Charles Curran (broadcaster)

Sir Charles John Curran (13 October 1921 – 9 January 1980), was a British television executive and Director General of the BBC (1969-77)..

Charles Curran was born in Dublin. He served in the Indian army from 1942 to 1945, but left to work in the BBC Talks department. He resigned following a dispute to edit the "Canadian Fishing News", but he returned in 1951 to join BBC Monitoring. Subsequent posts included Secretary and Director of External Broadcasting. While Director-General, he served three terms as President of the European Broadcasting Union. He succeeded Ronnie Waldman as Managing Director of the news agency Visnews in 1977.

He was Director-General of the BBC from 1 April 1969 to 30 September 1977. He was the first grammar school educated Director-General. Following his grammar school education at Wath-on-Dearne he studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge where he received a first class honours degree.

He is not to be confused with a former Conservative Member of Parliament Leslie Charles Curran, although it has been said that they had broadly similar politics. Following the appointment of the former Conservative minister Lord Hill as Chairman of the BBC Governors in 1967 (ironically, the Labour Prime Minister who appointed Hill, Harold Wilson, had attacked Hill's appointment as chairman of the Independent Television Authority under a Tory government in 1963), Curran's arrival marked a return to a more cautious approach after the radicalism of Sir Hugh Carleton Greene.

Curran also suffered criticism from Harold Wilson, at that time Labour Leader of the Opposition, who claimed that the 1971 documentary Yesterday's Men was biased against him and the Labour Party.

Curran was more influenced by Mary Whitehouse and other moralists than Greene had been, and was Director-General when Dennis Potter's play Brimstone and Treacle was banned in 1976 (although the decision to ban the play was made by the more liberal Alasdair Milne). Curran also issued an apology to Whitehouse after she complained about a scene at the end of episode three of The Deadly Assassin, a Doctor Who serial broadcast in 1976, in which the Doctor, played by Tom Baker, had his head held under water by a villain. Whitehouse had increased her criticism of the series during the previous two seasons under producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, who had taken it in a more adult direction, and Curran's apology marked a turning point in the BBC's support for the series. Philip Hinchcliffe finished working on the series after three more serials and his successor, Graham Williams, was ordered to lighten the tone and reduce the violence and horror content.

Some have suggested that the BBC under Curran was overtly middle-class, perhaps citing the claim by Edward Barnes, head of children's TV for the BBC at the time, that admirable characters should not be seen eating "chocolate and chips". There have also been repeated claims that MI5 had an overt influence on "vetting" BBC employees at the time, and those who believe that MI5 attempted to undermine the 1974-76 Labour government have claimed that it also influenced an overt Tory bias in BBC news bulletins of that period.

Conversely, it was under Curran that the BBC developed a distinctly populist current affairs format in the form of Nationwide, and also produced some of its best-loved and most consistently repeated comedy series, such as Dad's Army, Porridge and the first series of Fawlty Towers. Curran has often been blamed for an unenthusiastic and somewhat censorious attitude towards Monty Python's Flying Circus, but the Python team still won many of their battles with BBC officialdom and produced one of the most innovative TV series of all time.

The Play for Today series continued to take risks throughout Curran's eight years as Director-General and, in the drama series Days of Hope which accounted the early years of the Labour movement in Britain, the BBC proved that it was not necessarily as Tory-biased as some thought (although significantly the series was never shown again; it might have been more likely to gain a repeat under Hugh Greene or Alasdair Milne). The Morecambe and Wise Show became one of the best-loved British TV institutions ever between 1969 and 1977, and the Curran era also saw the development of Michael Parkinson's hugely popular Saturday-night chat show, which has become a major force again since its revival in 1998.

Following a period of ill health, Sir Charles Curran died from a heart attack on 9 January 1980, aged 58. His funeral was held in Westminster Cathedral.