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David Hatch tributes

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Dean BedfordJun 17, 2007
 

 
More on David Hatch - some repetition obviously but still worth a read
through

this from the Telegraph

Sir David Hatch, who died on Wednesday aged 68, joined BBC Radio as a
writer and performer on I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and during the
1960s was the originator and producer of comedy shows such as
Weekending, Just a Minute and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue; he became
controller of Radio 2, then Radio 4, before becoming overall head of BBC
radio.

Hatch was the first radio controller to have endeared himself to staff
by showing no indication that he regarded his postings at Broadcasting
House as mere staging posts along the road to Television Centre. Very
much a "hands-on" manager, he liked to walk the floors each day, looking
in on presenters in the on-air studios. Terry Wogan, for one, rated him
"the finest senior BBC executive I ever worked for".

Producers often found themselves bombarded with what they called
"Hatchlets", timed notes reading "Heard your programme, why did you do
that?" But he was also generous with his praise, not forgetting the
technicians.


Hatch loved radio with a passion; even John Birt, who removed him as
managing director of radio, saluted "an astute, straight-dealing and
utterly committed champion of the medium".

This was immediately apparent when Hatch took over at the top in 1987.
Knowing radio's strengths in people and ideas, he built on them. In 1993
it was at his prompting that Radio 2 restored Wogan to the network's
breakfast show.

But not all the risks Hatch took came off (he was responsible for the
launch of Radio 5, subsequently reinvented as Radio Five Live); yet as
commercial radio expanded he placed BBC radio firmly back in the
limelight.

Many expected Hatch to be a casualty of the Birt regime in 1993; he had
opposed plans for the introduction of a rolling news channel and a
large-scale shake up of Radio 1. As it turned out he was moved from his
job as head of radio to make way for Liz Forgan, and appointed to a new
post of "special assistant" to Birt.

As an adviser with influence but no power, Hatch described himself as "a
sort of minister without portfolio" whose main function was to act as
peacemaker among the "warring BBC barons". Though he helped draw up
plans for the corporation to devolve more programme-making to the
regions and loyally defended the new Director-General from his enemies,
he was widely seen as having been (in Mark Tully's phrase) "shunted into
a siding".

"I am told," Hatch said in an address to the 1993 Radio Festival, "that
you get two chances to give this speech - once on the way up and once on
the way down." He paused. "Welcome to my second speech." Hatch retired
early in 1996, five years before the mandatory retiring age.

The fourth and youngest son of a country vicar, David Edwin Hatch was
born on May 7 1939 and educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, and at
Queens' College, Cambridge. He read Theology and might have followed his
father into the Church, but he soon fell among the undergraduate comics
of Footlights - a generation that included John Cleese, Graham Chapman,
Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor - and changed his plans.

After graduating he joined other members of Footlights in a revue called
Plinths (later renamed Cambridge Circus). "We were offered seasons in
the West End and on Broadway, which seemed like a lot more fun than yet
more Latin," Hatch recalled. But even then he was always the management
figure, getting his fellow actors out of hotel beds and to the airports
on time.

The charms of cabaret soon palled, however, and Hatch returned to London
where, in 1964, with Bill Oddie, John Cleese and other Footlights
members, he joined the BBC through a scheme run by radio light
entertainment; he went on air as the straight man in the cult comedy
show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again.

Billed as a "radio custard pie", the show (hailed by one critic as "a
weekly fusilade of rude, cheerful, chaotic and noisy sketches") ran from
1964 until 1973. But Hatch preferred working behind the scenes, and went
on to produce a number of shows in the 1960s before moving into
management.

Appointed network editor of radio in Manchester in 1974, he returned to
London in 1978 as head of radio light entertainment. By increasing the
number of scripted comedy shows he set about dispelling its reputation
as a "Cinderella department" run by "old men covered in cobwebs".

During his three years as controller of Radio 2 from 1980, Hatch
inaugurated a gradual and unobtrusive shift away from old-style,
announcer-based shows towards "personality presenters"; he also
commissioned a major project to broadcast all 13 of Gilbert and
Sullivan's operettas.

Moving to Radio 4 in 1983, he vowed to reverse the trend of falling
audience figures with a series of "minor changes" to programming, but
found himself up against an audience which "if you try to make any even
very minor changes in scheduling or programming, react as if you have
gone into their living rooms and shifted all the furniture round". By
his own admission he tried to change too much too fast, introducing an
experimental sequence called Rollercoaster to the morning schedule which
brought in sackloads of abuse and had to be dropped. "I'm sure they'll
find that word engraved on my heart when I die," Hatch said later.

Appointed director of BBC radio in 1986 and managing director of Network
Radio BBC the following year, Hatch served as vice-chairman of BBC
Enterprises from 1987 to 1993. In 1989 the 25th anniversary broadcast of
I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again featured Hatch playing himself as one of
the original stars of the series. John Cleese played a BBC
Director-General who, on discovering that shows like those of Derek
Jameson were damaging the ozone layer, summoned Hatch as radio's
managing director and ordered him to recycle quantities of old
programmes in order to repair the damage.

After leaving the BBC Hatch served as chairman of the National Consumer
Council from 1996 to 2000. Later he returned to broadcasting, as
chairman of Radio 4's Wireless World from 1999 to 2003.
advertisement

He also become involved in the criminal justice field, as a magistrate
and - from 2000 to 2004 - as chairman of the Parole Board of England and
Wales. He arrived at the Parole Board at a time when its workload was
increasing and as it assumed responsibility for deciding on the release
of the most dangerous prisoners. Determined to maintain the board's
independence, Hatch was not afraid to take up issues on behalf of
members and he fought to retain prisoner interviews with the aim of
improving the quality of risk assessments.

He was appointed CBE in 1994 and knighted in 2004 for his work in the
criminal justice system.

David Hatch married, in 1964, Ann Elizabeth Martin, who died in 1997;
they had two sons and a daughter. He married secondly, in 1999, Mary
Clancy, with whom he had been paired at a dinner party by Terry Wogan's
wife Helen; Wogan himself was best man.


This from the Guardian

In an age when television was still supposed to be the dominant form of
broadcasting, and certainly one on which every career broadcaster should
have won his spurs, Sir David Hatch, who has died of cancer at the age
of 68, rose to the highest echelons of the BBC without ever straying
from radio.

Then, in a complete change of role, he became the salaried, sometimes
controversial chairman of the parole board. But even here he exercised
the humanity and good humour for which he had been famed at the BBC.

Article continues
The son of a Yorkshire vicar, he had intended at first to follow in his
father's footsteps, but at Cambridge in the late 1950s - after school at
St John's, Leatherhead - he was lured into the Cambridge Footlights
company.

Its members then included John Cleese, Tim Brook-Taylor, Graham Chapman,
Bill Oddie and Jonathan Lynn, who between them would go on to give
television (and the world) the Goodies, Monty Python's Flying Circus and
Yes, Minister. In 1963, they took a version of their last student
entertainment, A Clump of Plinths, to the West End and then to the US
for six months.

Hatch went with them, and on returning joined the BBC's light
entertainment department. In the classic I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again
(1964), he was the po-faced straight man essential to the wild comedy
dispensed by the rest of the cast.

The back-stage business of broad-casting had by then taken his interest.
He originated and produced Week-ending (which gradually turned into
another weird comedy show), then I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue and Just a
Minute, both of which are still on air. The Tennis Elbow Foot Game has,
alas, dropped through the sieve of time and no recordings seem to exist.

He also oversaw adaptations from popular fiction such as Richard
Gordon's Doctor in the House stories, and radio versions of popular
television formats. His move to higher management came in 1974, to
Manchester as head of network radio there, then back to London as head
of light entertainment. He was controller of Radio 2 for thee years,
moving to the same job for Radio 4 in 1983. In 1986 he was made director
of programmes, radio, and managing director, radio, 1987-93, with a seat
on BBC's board of management.

These were not easy times for the holders of such posts, with John
Birt's reforms and the increasing determination of successive
governments and prime ministers to appoint "strong" chairmen to keep
broadcasters in their place.

But Hatch managed to keep a human face in all his contacts. Always
good-tempered, affable, funny, he was renowned for the words of
encouragement and praise he lavished on all deserving underlings. He got
on famously well with the likes of Terry Wogan and David Jason. John
Cleese affectionately called him Kipperfeet.

Hatch was a big-hearted man who let you know his thoughts, according to
Will Wyatt, then head of broadcast, television. At his desk by 6.30 each
morning, Hatch would send out a stream of little notes and memoirs, some
containing advice or even a warning, others just to cheer up the
recipient. "He sent me a little bit of advice one morning and signed it
off, 'Cluck, cluck, Mother Hen'," said Wyatt.

It was the same story when he finally retired from the corporation in
1995 and, though retaining one or two honorary posts in broadcasting,
began to take on responsibilities in quite different walks of life.

As a justice of the peace in Buckinghamshire, it was rumoured that he
would sometimes feel so sorry for some poor offender that he would send
him the cash to pay his fine in an anonymous envelope.

He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a governor of the British
Nutrition Foundation and chairman of the National Consumer Council. He
was made CBE in 1994 and knighted 10 years later for his work at the
parole board.

This appointment raised eyebrows at the time. Previous chairmen had all
come from a government service background, and again his tenure
coincided with difficult times for the body he was heading. On the one
hand there was much public disquiet over the release of offenders from
prison who promptly went on to reoffend. At the other extreme was the
case of Tony Martin, the East Anglian farmer jailed for shooting dead a
Gypsy burglar, whose early release he opposed because he believed him to
be dangerous.

Hatch defended the policy of releasing as many prisoners on parole as
possible because he believed it helped to wean them off crime, and also
helped relieve prison overcrowding. His staff welcomed his sturdy
defence of the board's independence. They also found him an appreciative
and generous chairman.

His first wife, Ann, died in 1997. He is survived by two sons and a
daughter from that marriage along with Mary, his second wife, whom he
married in 1999.

· David Edwin Hatch, broadcaster, born May 7 1939; died June 13 2007


This from the Independent

Sir David Hatch
Brilliant BBC radio producer and performer turned administrator
Published: 14 June 2007

David Edwin Hatch, actor, producer, writer and radio executive: born 7
May 1939; Radio Network Editor, BBC Manchester 1974-78; Head of Light
Entertainment (Radio), BBC 1978-80; Controller, BBC Radio 2 1980-83;
Controller, BBC Radio 4 1983-86; Director of Programmes, BBC Radio
(later Network Radio, BBC) 1986-87, Managing Director 1987-93;
Vice-Chairman, BBC Enterprises 1987-93; Adviser to the Director-General,
BBC 1993-95; CBE 1994; Chairman, National Consumer Council 1996-2000;
Chairman, Services Sound and Vision Corporation 2000-07; Chairman,
Parole Board of England and Wales 2000-04; Kt 2004; married 1964 Ann
Martin (two sons, one daughter), 1999 Mary Clancy; died Chalfont St
Giles, Buckinghamshire 13 June 2007.

David Hatch was a brilliant radio producer, writer and performer who
became a hands-on BBC administrator and was able successfully to
negotiate the shark-infested waters of the Corporation, eventually
becoming head of the entire radio enterprise, or in BBC bureaucratic
jargon "Managing Director, Network Radio BBC".

On his way to the top he endeared himself to staff and colleagues
generally by championing radio at every opportunity and showing little
inclination to use his various posts as stepping-stones to what some
might think of as the greater glory of television. Hatch remained a
radio man, pure and simple.

Yet he was essentially an easy-going, sociable man with a droll sense of
humour who, especially in his early days, fitted perfectly the role left
empty by the death of Kenneth Horne, another superlative radio
performer. Hatch was a superb "straight" man: never more so than in the
comedy programme he inherited as producer when he joined the BBC in
1965, I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which was stuffed with
up-and-coming comics such as John Cleese, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Jo
Kendall and Tim Brooke-Taylor.

While the rest of the cast engaged in extravagant and hilarious foolery,
Hatch played the classic lone figure of sanity in a mad universe, by
turns avuncular, stern, unflappable. At the end of one series, in 1969,
the I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again survey (a regular feature) examined
"Love":

Hatch: What is that certain something that first attracts a boy to a
girl? No one can say.

Bill Oddie: I can.

Hatch: Not on radio you can't. I suppose really the special allure of a
woman was probably best summed up by an eminent psychoanalyst when he
said . . .

John Cleese: Phwoooar!

David Hatch was born in 1939, the fourth and youngest son of a country
vicar. He was educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, in Surrey, and
then Queen's College, Cambridge, where he gained an MA and a Diploma in
Education. Originally he planned to read theology, to follow in his
father's footsteps, but got sidetracked into the Cambridge Footlights
company, which then included Cleese, Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman,
Oddie and Jonathan Lynn.

It was a comic melting-pot which later produced Monty Python, The
Goodies, Yes, Minister (co-created and co-written by Lynn) and a
multitude of other classic comedy shows and radio and TV programmes.

Leaving Cambridge, Hatch successfully toured America with Cambridge
Circus and broke into the West End for a run. He joined the BBC in 1964
through a scheme run by radio's "Light Entertainment" department, and
cut his producing teeth on magazine programmes such as Roundabout (an
early evening show).

After I'm Sorry, he produced numerous light entertainment shows,
including The Tennis Elbow Foot Game (a "lost" programme collectors of
old radio shows would give their eye-teeth to be able to hear again) and
Just a Minute, as well as adaptations of the novelist Richard Gordon's
Doctor in the House, and television-to-radio transfers (a flourishing
trade in the 1970s) like Brothers in Law and All Gas and Gaiters. He
also created and launched the Friday late-night satire show on Radio 4,
Week Ending, which began unpromisingly po-faced (and voiced) but soon
became a cutting-edge programme to which most of today's best comedy
writers contributed at one time or another.

After a while Hatch discovered (somewhat to his surprise, as he later
recalled) that he was no longer "getting a buzz out of studio work.
Management seemed an obvious move".

Following a stint in Manchester and then a couple of years as Head of
Light Entertainment Radio, he was made Controller of Radio 2. During his
three years there he let commercial stations mount full-scale and
frenzied assaults on Radio 1 while he quietly built up "personality"
presenters on his own network, replacing the old "announcer" system.
Seeing that there was a dearth of female presenters, he captured and
built up Gloria Hunniford into a star performer.

In 1983 he moved from Radio 2 to Radio 4, again as Controller. He found
an enormous listener-loyalty which was immensely enthusiastic, but could
also be immensely ferocious. Changing the steady morning schedules into
an overall "running" show, Rollercoaster, proved fairly disastrous, as
Hatch ruefully realised in short order. "[It] brought me tremendous
abuse", he recalled years later. "I'm sure they'll find the word
'Rollercoaster' on my heart when I die".

He survived, and gradually brought round most of his critics and the
vast Radio 4 audience to the view that change was really inevitable, and
could often be liberating.

In 1986 he was made Director of Programmes, Radio, and finally Managing
Director of the entire Broadcasting House enterprise. He finally retired
in 1995, having been Adviser to the BBC Director-General from 1993.

From being a BBC apparatchik (though a friendly and approachable
apparatchik) Hatch became Chair of the National Consumer Council from
1996 through to 2000, joining the ranks of the great and the good. He
helped to run the British forces broadcasting network and was a JP,
sitting regularly at Aylesbury and Amersham. In 2001 he was made a
governor of his old school, St John's, Leatherhead.

Jack Adrian


This from the Times

Sir David Hatch
Comedian who became managing director of BBC Radio, where his optimism
helped to lighten some gloomy times
undefined

David Hatch was a mainstay of BBC Radio for some 30 years. His early
training had not particularly marked him for this: the fourth son of a
Yorkshire vicar, he went to Cambridge with theology in mind. There,
through the aegis of the Cambridge Footlights, he fell in with John
Cleese, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, and with them took a revue
show, A Clump of Plinths (later renamed Cambridge Circus) to the West
End and Broadway in 1963.

The following year he took the straight-man role in the radio series I’m
Sorry I’ll Read That Again. He also did six months on the West End
stage, and then played New York. He reckoned this new life to be “better
than yet more Latin”.

But he was swiftly drawn to life on the other side of the microphone. He
joined the BBC staff in the mid1960s, and over ten years in radio light
entertainment built a solid reputation for innovation and effective
producing. He was the moving spirit behind Week Ending and Just A
Minute; he cast his net wide, and high on the list of passing recruits
who became lifelong friends were Terry Wogan, Richard Briers and David
Jason.

He spent the late 1970s running radio in Manchester, and then headed the
light entertainment department from London. He moved into management,
and ran Radio 2 for three years from 1980, switching then to Radio 4.
Not everything he did was lauded: his experiment with a roller-coaster
sequence on Radio 4 proved too much for his morning audience, but his
undergraduate humour did not desert him. “Radio 4,” he wrote, “should be
a daily anthem of joy – and anthem is as anthem does.”

He resisted the temptations of television: unlike many of his radio
colleagues, he was not restless or frustrated in his medium. Television,
it was true, had more money, but radio commanded a deep loyalty from
listeners. He was for the most part uncomplaining about the traffic of
talent out of radio and into television. He saw radio as an important
training ground, from which the best would inevitably move on, be it
John Lloyd or Steve Coogan. It was, however, a matter of irritation for
him that his television colleagues failed to make the best of this
nursery, even on occasions allowing BBC radio shows to find a visual
outlet on ITV. He held that comedy was too rare and precious a commodity
to be so lightly set aside.

The BBC’s habit of looking to television for its radio chiefs amused
Hatch. He would cheerfully wonder who the BBC would next send down the
road from White City to Broadcasting House. He soldiered on with good
grace under Aubrey Singer, Dick Francis and Brian Wenham, finally
getting the top job himself in 1987.

As the first managing director to face competition from networked
commercial radio, he sought to tidy up: he corralled sport, Open
University, schools, education and new children’s programming into a
newly mixed Radio 5. The soufflé failed to rise, however, and Hatch came
under increasing pressure to make way for rolling news. His resistance
to this put him on a collision course with John Birt, then operational
boss of BBC journalism and shortly to become director-general. It was
widely assumed that when Birt took over, Hatch would go.

In fact, an intervention from the Heritage Secretary, David Mellor,
added an unexpected twist. Mellor argued that the BBC could ill-afford
to lose one of its few managers with a human face, and Hatch stayed as
special adviser to Birt. He peppered him with morning memos designed to
lighten the onward march of Birtism.

Notwithstanding that his Radio 5 had been removed in favour of the newsy
Radio 5 Live, Hatch stayed loyal to the new regime. His support proved
crucial when Birt’s career nearly foundered on the question of his tax
status.

Hatch was asked to redefine the BBC’s regional priorities, and find ways
to put more work away from London. This led to its fair share of
idiocies as programmes were biked hither and thither to fulfil quotas,
but Hatch felt that the scheme’s heart was in the right place. He had
always seen that a strong BBC needed to draw inspiration and insight
from the length and breadth of the land.

Some thought Hatch too much a man for all seasons. The truth was that he
treated most political considerations with insouciance. It was therefore
natural for him to rub along with the chopping and changing of policy
fashion simply to get on with the task in hand. That, as he saw it, was
the role of the public servant.

The affection expressed for him when he finally left the BBC in the
summer of 1995 was genuine and widespread. Hatch was not without a
fondness for the louche, but in him it sat happily alongside a love of
the Church. In 1995 he became a justice of the peace in Aylesbury and
the next year was appointed CBE.

In 2000 he became chairman of the Services Sound and Vision Corporation
and, to the surprise of some, the Parole Board. He fought hard against
budget cuts that meant prisoners seeking release could not be properly
interviewed, and was incensed when Home Office researchers concluded
that conducting interviews did not make much difference to Parole Board
decisions. His warnings bore bitter fruit in 2006 after a number of
killings by men freed in error.

Hatch was knighted in 2004. He will be best remembered for his steadfast
commitment to radio, especially in those gloomy years when it seemed the
good times were gone for ever. Hatch rightly suspected that television
would lose some of its lustre, and it is largely to his credit that BBC
Radio regained confidence in itself. As he always asserted, radio makes
better pictures.

His first wife, Ann, predeceased him. He is survived by his second wife,
Mary, two sons and a daughter.

Sir David Hatch, CBE, managing director of BBC Radio, 1987-93, and
chairman of the Parole Board of England and Wales, 2000-04, was born on
May 7, 1939. He died on June 13, 2007, aged 68

And this from my friend Keith Matthews who has been doing some research
at the BBC archives

I was travelling up the A1 when I heard the news report on radio 2
concerning the death of David Hatch - Just A Minute's most influential
director.

He was so important in establishing the blueprint for the show in the
first dozen or so years. The framework of this essential bluepprint
still, exists to this day.

It was he who cossetted and cajolled and generally massaged the
reluctant Kenneth Williams' frail ego into toughening up and hardening
himself against the established players of the game. If David had been
an ego orientated person he would have left Kenneth to fend for himself
and surely the show would have ended after the second series.

It was he who brought about the unwritten rule among the regulars of
letting the speaker establish their story in the first fifteen seconds
or so of their minute - a rule with which both Kenneth and Nicholas
agreed.

Often Kenneth would visit David at his office under the premise of
talking about one of the upsets that had occurred during his early days
with the game and often his stays would end up talking about the world
of comedy and anything else from theology to hospitals. They developed a
deep respect for each other and as Kenneth began to excel at the game
(in the performance bit anyway because he 'often trailed') David would
write Kenneth letters that bordered on the fanatical. He would apologise
for sounding so like a typical fan but in respect to Kenneth's work on
Just A Minute he could not help himself. He would thank Kenneth over and
over again for the excellent comedy that Kenneth had given the show -
labelling some of Kenneth's shows as ' some of the best ever recorded'.

As for David ,Kenneth grew so attatched to him that he fretted whenever
it looked likely that David was missing due to illness or a holiday
claiming 'it was not the same.'

When David moved to producing for the BBC up North Kenneth virtually
went in to mourning. As we know David Hatch did eventually return to
producing JUST A MINUTE and so at least Kenneth was not left grieving
the absence of David Hatch for long.

When Kenneth died David Hatch applied to the BBC's Archive department
for several of the originals of the letters that Kenneth had sent him.
The BBC granted his wish and kept photocopies on file and sent the
originals to a very grateful Hatch. What emerges from these letters is
the sincerest of friendships that Kenneth ever had with a radio
producer. Radio was Kenneth's favoured medium of self expression by the
mid 70s and it was Hatch who held the key to this treasure trove.

What also emerges if you spoke to anyone from any show that Hatch worked
on is his selfless devotion to bringing about the best in everyone
involved. His magician like ability to harness seemingly opposed talents
and spin them into gold. This genius will be sadly missed by all lovers
of radio comedy.

 
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