Norman Collins

Norman Collins (3 October 1907 – 6 September 1982) was a British writer, and later a radio and television executive, who became one of the major figures behind the establishment of the Independent Television (ITV) network in the UK. This was the first organisation to break the BBC’s broadcasting monopoly when it began transmitting in 1955.

Collins was born at Beaconsfield into a family that had a French-Huguenot background on his father's side and Welsh farming stock on his mother's. He was educated at a school founded by William Ellis at Gospel Oak, Hampstead. He left at eighteen, and began his career as an editorial assistant at the Oxford University Press in London. Leaving there around 1930, apparently after a dispute over his low salary, he went to work under Robert Lynd as a literary editor on the London News Chronicle newspaper. When 23 he joined the publishing firm founded in 1927 by Victor Gollancz, became deputy chairman, left in 1941, and joined the BBC as an assistant in the Overseas Talks Department, and then as a producer for BBC Radio.

Meanwhile, he wrote novels, publishing several successful works such as London Belongs to Me (which was later filmed) in the 1930s and 40s. After 1935 he worked in broadcasting as a producer for BBC Radio. In 1946 he was appointed Controller of the Light Programme, the BBC’s more populist, entertainment-based radio service which had grown out of the BBC Forces Programme first established to entertain allied troops, but which had also become hugely popular with domestic audiences, during the Second World War.

At the Light Programme he created two of the most iconic programmes in the history of British radio broadcasting. The first of these was the adventure series Dick Barton: Special Agent, which ran for 711 episodes between 1946 and 1951, following the adventures of a dashing secret agent. The series, broadcast in the early evening just after the main news bulletin, was phenomenally popular and drew 15 million listeners at its peak, being fondly remembered and occasionally revived for many years afterwards. The second famous programme Collins initiated was the notably long-lived Woman's Hour, first broadcast in 1946 and still running every weekday on BBC Radio 4.

...
Wikipedia