The television producer and director Simon Albury, who has died aged 80, went from making current affairs and music programmes to becoming a passionate advocate for the industry he loved.
He thwarted what he described as “Thatcher’s wrecking ball” to ITV in the Conservative government’s 1990 Broadcasting Act plans, which would reshape the future of British television.
As director of the Campaign for Quality Television (1989-90), he helped to dilute the prime minister’s intention to award regional franchises to the highest bidder in a new multichannel age that was taking off with the launch of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky – and leaving little money for programme-making, he argued.
Confronted with this “auction” in a deregulated system, Albury warned starkly in a letter to the Financial Times: “Money to the Treasury is the government’s over-riding concern; and viewers will be offered programmes of lower quality and narrower range.”
Eventually, the act incorporated an “exceptional circumstances” clause, with quality as the main exception. This and other amendments were a direct result of Albury’s campaigning and the charm he exuded in lobbying the then home office minister, David Mellor.
In the franchise reallocation three years later, this saved Granada Television (despite a higher bid coming from a consortium led by Phil Redmond, the creator of Brookside), but failed to help the three regional ITV companies that were replaced, including Thames Television – widely seen in the industry as Thatcher’s revenge for it broadcasting Death on the Rock, a 1988 This Week special about the SAS’s killing of three unarmed IRA suspects in Gibraltar.
Later, Albury – a larger-than-life personality remembered for his bright-red glasses, snazzy ties, braces and sharp suits – switched his focus to equality and diversity.
In 2013, he founded and chaired the Campaign for Broadcasting Equality after visiting BBC radio studios for an 8am interview on the Today programme and seeing no one from an ethnic minority “in the vast BBC newsroom except for an Asian runner whose job was to take people to and from the studio”.
Albury proved to be an ally of the comedian Lenny Henry, who at the same time was pressing for more ethnic diversity in television. They both cautiously welcomed promises of action by the BBC director general, Tony Hall, in 2014, but five years later, when appearing before a House of Lords communications committee on the future of public broadcasting, rued the limited progress.
In between his campaigns over the Broadcasting Act and ethnic diversity, Albury served as a charismatic and genial chief executive of the Royal Television Society (2000-12). He raised its profile, made it a flagship forum for talks by leading industry figures and achieved a five-fold increase in funds available for charitable activities.
Born in Birmingham, Simon was the son of Eileen (nee Lloyd-Jones) and Cyril Albury, a jeweller. On leaving Clifton college, he studied sociology, gaining a BA from Nottingham University and an MA from Sussex University, and won a scholarship to Brandeis University, Massachusetts, where he became a friend of the beat poet and activist Allen Ginsberg. Being present at Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech inspired Albury’s campaigning for racial equality.
His broadcasting career began with Granada Television in 1969 for a short stint on World in Action before he moved to the BBC as a producer on 24 Hours.
His programmes included a 1969 special on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He had the idea of getting a New York Times journalist, Gloria Emerson, to take part in the interview, enraging the Beatle by telling him that their war campaigning was ineffectual. Other specials on Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Liberace followed before Albury moved to Man Alive and made Open University programmes.
Displaying another string to his bow when Capital Radio went on air in London, he became one of Britain’s first DJs playing black American gospel music, hosting the Hallelujah show (1973-76) under the pseudonym Sam Scott.
Returning to Granada, he directed World in Action programmes on nuclear war, unemployment and the Winter of Discontent (1976-79), and produced The Starlight Ballroom (1983), a musical drama starring Alvin Stardust as the 1940s dance-band singer Umberto Rossi, The Outrageous Millie Jackson (1983) and other music shows, and Death in Florence (1988), about a less salubrious side to Italy’s culture capital.
Later, following his campaigning on the Broadcasting Act, he co-founded one of the new ITV franchise holders, Meridian Television, successor to TVS in the south of England, in 1993. He was director of public affairs for Meridian, Anglia, HTV and Channel 5 until 2000.
During this time, he persuaded ITV to join a Windsor Fellowship scheme to give black and Asian students paid work experience in newsrooms. Charlene White, now an ITV News presenter, was one who benefited, starting in television at Meridian. “The footprints of this great man left an imprint in my early career,” she said.
Albury also chaired the British Screen Advisory Council’s committee for ethnic minority employment in film (2000-07) and the Centre for Investigative Journalism (2005-08).
He was appointed MBE in 2019.
In 1989, Albury married Phillida Bartels-Ellis. Sheand their sons, David and Robert, survive him.