Name Tony Whitby | Died 1975 | |
Tony Whitby (c.1930 – 1975) was a British BBC Radio producer and Television current affairs editor who was Controller of BBC Radio 4 from 1970 to 1975.
Life and career
At the University of Oxford, Whitby wrote a thesis on Matthew Arnold. He began his career as a civil servant in the Colonial Office.
Tony Whitby joined the BBC as a radio producer on At Home and Abroad in the 1950s. During the 1960s, Whitby was a television current affairs editor on Gallery, Tonight and 24 Hours. Whitby was Secretary of the BBC, before his appouintment as Controller of Radio 4 in 1969, taking up the post in January 1970. In this post, he gained a reputation for shrewdly picking out the ideas of others and embellishing them by adding his own thoughts and suggestions. He had no intention of creating a new schedule from scratch, but he wanted a more topical and a more varied flavour - to make Radio 4, in his words, like a "well-labelled library that has a few surprises in it". So, in 1970, along came the unashamedly serious Analysis and the magisterial World Tonight, the bright and breezy 'commuter magazine' PM Reports and a phone-in called It's Your Line, the satirical sketch-show Week Ending, and the consumer magazine You and Yours. In 1972, Whitby commissioned the first series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and in 1973 Kaleidoscope. In 2010, David Hendy, lecturer in broadcasting history at the University of Westminster, said:
"Looking back, what's most striking about Whitby's revolution of 1970 is how genuinely eclectic it made Radio 4, with programmes stretching across a suddenly wider spectrum, from the intellectually demanding or disturbing at one end to the faintly scurrilous or comforting at the other. The changes 40 years ago set Radio 4 on its long-term trajectory: away from the dusty tones of the somewhat middlebrow old Home Service, to the tougher, livelier, more authoritative, network we have today".
His wife was Joy Whitby, known for her work in children's television.