No BBC radio or television producer in the postwar era was more admired within his profession than Michael Bakewell, who has died aged 92 after a slow decline through Alzheimer’s disease and macular degeneration.
He was the BBC’s first head of plays, appointed in 1963 by Sydney Newman, the dynamic and visionary executive who had arrived from Canadian film and television and ITV to shake up the drama department. He divided it into drama series and single plays. The Wednesday Play was the major anthology series and, on BBC Two, Bakewell ran Theatre 625 (in the new high-definition 625-line format).
