Sir Paul Fox, giant of BBC broadcasting in the era of Panorama, Grandstand and Dad’s Army – obituary

Sir Paul Fox who has died aged 98, ranked among the most creative and influential figures in British television for almost three decades and was one of the few television executives to achieve senior managerial status on both sides of the BBC/ITV divide; as controller of BBC One, he was the last of that breed of programme-making giants to reign over the medium’s golden age through the 1960s and 1970s.

Many of his admirers in the industry thought he should have ended his career in the most senior post of all, as director-general of the BBC. In 1982, on the departure of Sir Ian Trethowan, and again in 1987, following the dismissal of Alasdair Milne, Fox was seen as a natural successor. But he resolutely refused to put his name forward, while letting it be known that he would consider an approach from the Board of Governors.

This never came. Instead, when two years over BBC retirement age, Fox was recalled to fill the gap left by repeated purges of senior BBC managers. As managing director of BBC Television, his role was to bring badly needed authority to a demoralised service until executives a generation younger, like Will Wyatt and Alan Yentob, had achieved sufficient stature to take over.

“My brief,” he noted after his second departure from the BBC, “was to keep things calm, keep programme standards high, and a find a successor.”

The unspoken agenda behind this mission was that Fox should act as a counterweight to John Birt, the newly recruited deputy director-general, whose reforming zeal had alienated BBC staff at almost every level. Birt had made clear his low opinion of the BBC’s factual programmes output; it was feared that he would soon transfer his attentions to other production areas.

A modus operandi between the 42-year-old newcomer and the 62-year-old veteran was carved out. Birt would confine his attention to news and current affairs, leaving Fox a free hand with drama, education, sport and scheduling.

Both sides seem to have respected this arrangement. When, after his second retirement, Fox was asked why he did nothing to change Question Time (he thought the current-affairs debate show had become “a mess” after the departure of Robin Day), he replied, “because I had no editorial control over it. Absolutely none.”

If, in 1991, at the end of his three-year stint, it seemed as though he had done little more than steady the ship, Fox could point to substantial achievements in securing desperately needed long-term contracts for football, rugby and Wimbledon tennis. A colleague on the Board of Management summed up his three Indian summers at the helm of BBC TV: “He sorted out the sport, kept John Birt in check, and had a good time.”

Back in 1973, Fox’s cross-channel move from the BBC to Yorkshire Television had been dictated partly by financial considerations. As director of programmes, and later managing director, he could command a salary virtually double his BBC pay (then about £12,500 pa). He thought that this, and being his own man in a smaller, less bureaucratic organisation, was worth exchanging control over 10,000 hours of BBC television for an output of 500 hours from the smallest of the ITV network companies.

Rightly or wrongly, he believed he had risen as far as the BBC hierarchy would permit, and that the Corporation would never appoint a Jewish executive to its highest offices. Soon after moving to Yorkshire, he told an interviewer: “There are only three jobs worth having in the BBC: editor of Panorama, controller of BBC One and director-general. I have had the first two and I would never have got to the third.”

The appointment of Alasdair Milne to be director of programmes, a post which could have been expected to go to Fox, confirmed him in this view. (As it happened, a fellow Jew, the late Stuart Young, would later become the BBC’s chairman, while a third, Aubrey Singer, rose to be managing director of BBC Television.)

In today’s multi-channel world, when top executives regularly switch jobs and loyalties, Fox’s decision would be seen as routine. But in the intensely partisan broadcasting climate of the early 1970s, his defection to the opposition after six years as Controller of BBC One had an air of lèse-majesté. On being told of the move, his boss, Huw Wheldon, told Fox: “Well, get out now, and don’t come back.”

Fox’s naturally combative approach to running a major television network had served the BBC well in the intensely competitive era that followed the arrival of ITV in the mid-1950s. Determined to maintain audience parity with the BBC’s new commercial rival, he maximised viewing figures by scheduling popular programmes at peak times.

Critics complained that his policy “debased” the BBC, but Fox was equally committed to maintaining programme quality. He was unafraid to take bold, contentious decisions, among them opting for saturation coverage of the 1972 Olympics and refusing the rival channel’s pleas for alternation. Some viewers, compelled to watch the same events on both channels, complained. But Fox stuck to his guns and won large audiences.

The son of a doctor, Paul Leonard Fox was born on October 27 1925 and educated at Bournemouth Grammar School. Both his parents died before he was 15. At 18, he joined the Parachute Regiment, and was wounded in action with the 6th Airborne Division after the 1945 Rhine crossing. On demobilisation in 1946, he went into journalism as a reporter on the Kentish Times, moving to The People before cutting his teeth in film at Pathé News in 1947.

In 1950 Fox answered a BBC advertisement for holiday-relief staff, and remained for the next 23 years. His first BBC berth was as a writer-producer on Television Newsreel, where he demonstrated his early ruthless competitiveness, in an era when facilities were as scarce as they were primitive, by using his impressive frame to physically bar the door to the film-editing suite until he had put the finishing touches to his own programmes.

Promotion soon followed, and by 1953 he was editing Sportsview, television’s first sports magazine programme, and while in that post he devised the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. Moving over to Grandstand, he organised the coverage of the 1960 Rome Olympics.

His move to edit Panorama in 1961 was greeted with some surprise and even sniffiness among the programme’s old hands. But his talent for looking after his reporters and producers in the field soon won them over. One of his first decisions was to turn down a young Jeffrey Archer for a reporter’s job, noting him to be “a whippersnapper trying to bullshit his way in”. Fox instituted a fast-moving magazine format for the programme, prompting an unimpressed Robin Day, then a Panorama reporter, to dub him “five-item Fox”.

After two years as head of BBC Television’s public affairs group, in 1967 his outstanding talent for organising programme people and scheduling their output to maximum effect was recognised by his appointment to the key post of Controller of BBC One.

Some production departments feared that a controller who lacked a university education and whose programme experience had been limited to sport and current affairs would be unsympathetic to drama and entertainment.

Fox quickly proved them wrong. The Two Ronnies and Parkinson were launched during his tenure, and after initial misgivings about Dad’s Army – “You cannot,” he told its writer and producer David Croft, “take the mickey out of Britain’s finest hour” – he changed his mind and commissioned what became one of the BBC’s most enduringly popular and successful television comedy series. He also promoted audience-winning drama series.

Next, in his 15 years with Yorkshire Television, Fox built up the smallest of the ITV Big Five companies to a prominence out of all proportion to its output and revenue. He encouraged the production of major drama series such as Harry’s Game, Airline (both 1982) and The Sandbaggers (1978), and persuaded Duncan Wood, producer of Steptoe and Son and many other BBC series, to be his head of comedy.

Above all, he fostered Yorkshire Television’s highly regarded current-affairs output, which culminated in the award-winning documentary strand  First Tuesday. He was closely involved in the company’s public flotation in 1986, which was over-subscribed 51 times.

A big, physically imposing and blunt-speaking man, Fox inspired almost universal respect, intense personal loyalty, and not a little fear. Some who tangled with him remained bruised. But for the most part he was perceived as a natural leader who fought his corner and returned the loyalty of those who worked for him. He could claim a distinguished record of defending programme makers, resisting censorship and standing up to politicians.

Fox’s innate authority allowed him to use his relatively small ITV base at Yorkshire TV to act as spokesman for the whole commercial network. He became chairman of the ITV network programme committee, chairman of ITN and president of the Royal Television Society. In 1977, six years ahead of the ITV network as a whole, he secured permission from the Independent Television Authority for Yorkshire to launch its own breakfast television service. He would later head a consortium which attempted, unsuccessfully, to win the network breakfast contract from TV-am.

When, in 1979, the whole of ITV was taken off the air by a strike of technicians, Fox advocated a “going it alone” service run by management. The idea was rejected by less confident ITV bosses, but a decade later was taken up by Bryan Cowgill of Thames Television when that company found itself in a similar situation.

When the BBC call came, Fox felt ready to re-cross the floor because, he explained, ITV needed younger leaders in the looming political fight with the government of Margaret Thatcher. He was also saddened by the realisation that he was one of the few remaining ITV bosses whose careers had started in programmes.

Passionate and committed, Fox could also be impulsive. He commissioned, sight unseen, the Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour in 1967, earning popular and critical disapprobation (“Positively the worst show I can remember seeing on any TV channel,” read one typical letter of complaint).

Sometimes he enjoyed the role of grandee. At European festivals like the annual Prix Italia, he would stay in five-star hotels miles from the main conference centre, where he would hold court over less distinguished delegates. This harmless but expensive foible had to be abandoned, however, when he exchanged his lavish ITV expense account for a BBC allowance.

In his final retirement, Fox devoted much of his abundant energy to the sport that delighted him most, as chairman of the Racecourse Association and a director of the Horserace Betting Levy Board. He was an enthusiastic racegoer and a cautious but reputedly successful punter.

He was also a sports columnist for The Daily Telegraph, inveighing against the iniquity of satellite television being allowed exclusive rights to sports once freely available to viewers of the BBC and ITV. In 2012 he lamented the end of the BBC’s television coverage of the Grand National, an event it had turned into the most popular sporting day of the year, with a domestic audience alone of more than 12 million, and many millions more worldwide. He was convinced that the BBC was giving up on sport, and even suggested that the London Olympics might be the last the Corporation covered.

He was appointed CBE in 1985 and knighted in 1991.

As for current television fare, Fox declared himself a touch jaded. “Frankly, there’s quite a bit of what I’d call rubbish on daytime on both BBC One and BBC Two, like some of those auction programmes,” he grumbled in 2011. “I can’t believe from watching the credits how many people are needed to make these shows. The BBC also spends far too much on promoting its own programmes.”

Paul Fox married, in 1948, Betty Nathan, who died in 2009. They had two sons.

Sir Paul Fox, born October 27 1925, death announced April 9 2024

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