For 50 years, John Fawcett Wilson, who has died of cancer aged 83, produced many of BBC Radio's most outstanding music, comedy and drama series. His vast output included King Street Junior, The Public Ear, Hinge and Bracket, Rolf's Walkabout, Albert and Me, and dramatisations of novels by John le Carré and Graham Greene. He became renowned for his creative and often innovative approach, and his work remains a staple of BBC Radio 7's comedy and drama output.

John was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and attended the town's grammar school. His parents began to take him to concerts given by the Yorkshire Orchestra and the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli, and music became his passion. After completing his military service in the RAF, he enrolled in 1948 at the Guildhall School of Music in London, where for two years he studied piano and conducting.

From 1951 until 1954, he continued at the Royal Academy of Music, where he added composition to his repertoire. He produced and performed cabarets at the academy's end-of-year review week. One impersonation of Vaslav Nijinsky dancing The Spectre of the Rose earned him a rebuke for omitting to wear a jockstrap in front of so many young ladies. Later, in 2003, he was made an associate of the academy.

After a brief spell as a music master at Gresham's school, Holt, in Norfolk, John became an executive at Chappells, the music publishers. His knowledge of the light music repertoire and his flair for programme ideas led to an almost seamless move to BBC Radio as a producer in the light music department in 1957. His productions included Let the People Sing and Music Box.

He surprised many with his move, in 1962, to the light entertainment department, where he remained until 2007, spending the last 20 years as a freelancer. Here he was able to employ his skills more creatively, never more so than with Lines from My Grandfather's Forehead (1971-72), starring Ronnie Barker. The series comprised a blend of comic sketches, monologues and songs, performed with no studio audience. It used writers such as Barker, Spike Milligan, Harold Pinter and Jim Eldridge, and won a Writers' Guild award for best radio comedy series.

With long-term collaborators such as Eldridge, the writer of King Street Junior, and René Basilico, who dramatised the Le Carré and Greene novels, he managed to create a documentary-style atmosphere through his often painstaking pursuit of authenticity. For Le Carré's A Small Town in Germany, he had the sound of the autobahn recorded, since he felt the acoustics differed to an English motorway. He disliked actors using foreign accents, and if the plot required for example, German, Turkish or Paraguayan voices, he cast actors from those countries. When he could not find any Haitians for Greene's The Comedians, he employed a Haitian dialect coach. This production won another Writers' Guild award.

Shy and self-effacing, John was a radio man to his boots. He would view a drama script as a musical score. If a script had too many similar characters, he would say there were too many trombones and that woodwind was required. It was important to him that the listeners never mistake which person was speaking. His perfectionism, although at times highly exasperating for writers and performers, did not dent their loyalty or respect towards him.

His wife, Angela, died in 2001.

• John Fawcett Wilson, radio producer, born 8 October 1927; died 1 February 2011


By:- Bob Chaudry

Source:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/mar/08/john-fawcett-wilson-obituary