John Tydeman

John Peter Tydeman (born 30 March 1936) is an English producer of radio and director of theatre plays. He was responsible for commissioning and directing the early plays of Caryl Churchill, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard and Sue Townsend.

Tydeman was the head of BBC Radio Drama from 1986 to 1994.

Tydeman was educated at Hertford Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 1st Singapore Regiment of the Royal Artillery in Malaya, 1954-1956.

After joining the BBC as a general trainee, working in various parts of the Corporation, he became a full-time producer in BBC Radio Drama in 1960, where he produced Shakespeare and other classical writers and worked with many of the leading dramatists of the day, also adapting works such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Jane Austen’s Emma. Among the writers he produced were David Rudkin (Cries from Casement as his Bones are Brought to Dublin), Edward Bond (Narrow Road to the Deep North), William Trevor (Scenes from an Album) and David Cregan and Tom Stoppard on many occasions.

Although Caryl Churchill’s first play for radio, The Ants (produced by Michael Bakewell), was broadcast three times in 1962-63, it was not retained in the BBC Archives. For Churchill, as for Stoppard, the freedom of the radio form was significant in the development of their writing. Churchill’s work with Tydeman shows an unfettered imagination at work. The plays Identical Twins, Shreber’s Nervous Illness, Henry’s Past, Abortive, Not, Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen and Perfect Happiness do survive in the BBC, and foreshadow the freedom and discipline of her later stage work. Kenneth Haigh’s performance as twin brothers in Identical Twins, a ‘duologue’, is a tour-de-force of radio acting and writing.

Joe Orton was there at the beginning of Tydeman’s BBC career, as Tydeman, usually called ‘Tydey’ in theatrical circumstances, told Brian Jarman of the Fitzrovia News in 2011: ‘It was when he was a young BBC general trainee after university in 1959 that a playwright called Joe Orton walked into his office. John was spending three months in various departments and just happened to be working in Drama at the time.

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