John Whitney obit

John Whitney, radio and television entrepreneur who had a torrid time as director-general of the IBA – obituary

He was involved in the award-winning Upstairs, Downstairs and helped to make Capital Radio the most successful independent station 

He was not on the list.

John Norton Braithwaite CBE died peacefully at home on 4th November, aged 92. Beloved husband of Roma, loving father of Fiona and Alexander. A family funeral service is taking place, and a memorial event will be held at a later date. 

John Whitney liked to point out that his career in commercial broadcasting began long before he became one of its titans as the first managing director of Capital Radio and a robustly purposeful head of the Independent Broadcasting Authority.

Indeed, there was no commercial broadcasting in Britain when his entrepreneurial flair and love of radio first combined as a schoolboy in the 1940s and he began renting out home-made crystal sets to his fellow pupils at three pence a week.

It was a Quaker school where such capitalist enterprise was not high on the curriculum and his stock of crystal sets was soon confiscated by a disapproving master. Undeterred, he resumed production and this time offered his sets only for sale — and found he could make even more money as a retailer than he had in the rental market.

On leaving school, he knew he wanted to work in radio. Turned down for a job by the BBC, his talents were lost for ever to public service broadcasting when he went to work instead for the opposition — which at the time meant Radio Luxembourg, one of the few overseas-based stations that could reach British audiences.

By the time he was 21 he was selling shows to Radio Luxembourg via his own production company, run from an office in Mayfair with a staff of 30 and a Rolls-Royce parked outside. Not the least part of his satisfaction was the thought that he had got one back on the misguided teacher who had tried to curb his commercial proclivities.

The Roller had to go five years later when he married Roma Hodgson, a dancer with the London Festival Ballet, and in the language of the time he found he could not afford to run “two beautiful, expensive things”. His wife survives him along with their children Fiona Whitney, an author and film producer, and Alexander, a publisher.

Despite downsizing his transportation, his buccaneering approach meant business continued to flourish and when in the 1960s the government legislated to ban the pirate radio stations broadcasting from offshore, he founded the Local Radio Association to lobby for an end to the BBC’s monopoly on radio broadcasting.

He met a brick wall from Harold Wilson’s Labour government and at one point the postmaster-general Edward Short told him, “If you’ve come here to persuade me that there’s a future for commercial radio then this meeting might as well end right now.”

However, a change of government led in 1972 to the Sound Broadcasting Act, which authorised commercial radio in the UK for the first time. When the first franchises were put out to tender, Whitney made a bid for one of the two new London stations. He lost out to a consortium led by Richard Attenborough, who then rang his rival and invited him to become managing director of the fledgling Capital Radio. Whitney promptly filled the top tier of its management team with the executives he had lined up for his own bid.

Under his stewardship he created a station with a roster of DJs to take on Radio 1, including Kenny Everett, Dave Cash and Nicky Horne. He also introduced such innovative add-ons as a helpline, relationship counselling by Anna Raeburn, a Capital doctor and a job-finding service for London teenagers.

By then Whitney had already branched out into commercial television, setting up a production company whose biggest success was the 1970s period drama Upstairs, Downstairs.

After a decade as a radio supremo, he was headhunted in 1982 to run the Independent Broadcasting Authority. As a non-establishment figure with a reputation for risk-taking, he arrived as a breath of fresh air but it was his diplomatic skills that were most required during a period of dramatic expansion as breakfast TV, a fourth channel and cable and satellite television were all launched on his watch.

He clashed with Margaret Thatcher’s government over Thames Television’s showing in 1988 of Death on the Rock a controversial documentary about the shooting of three IRA terrorists in Gibraltar.

Sir Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary lent on the IBA to have the programme pulled but Whitney resisted bravely. When the programme was aired, the Daily Mail attacked Whitney and the IBA with the headline “fury over SAS trial by TV” but The Times called the documentary “a significant, thoroughly responsible and serious examination of a most disturbing case”.

He also clashed with Mary Whitehouse, whom he later called “a shrill do-gooder who wanted the television screen to be sanitised against sex and violence”. When the IBA gave Channel 4 the green light in 1983 to screen Ray Minton’s highly-charged TV play Scum about life in borstal — which had been banned by the BBC — Whitehouse instigated a private prosecution against Whitney and the IBA. The High Court ruled in her favour but, in what is now considered a landmark in the cause of broadcasting freedom, the decision was overturned on appeal.

John Norton Braithwaite Whitney was born in Buckinghamshire in 1930, the son of Ann, a nurse, and Dr Willis Bevan Whitney, a scientist and inventor who worked for the Electrical Research Association. His parents were Quakers and sent him to be educated at Leighton Park Friends School, Reading, where he honed his extra-curricular entrepreneurial skills.

On leaving school at 16, he enterprisingly set himself up as the Norton B Whitney Company, specialising in “personal sound recording” with a pitch to put on to disc “those treasured family moments that so easily slip into the past and fade”. With a butcher’s van as his studio and the nearest telephone box as his office, he toured the country, making recordings of weddings, bar mitzvahs and after-dinner speeches.

With the proceeds from these commemorative recordings he made a demo for a radio programme that led to him working for Radio Luxembourg, creating content for the station under the name Ross Radio Productions.

The arrival of commercial television in 1955 offered new opportunities and he smartly bought a bankrupt US company called Autocue, which he turned into the leading supplier of television prompt systems. He also turned some of his radio shows into television programmes including an early form of reality TV called People Are Funny in which prizes were handed out to contestants who remained calm under duress.

In one episode, a family returned to their prefabricated home to find that Whitney’s crew had removed their entire possessions from the property. They took it in remarkably good part until they discovered that in the course of the stunt their pet budgerigar had gone missing. Fearing tabloid exposure, Whitney paid substantial compensation to keep the family from taking the story to the press but the programme was raised by a Conservative MP on the floor of the House of Commons as an example of the declining standards that commercial television had introduced to the airwaves.

On resigning from the IBA in 1989 — in part because the government had rejected his proposal for the competitive tendering of ITV franchises in favour of selling them off to the highest bidder — he turned his attention to commercial theatre and became managing director of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group.

He resigned after 16 months and although he remained chairman for another five years, it was not a happy experience. He admired Lloyd Webber as a showbusiness phenomenon, but complained privately that he refused to take the professional advice of those whose job it was to offer it.

His Quaker upbringing left him with a strong sense of service and he was active in numerous charities. Appointed CBE in 2008 for services to broadcasting and charity, he was president of Soundaround, the national sound magazine for the blind, chairman of Artsline, London’s disability access information service, and a founder member and trustee of a prisoners’ self-help organisation.

Asked what he regarded as his greatest achievement, he replied that he was proud to have helped commercial radio to mature from being a “squawky child” into the diverse and vital cultural force it subsequently became.