John Thompson
Director of radio at the IBA whose thoughtful regulation put commercial broadcasting on the map
JOHN THOMPSON, who has died aged 88, was widely regarded as the architect of Britain’s commercial local radio network, becoming director of radio at the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) in 1973 as the first stations came on air.
With his background in journalism, Thompson brought a thoughtful and realistic approach to the development of independent local radio (ILR). As the industry’s regulator, he devised the doctrine of “meaningful speech” to emphasise the diverse programming mix and to counter criticism early on that the network’s music-based stations were offering little more than the “pop and prattle” formerly purveyed by the likes of Radio Luxembourg and offshore pirate stations like Radio Caroline.
Although he applied what he called “regulation with a light touch”, Thompson insisted on abundant use of the spoken word, principally news and current affairs, augmented by ubiquitous (and cheap) phone-ins which led to the democratisation of the airwaves. His writ was enforced by local IBA radio officials who monitored the output of the various stations, ensured the speech content was maintained and listened for infringements of IBA rules.
After weathering a hard economic climate in the early years, the ILR stations proved increasingly attractive to listeners and advertisers. London’s Capital Radio, for example, was soon making enough money to set up its own classical ensemble, the Wren Orchestra, to meet the IBA’S requirement that stations spent three per cent of revenue on the employment of live musicians.
As revenues soared still higher, Thompson introduced secondary rental, an additional levy imposed once profits were secure, creating a fund on which stations could draw to make programmes that were otherwise unaffordable.
In London, Capital broadcast Headline, a monthly, live 90-minute debate with an audience. Piccadilly in Manchester devoted an entire weekend to symposia, a drama, and documentaries on incest (not a subject often aired then), while Hallam in Sheffield did a similar exercise on alcoholism. With their mix of chat, music and lively news, ILR stations came to be considered a serious rival to the BBC’S local radio service. Describing ILR as “radio in jeans”, Thompson believed that it was speech content, not music, that drove audiences. “News and information, if presented in an interesting and reliable way, are the bait attracting listeners in the first place,” he observed in 1981.
His spare but canny advice, his wry sense of humour, his appreciation of oddities of character and his flair for seeing possibilities where others might have despaired put British commercial radio into the lives of many millions.
The son of a civil servant with the Inland Revenue, John Brian Thompson was born on June 8 1928 at Bangor, Co Down, but left Northern Ireland at the age of eight when his father was transferred to London. From Dulwich prep school he won a scholarship to St Paul’s, where he became head boy, before going up to Pembroke College, Oxford, to read History. His tutor, Asa Briggs, became a lifelong friend.
Rejected by the Foreign Office because of his asthma, Thompson set his sights on industry and worked for Glaxo Laboratories as what he called the chairman’s “office boy”. Moving to the advertising department, he was recruited by the Masius & Fergusson agency but did not settle.
In 1956 a journalist friend, George Scott, offered him a job on the literary and political magazine Truth. As there was only one other staff member, Bernard Levin, the three wrote the magazine between them. Headhunted by Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express, then in its pomp, as one of his bright young men, Thompson was briefly the paper’s assistant literary editor, before being sent, newly married to Sally Waterhouse, a BBC producer, to New York to write a column called This Is America.
After a spell in Fleet Street as the paper’s drama critic, he joined ITN as a newscaster in 1959 but left within a year to edit the ailing weekly, Time and Tide. When it was sold two years later, Thompson went to The Observer as news editor in 1962. He was the last person in the office to speak to the Soviet spy Kim Philby, then the paper’s correspondent in Beirut, before Philby fled to Moscow in January 1963, and was on duty when President Kennedy was assassinated that November.
When Thompson succeeded his friend Anthony Sampson (author of the bestselling Anatomy of Britain) as editor of the Observer Colour Magazine in 1966, he recruited the food writer Jane Grigson, sealing the deal over a lunch she cooked at her home in Wiltshire that included spinach soaked in butter for a week.
After a brief stint at the pre-maxwell British Printing Corporation in 1971 publishing part works, Thompson was appointed senior adviser to the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Christopher Chataway, and worked on the Bill to establish independent local radio. Once it was enacted, he became the IBA’S director of radio. Appointed CBE in 1980, he retired in 1987.
In retirement, he edited The Viewer magazine about independent television, discovered opera and created an extensive garden at his home in Wiltshire. He also made cameo appearances in films produced by his son Barnaby, playing the Commons Speaker in An Ideal Husband (1999), a civil servant in St Trinian’s (2007) and a roup in a brothel in Dorian Gray (2009).
John Thompson married, in 1957, Sylvia (Sally) Waterhouse, who survives him with their two sons and a daughter.