This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Bobby Jaye
 
Published: 6:39PM GMT 31 Jan 2010

Bobby Jaye, who died on December 15 aged 84, was a BBC producer who worked on some of the great landmarks of postwar British comedy, including The Goon Show and Morecambe and Wise; he eventually became BBC Radio's head of light entertainment.

During his career he oversaw the successful transfer to radio of many classic BBC television comedy programmes, such as Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son and Yes, Minister, bucking the trend which saw successful radio comedy formats usually transferred to television.

As an executive, one of his biggest radio successes was After Henry, a gentle, bittersweet comedy written by Simon Brett, which ran on Radio 4 from 1985. When BBC Television turned it down, it was snapped up by Thames for ITV. Jaye was a survivor of the BBC's old guard, a twinkle-eyed showman who could, as one colleague recalled, "light up a room". He was a natural performer, and his warm-ups, prior to recordings, were often funnier than the acts he was introducing.
 
Peter Robert Jaye was born on May 9 1925 on the Isle of Wight, one of seven children. Like his two older brothers, he was educated at Ryde School. On leaving he joined the BBC as a studio manager, and in 1944, aged 19, volunteered for the Army, despite being in a reserved occupation.

After Sandhurst he was commissioned into the Royal Tank Regiment, the 25th Dragoons, and was stationed in India to prepare for the anticipated Japanese invasion. In the event he spent three years in India in the run-up to Partition.

Demobbed in August 1947, Jaye returned to his job at the BBC and during the 1950s worked as a studio manager on The Goon Show. Following his appointment as a producer in 1961, he worked on many other popular programmes of the day, among them Movie-Go-Round, The Ken Dodd Show, Twenty Questions, The Petticoat Line, My Word and My Music.

In the late 1960s he produced the weekday Late Night Extra programme, broadcast on Radios 1 and 2, and presented by Terry Wogan at the start of his own BBC career. Perhaps Jaye's own favourite production was The Small, Intricate Life of Gerald C Potter, which won a Bafta. He particularly appreciated the delicately-crafted observation of domestic life by the author, Basil Boothroyd.

As head of radio light entertainment from 1981, Jaye nurtured many new programmes, including the award-winning Radio Active, a barbed satire on the frenzied goings-on at a local radio station. The show lampooned the people of other European nations, but – once Jaye persuaded broadcasters abroad that the ability to laugh at one's own country was not the exclusive preserve of the British – was widely hailed on the Continent.

Although a professional to the last, Jaye could display the occasional mischievous streak. At a tedious meeting of the BBC's weekly programme review board during the peak of Torville and Dean's ice-skating fame, Jaye and some colleagues greeted one particularly long-winded speaker's contribution with hastily-improvised scorecards showing 6.0, 5.9, 5.7 and so on. It is said that these scores were recorded in the minutes of the meeting.

After retiring in 1985 he worked in his much-loved garden and continued his lifelong support of Crystal Palace football club.
Bobby Jaye married, in 1949, a fellow studio manager, Rita Barnsley. She and their two daughters survive him.