Anthony Smith (producer)

Professor Anthony Smith, CBE, is a British broadcaster, author and academic, who was President of Magdalen College, Oxford, between 1988 and 2005.

He was born in 1938 and attended Harrow County School for Boys (now Harrow High School), from 1949 to 1956. He read English at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Anthony Smith had a career in broadcasting starting as a producer of BBC current affairs programmes in the 1960s. He became responsible for running the nightly news programme Twenty-Four Hours.

In the early 1970s, he became a Research Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. He worked for the Annan Committee on The Future of Broadcasting, and became engaged in the national debate which led to the foundation of the UK's Channel 4. He was subsequently appointed a Board Director of Channel 4 (1981–1985).

He also carried out research for the McGregor Commission on the Press, which presented its report in 1976.

Between 1979 and 1988 he was Director of the British Film Institute and was involved in the conception and establishment of the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank.

In 1988 he was appointed President of Magdalen College, Oxford University, and he retired from this position in 2005.

He was made CBE in 1987, and was awarded an honorary degree (Doctor of Arts) by Oxford Brookes University in 1997.

He served for four years as a Member of the Arts Council of Great Britain and he has had a long association with the Writers & Scholars Educational Trust, (which produces Index on Censorship), acting for several years as its Chairman. He served for ten years as a member of the Cambodia Trust for the rehabilitation of landmine victims, and served also for a decade as Chairman of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation which was active in helping intellectuals and academics in the Czech and Slovak Republics in the years before and after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

...
Wikipedia