The tv producer and director Simon Albury, who has died aged 80, went from making present affairs and music programmes to turning into a passionate advocate for the trade he cherished.
He thwarted what he described as “Thatcher’s wrecking ball” to ITV within the Conservative authorities’s 1990 Broadcasting Act plans, which might reshape the way forward for British tv.
As director of the Marketing campaign for High quality Tv (1989-90), he helped to dilute the prime minister’s intention to award regional franchises to the very best bidder in a brand new multichannel age that was taking off with the launch of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky – and leaving little cash for programme-making, he argued.
Confronted with this “public sale” in a deregulated system, Albury warned starkly in a letter to the Monetary Instances: “Cash to the Treasury is the federal government’s over-riding concern; and viewers will probably be provided programmes of decrease high quality and narrower vary.”
Finally, the act integrated an “distinctive circumstances” clause, with high quality as the primary exception. This and different amendments had been a direct results of Albury’s campaigning and the attraction he exuded in lobbying the then residence workplace minister, David Mellor.
Within the franchise reallocation three years later, this saved Granada Tv (regardless of the next bid coming from a consortium led by Phil Redmond, the creator of Brookside), however failed to assist the three regional ITV corporations that had been changed, together with Thames Tv – broadly seen within the trade as Thatcher’s revenge for it broadcasting Loss of life on the Rock, a 1988 This Week particular in regards to the SAS’s killing of three unarmed IRA suspects in Gibraltar.
Later, Albury – a larger-than-life persona remembered for his bright-red glasses, snazzy ties, braces and sharp fits – switched his focus to equality and variety.
In 2013, he based and chaired the Marketing campaign for Broadcasting Equality after visiting BBC radio studios for an 8am interview on the In the present day programme and seeing nobody from an ethnic minority “within the huge BBC newsroom apart from an Asian runner whose job was to take individuals to and from the studio”.
Albury proved to be an ally of the comic Lenny Henry, who on the identical time was urgent for extra ethnic range in tv. They each cautiously welcomed guarantees of motion by the BBC director basic, Tony Corridor, in 2014, however 5 years later, when showing earlier than a Home of Lords communications committee on the way forward for public broadcasting, rued the restricted progress.
In between his campaigns over the Broadcasting Act and ethnic range, Albury served as a charismatic and genial chief government of the Royal Tv Society (2000-12). He raised its profile, made it a flagship discussion board for talks by main trade figures and achieved a five-fold improve in funds accessible for charitable actions.
Born in Birmingham, Simon was the son of Eileen (nee Lloyd-Jones) and Cyril Albury, a jeweller. On leaving Clifton faculty, he studied sociology, gaining a BA from Nottingham College and an MA from Sussex College, and gained a scholarship to Brandeis College, Massachusetts, the place he grew to become a buddy of the beat poet and activist Allen Ginsberg. Being current at Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech impressed Albury’s campaigning for racial equality.
His broadcasting profession started with Granada Tv in 1969 for a brief stint on World in Motion earlier than he moved to the BBC as a producer on 24 Hours.
His programmes included a 1969 particular on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He had the concept of getting a New York Instances journalist, Gloria Emerson, to participate within the interview, enraging the Beatle by telling him that their warfare campaigning was ineffectual. Different specials on Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Liberace adopted earlier than Albury moved to Man Alive and made Open College programmes.
Displaying one other string to his bow when Capital Radio went on air in London, he grew to become one among Britain’s first DJs enjoying black American gospel music, internet hosting the Hallelujah present (1973-76) underneath the pseudonym Sam Scott.
Returning to Granada, he directed World in Motion programmes on nuclear warfare, unemployment and the Winter of Discontent (1976-79), and produced The Starlight Ballroom (1983), a musical drama starring Alvin Stardust because the Nineteen Forties dance-band singer Umberto Rossi, The Outrageous Millie Jackson (1983) and different music exhibits, and Loss of life in Florence (1988), a few much less salubrious facet to Italy’s tradition capital.
Later, following his campaigning on the Broadcasting Act, he co-founded one of many new ITV franchise holders, Meridian Tv, successor to TVS within the south of England, in 1993. He was director of public affairs for Meridian, Anglia, HTV and Channel 5 till 2000.
Throughout this time, he persuaded ITV to affix a Windsor Fellowship scheme to offer black and Asian college students paid work expertise in newsrooms. Charlene White, now an ITV Information presenter, was one who benefited, beginning in tv at Meridian. “The footprints of this nice man left an imprint in my early profession,” she stated.
Albury additionally chaired the British Display screen Advisory Council’s committee for ethnic minority employment in movie (2000-07) and the Centre for Investigative Journalism (2005-08).
He was appointed MBE in 2019.
In 1989, Albury married Phillida Bartels-Ellis. Sheand their sons, David and Robert, survive him.
