This is taken from the Daily Telegraph, April 1, 2010:

Stephen Hearst

Stephen Hearst, who has died aged 90, ran BBC Radio 3 for six years in the 1970s having earlier, as a television executive, helped to bring two landmark series to the screen – Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Alistair Cooke's America.
 
As controller of Radio 3 (formerly the Third Programme) Hearst made the mainly classical music network much less stuffy and hidebound, sweeping away the academic language in which pieces were introduced and emphasising that listeners should be encouraged to enjoy the output rather than necessarily understand it all. "We must seek to widen understanding through enjoyment," he noted.

When he discovered that musicological introductions being read out by announcers totalled an hour and a half a day, he ordered the verbiage to be cut down; when academics from the BBC's Music Division bickered in meetings among themselves and with him, Hearst threatened to walk out.
 
There were differences, too, between Hearst and Robert Ponsonby, who succeeded Sir William Glock as the BBC's Controller of Music in 1972. When Hearst proposed the first simultaneous transmission on radio and television of an Albert Hall concert to mark the BBC's 50th anniversary, Ponsonby complained that a single television camera would displace 50 members of the audience. But, Hearst gently explained, the result would be three million viewers.

Another innovation was Hearst's idea for a weekly bulletin of "good news" in The Positive World, but this lasted only a year; more successful were a revival of the old Third Programme series The Critics – reincarnated as Critics' Forum – and his "theme" days, beginning in January 1973 with French Sunday (featuring music, poetry and drama from France) and followed by a Women's Day and German, Polish and Italian Weekends.

But when he launched Your Concert Choice, with music chosen by listeners phoning in, senior figures with the BBC branded it a populist "disgrace"; a few months later, one of Hearst's own producers openly doubted that Radio 3 was "the great cultural institution that the Third Programme had been".

Hearst bore such travails with equanimity, remarking that the station should reflect not just the nation's intellectual life but also "initiate new life". But in turning over many evenings to opera, some of it contemporary, he provoked many critics, and was warned more than once by the BBC's senior managers that his network was failing in its primary job of scheduling classical instrumental music in the evenings. In The Daily Telegraph, Sean Day-Lewis agreed, calling on Hearst to ensure that his channel spent "more time in the mainstream".

In fact, Hearst was only a lukewarm fan of much contemporary classical music, and disliked the avant-garde once complaining that it left him "baffled if not wholly alienated".

Stephen Hearst was born Stephan Hirshtritt in Vienna on October 6 1919, the son of a prominent dentist who knew the Mahler family well. In 1938 Stephan's medical studies at university were interrupted by Hitler's Anschluss, which drove him underground because, as he explained, he was not only Jewish but had also distributed pamphlets "and stuck labels for the Patriotic Front on to the backs of Nazis".

Although his father would later establish a successful dental practice in Harley Street, Stephan arrived in England alone with £10 in his pocket, and recalled a vivid memory of newspaper placards at Victoria station bruiting Len Hutton's record 364 Test runs against Australia. That evening, at the Savile Club, he found himself being introduced to HG Wells.

Early in the Second World War, like many German-speaking refugees, he was interned – three members of the Amadeus string quartet languished in the next tent – before joining the Pioneer Corps, changing his name at five minutes' notice to Stephen Hearst, and seeing action in the beach landings in Italy. Later, in Palestine, he became commandant of a camp for Italian PoWs.

On demobilisation Hearst took a degree in History at Brasenose College, Oxford, and briefly became a trainee at Marks & Spencer before joining the BBC in 1952 as a holiday relief scriptwriter for television newsreels. Although he had become an instant early devotee of the Third Programme on the wireless – "The whole of the Ring – one had never heard this before on radio!" – he remained in television; he worked as a documentary scriptwriter for Richard Dimbleby for two years, and as a writer-producer from 1955 until 1965 when, under Huw Wheldon, he was appointed executive producer of arts programmes and deputy to Humphrey Burton, the BBC's first head of music and arts.

In 1967 Hearst became head of television arts features, presiding over the making of two of the BBC's most outstanding documentary series during what is now perceived as a vanished golden age: Kenneth Clark's monumental survey of European art, Civilisation (1969); and Alistair Cooke's equally sweeping television history of the United States, America, first shown in 1972. In January of that year, promising to build audiences, Hearst switched to radio as Controller, Radio 3.
His arrival was inevitably viewed with a mixture of suspicion and hostility: the network's entrenched cadre of producers suspected a television man of wanting to "dumb down" and boost ratings. But Hearst impressed them with his cultured outlook, intelligence and charm, and soon created a relaxed atmosphere, despite the continued ravings of some diehard elements of the Radio 3 audience.

Meanwhile, Hearst made plain his initial disapproval of Patricia Hughes, the station's only female announcer, demanding that it get rid of "that terrible woman with the Kensington voice" (he later relented). Many of his innovations have since become standard BBC practice: he gave titles to concerts, showcased them in Radio Times, and promoted more new drama on Radio 3. But as Hearst himself noted later in The Daily Telegraph, the more the cultural prestige of his network rose, the more the audience declined.

By 1976, the 30th anniversary of the founding of the old Third Programme, his station's broadcasting hours were being cut to save money, and some of its programmes were being shared with Radio 4, notably Man of Action. But Hearst could point to Radio 3 being the only network not obsessed by ratings. "It is the last-ditch defence of the BBC," he said, "and it will be there at the end."

In 1978 Hearst was succeeded at Radio 3 by Ian McIntyre and appointed controller of the BBC's "think tank", the Future Policy Group, a position that earned him the unofficial title "Deep Thought". He was appointed CBE the following year.

For the last four years of his time at the BBC, between 1982 and 1986, he was a special adviser to the director-general, Alasdair Milne.

On retirement he became an independent producer and consultant, and a visiting professor at Edinburgh University.

Stephen Hearst, who died on March 27, married, in 1948, Lisbeth Neumann, who survives him with their son and daughter.