I am sorry to report the death on February the 7th of Barry Lankester after a long illness.
Like many others I first became aware from afar of Barry as the 'voice of the Archers' each night introducing the latest episode on National radio but to Midlanders he was one of a team of announcers in the old Midland Region bringing news and music programmes to the local audience in the sixties and seventies. He also read the regional news in vision and when things developed became the first presenter of Midlands Today.He also enjoyed a short time at Alexandra Palace to read the National News....one amazing pioneering bulletin in which he was the presenter  when the Test Match was in a critical situation was to run the news titles over the continuing coverage and start the bulletin without interrupting the coverage.
He had been a studio manager and was heavily involved in major programmes like a never to be forgotten Christmas Day live national hook up and the first broadcast of Britten's War Requiem from the then new Coventry Cathedral.
All of this prepared him to be a pioneer of BBC Local Radio,first in Leicester then in Birmingham. He was one of the founding producers of the old Radio Birmingham later WM of course and I met him when I moved to the Midlands to join the production staffin 1970. He was famous for producing music programmes of all types,he produced the first community 'all race' programmes in local Radio..it even included a weekly news section in Esperanto! Later we co-produced a famous series of Brass band competitions. Following this he pioneered  the BBC Wolverhampton operation and I followed him there in the mid 1980s

He really was a great Local Radio producer getting literally hundreds of people on the air in the early days. Many people will have been part of his musical weekends at the old Pebble Mill studios where on weekends in the seventies and eighties they would troop in en masse for various musical festivals and competitions. He also regularly broadcast commentaries of the matches of Moseley Rugby Club.
For me he was my first producer and then a colleague and mentor in the hugely enjoyable business of broadcasting. He found the change in style from formal and structured  to informal and more 'instant' and possibly not so well crafted a challenge but we all past and present in the BBC  owe him a great deal for what he did to make broadcasting more accessable and to guarantee that local radio would work and work well.