Laurence Gilliam

Laurence Duval Gilliam, OBE (4 March 1907 – 15 November 1964) was a BBC radio producer.

Gilliam worked with the Gramophone Company, before transferred to the BBC drama department in 1933, where he was responsible for features. At the end of World War II he was appointed OBE for his outstanding programmes.

Laurence Duval Gilliam was born on 4 March 1907 in Fulham, London, the younger son of Ernest William Gilliam (d. 1943), a businessman, and his wife, Beatrice Bishop (d. 1946). He was educated at the City of London School (1918–25) and Peterhouse, Cambridge (1925–8).

Laurence Gilliam worked first with the Gramophone Company in various capacities, and later as a freelance journalist, actor, and producer before joining the editorial staff of the Radio Times in 1932.

Gilliam transferred to the BBC drama department in 1933, where he worked on the development of special feature programmes which wove sound, words, and music together to create an aural picture. From 1933 until the end of his life he was responsible for the world-wide Christmas day programmes which preceded the monarch's address. These programmes were the BBC's technically most complicated assignment, linking the Commonwealth outposts with Broadcasting House in London via elaborate world-wide link-ups. Another notable example of Gilliam's early technical ambition was 'Opping 'Oliday—a ‘sound picture’ of hop picking in Kent—which he produced in 1934 using the newly established mobile recording van. Val Gielgud, head of drama, transferred responsibility for features to Gilliam in May 1936, though features really came into their own during the Second World War.

In 1940 Gilliam married Marianne Helweg (1914–1976), a Dane whose father, Jacob Helweg, had immigrated to Britain in the 1920s to take up a lecturing position at the University of London. The couple met at the BBC, where Marianne had been a plays reader. She and Laurence had three sons and one daughter. They lived in Highgate, Middlesex, until the marriage was dissolved in 1952, when Marianne moved in with the Northern Irish poet Bertie (W. R.) Rodgers, who worked for Gilliam.

While much of the BBC saw broadcasting as a means of escaping from the blitz, Gilliam saw the possibilities for the medium to reflect the reality of war. In his major topical series The Shadow of the Swastika, which documented the rise of Nazism, Gilliam demonstrated the power of the factual documentary for propaganda purposes and offered the first challenging piece of work from the BBC since the outbreak of war. Gilliam had a natural sympathy for the journalistic approach to broadcasting, and his war work reflected these instincts. As one of the two editors (with Donald Boyd) of War Report, he helped to create a revolutionary technique on which all news reporting has since been based, taking the microphone to the fighting line to report back to the people at home nightly, in record time. In recognition of this outstanding war record, features became a separate department at the end of the war in 1945, with Laurence Gilliam as its head, and Gilliam himself was appointed OBE.

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