country. Unknown to most of his associates, on the other hand, he was also deeply religious, though not a regular churchgoer. He was able to quote entire hymns from Ancient and Modern and he did so whenever he thought it appropriate.
A verse by George Herbert that he considered especially suitable for television people, and which he would declaim without preamble or subsequent interpretation, was: “A man that looks on glass/ On it may stay his eye/ Or if he pleaseth, through it pass/ And then the Heav’n espy.”
He had a long association with BBC Enterprises, the corporation’s commercial arm, of which he was chairman for a time, and also with the Royal Television Society, of which he was a Fellow and a president. After his retirement from the BBC he became chairman of Noel Gay Television and of the ITV company, Meridian. For a decade he acted as agent for the broadcaster Sue Lawley. He was appointed OBE in 1976 and CBE in 1989 and was knighted in 2001.
He had three daughters by his first marriage to Bernadine (known as Boo) Sinclair, who died of breast cancer in 1964. His second marriage, to Ann Henderson, was dissolved and he married Kathryn Burgess in 1990.
Sir Bill Cotton, CBE, television executive, was born on April 23, 1928. He died on August 11, 2008, aged 80
Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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