Tony Whitby

Tony Whitby
Died	1975

Tony Whitby (c.1930 – 1975) was a British BBC Radio producer and Television current affairs editor who was Controller of BBC Radio 4 from 1970 to 1975.

At the University of Oxford, Whitby wrote a thesis on Matthew Arnold. He began his career as a civil servant in the Colonial Office.

Tony Whitby joined the BBC as a radio producer on At Home and Abroad in the 1950s. During the 1960s, Whitby was a television current affairs editor on Gallery,Tonight and 24 Hours. Whitby was Secretary of the BBC, before his appouintment as Controller of Radio 4 in 1969, taking up the post in January 1970. In this post, he gained a reputation for shrewdly picking out the ideas of others and embellishing them by adding his own thoughts and suggestions. He had no intention of creating a new schedule from scratch, but he wanted a more topical and a more varied flavour - to make Radio 4, in his words, like a "well-labelled library that has a few surprises in it". So, in 1970, along came the unashamedly serious Analysis and the magisterial World Tonight, the bright and breezy 'commuter magazine' PM Reports and a phone-in called It's Your Line, the satirical sketch-show Week Ending, and the consumer magazine You and Yours. In 1972, Whitby commissioned the first series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and in 1973 Kaleidoscope. In 2010, David Hendy, lecturer in broadcasting history at the University of Westminster, said:

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