In a career that spanned both the BBC and the independent channels, Paul Fox, who was died aged 98, made perhaps his greatest mark as controller of BBC One for six years from 1967. One of the most colourful and extrovert of TV chiefs, he made the most of what was arguably the most vital and influential role in the industry.
The enduring favourite programmes whose launch he oversaw were Dad’s Army – of which he had initially been dismissive; Parkinson, the talk show with Michael Parkinson as interviewer; The Generation Game, presented by Bruce Forsyth; and The Two Ronnies, the comedy sketch show featuring Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett.
BBC One followed BBC Two in transitioning from black and white to colour, with a full colour service on BBC One from 1969, and Fox made the most of it for sports events – Match of the Day football, tennis from Wimbledon and extensive coverage of the 1972 Olympics from Munich. Still necessarily in black and white was the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969.
When Fox failed to get the job of director of BBC television in 1973, he concluded that he would get no further at the corporation and, preferring to be a big fish in a smaller pool, left to become programme controller at Yorkshire Television, then managing director (1977-88). There he encouraged drama and current affairs, with the documentary series First Tuesday covering social issues and international stories for a decade from 1983. In 1986, when he had entered his 60s – past the BBC’s retirement age – he declared that he was content to stay put in Yorkshire, where his shareholders were non-interventionist, and signed up for another three-year contract. Now an elder statesman of the industry, he had a finger in many subsidiary pies: chairman of Independent Television News (1986-88), a director of Channel 4 (1985-88) and president of the Royal Television Society (1985-92).
But he had always stressed his continuing admiration for the BBC, despite its faults, and in 1988 accepted the corporation’s offer to make him managing director of BBC TV, replacing Bill Cotton.
He took an office in the familiar BBC Television Centre in west London. At the time, the appointment was seen by some commentators as a foil to John Birt, who was then head of the news and current affairs directorate and a deputy director general, who had a reputation as a dour manager. “If I can help John, I will,” Fox said obliquely, and during his three years in the post left news and current affairs to Birt, while focusing on drama and sport, for which he arranged contracts to cover football, rugby and tennis.
Reluctant to discuss his early years, Fox told the journalist Philip Purser that he was born in Germany of Jewish parents. His father, a doctor, died when he was young, and Paul was sent to Britain on a Kindertransport in 1938. Fostered by a family in Bournemouth, he went to Bournemouth grammar school. As soon as he was 18 he volunteered for the army and trained as a parachutist, joining the Parachute Regiment, 6th Airborne Division. He was wounded in the arm in the Rhine crossings as the allies swept through the continent in 1944.
Recovering, he studied journalism at an educational centre set up by the Americans in Biarritz, south-western France, and when he was demobbed in 1946 got a job at the Kentish Times, covering the districts of Sidcup and Dartford.
But he soon set his sights on London and working at the tabloid end of the market – at the Sunday Dispatch and then the People. From there, he got himself a job writing scripts with Pathé News, then the most prestigious source of screen news through the cinemas. This led to summer relief work at the BBC and, from 1950, a full-time job with BBC Television.
He devised and edited a programme called Sportsview. His forte lay in exploiting new technical devices such as the teleprompter and the split screen and interviews with players in front of the cameras while the perspiration was still on their brows. He used fast cars and faster aeroplanes, and succeeded in getting Roger Bannister into the London studio just 55 minutes after his record-breaking four-minute mile in Oxford in 1954. That year Fox instituted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, with Bannister taking second place to fellow athlete Christopher Chataway.
In 1955, long before today’s driver’s eye-view shots from Formula One cars became commonplace, Fox clamped a bulky film camera to the tailfin of Mike Hawthorn’s D-type Jaguar on a practice run round the Le Mans circuit. On top of that, Hawthorn recorded his own sardonic commentary. “Typically French,” he sneered as he had to swerve to avoid a farmer crossing the track with a horse and cart.
However, the limitations of sports coverage eventually started to bore Fox, and in 1960, having led coverage of the Olympics in Rome, he persuaded the BBC to allow him to cover the US presidential election in which John F Kennedy beat Richard Nixon. In 1961, he became editor of the current affairs flagship, Panorama.
This position was a hot seat, and after two years Fox found himself being shunted into jobs with important sounding titles that left him restless – head of public affairs from 1963, and of current affairs from 1965. In 1967 he formed a consortium to bid for the Yorkshire ITV franchise: he was told of its failure at just the time he was made controller of BBC One.
When his contract as managing director of BBC Television ran out in 1991, Fox did not ask for an extension. He joined a consortium bidding to replace the breakfast channel TV-am, whose news presentation he derided, and vainly tried to help Thames TV to retain its weekday licence for London.
In the 1990s he held several posts in horseracing bodies, wrote a sports column for the Daily Telegraph (1991-2003), and was a frequent newspaper commentator on television. He was appointed CBE in 1985 and knighted in 1991.
In the 80s, as a BBC executive, Michael Grade made a provocative remark advocating the privatisation of Channel 4. Fox, then a director of Channel 4, took him to one side and told him bluntly to mind his own business. At a press conference called by Yorkshire Television around the time of its flotation in 1986, Fox was asked a poorly worded, but highly sensitive, question about the forthcoming shares. “That is a naive question, even for you,” said Fox, moving swiftly to another subject before the journalist could try again.
Both incidents were typical of the TV executive’s tendency to tackle a situation or a person head-on. If he bit his tongue most of the time, the occasions when he did not were memorable. “One minute he is all sweetness and light, the next a Sherman tank,” said a former colleague. “He can turn at the flick of a switch.”
Nonetheless, the London Weekend Television chief Brian Tesler spoke of Fox’s “extraordinary warmth, affection and humour”.
In 1948 he married Betty Nathan. She died in 2009. They had two sons.
• Paul Leonard Fox, journalist and television executive, born 27 October 1925; death announced 9 April 2024
• Dennis Barker died in 2015
