My former colleague and friend John Powell, who has died aged 92, was an award-winning and ambitious producer of drama and arts programmes for BBC Radio.
Typical of his adventurous approach was his first full adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1968, which used all the resources offered by the BBC radiophonic workshop to conjure up Tolkien’s trolls, goblins, elves and wargs.
He had joined the BBC Radio drama department in 1955 straight from university, where he had directed for the Oxford University Drama Society. Among his productions on the airwaves were Cyrano de Bergerac with Ralph Richardson, Millicent Martin in Pygmalion, Paul Scofield in Arthur the King, and a 20-part adaptation of War and Peace.
For him the actor was pivotal; he mined the riches of John Gielgud’s career in An Actor and His Time and celebrated Laurence Olivier in The Player King. But he also embraced total theatre, and the atmospheres and sound effects he required often had studio technicians racing between tapes and record players to hit the cues. In his Much Ado About Nothing there was music, rain, thunder, horses’ hooves, jingling reins, various church bells, dogs barking, fireworks, fountains, cooing doves … and cicadas.
John was born in Lambeth, south London, the only child of Charles Powell, who worked in the linen trade, and his wife, Winifred (nee Dawes). He attended Raynes Park county grammar school, where he developed his theatrical talents, and then joined The Company of the Saints, an amateur dramatic group in New Malden, Surrey, where he met Hilary Methven, a teacher, whom he married in 1961.
In the early 1970s John left the BBC for a short spell to be associate professor of theatre at Denver University in the US, co-founding the Denver Repertory theatre, before returning to Broadcasting House in 1973 to join the live Radio 4 arts programme Kaleidoscope, producing about 300 editions.
In 1986 he switched to the BBC’s radio features and arts department, making programmes about cowboys, choreographers, composers and cathedrals, and winning the Sony Gold award in 1990 for his portrait of Edward Elgar’s later years.
Despite officially retiring in 1991 he was swiftly re-contracted by the BBC to devise two live multimedia shows exploring the BBC through sound and imagery, before he finally hung up his boots in 1997.
With Hilary he spent much of his retirement welcoming friends to their charming house, with its treasured collection of theatre art, theatre books and a fully operational large model of the Old Vic theatre, which he loved to bring to life.
He is survived by Hilary.
