Hugh Greene - Director-General of The BBC

Director-General of The BBC

Greene kept the BBC in pace with the major social changes in Britain in the 1960s, and through such series as Steptoe and Son, Z-Cars and That Was The Week That Was, the BBC moved away from the ethos of Reithian middle-class values and deference to traditional authority and power. Controversial, socially concerned dramas such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home were broadcast as part of The Wednesday Play strand, which also gave Dennis Potter his breakthrough as a dramatist with, among other works, the "Nigel Barton" plays. Directly though, Greene is thought to have directly suggested only two programmes, the imported American series Perry Mason and Songs of Praise which began in 1961.

The tone of much of BBC radio changed less radically in the Hugh Greene era than BBC television, with much of the current national network structure not being introduced until 1970 (by which time Sir Charles Curran was Director-General). However it was in 1967, under Greene's directorship, that the corporation began a dedicated pop radio network for the first time with Radio 1, taking most of its DJs and music policy from offshore pirate radio ships, like Radio Caroline, which were now illegal because the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act had removed a loophole. Hugh Greene also strongly resisted pressure from the 'clean-up TV' campaigner Mary Whitehouse, a policy not always followed by future directors-general.

Greene's undoing followed the appointment of the former Conservative minister Lord Hill as chairman of the BBC governors from September 1, 1967, by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had criticised Hill's appointment as chairman of the Independent Television Authority by a Conservative government in 1963. A more cautious and conservative atmosphere then took hold in the corporation, typified by the axing (until 1972) of Till Death Us Do Part, one of the series most despised by Mary Whitehouse, but conversely one of its most popular in the ratings. In July 1968 the BBC issued the document Broadcasting In The Public Mood without Greene's significant involvement, seeming to question the continued broadcasting of the more provocative and controversial material (one of Greene's allies at the top level of the corporation described this document as "emasculated and philistine") and in October 1968 Greene announced that he would be retiring as Director-General. He was succeeded the next year by the more conservative Sir Charles Curran. This move was welcomed by a great many MPs, Governors of the BBC, Churchmen and Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners Association, as Greene was regarded, by the conservative minded, as a man of low moral fibre and as the person responsible for the increasing volume of sex and violence on television.

Echoes of the removal of Hugh Greene could be heard in the departure in 2004 of Director-General Greg Dyke in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry.