Part Five - … and After

Summary

The Chief Producer years involved some very routine activity such as trying to keep down the store of used and now unwanted recordings.1 Some of them showed a most remarkable capacity for survival – one instruction after another to ‘wash’ them would at the next inventory prove not to have been carried out. It prompted me to formulate Black's Law, which in its final, most succinct version runs: ‘things are present in inverse proportion to your need for them’. In plain English, what you yesterday stumbled over, cursing, you today seek in vain, likewise cursing. An equally vast amount of much more congenial work was involved in coordinating an ever-expanding intake of radio recordings from abroad. That in its turn brought an experience of the American ‘market’, which proved so engrossing that I now devote an entire section to it.

With a merger of the Music Programmes and Gramophone Programmes Departments in 1982 there was, as in Peter Gould's smaller department, a Parkinsonian need for two ‘assistant heads’, and along with my opposite number Arthur Johnson from Gramophone Programmes I became one such ‘Executive Producer’. Ever since that first promotion in 1971, I had managed to hang on to a sizeable amount of programme production; it was what I was best at, but also, I suspect, a main reason why a 1980s-style Management Audit soon decided there was one Executive Producer too many. This man should have been organizing people and crunching numbers, not enjoying himself doing the work of a mere producer. My career as a BBC official ended in 1988; I left four years early (at 56) and was free that much sooner to go on and develop new skills. One was still in programme-making, but this time the ‘right’ side of the glass; at long last I was required rather than forbidden to speak at length into the microphone as author. That very enjoyable if intermittent activity ended in 2003 after the publication of my book on Schubert (another case of post hoc non propter hoc). My later book on Rubbra failed to work the same oracle. For a very long time I had also been jotting down thoughts on a variety of musical subjects and figures, some of which have finally emerged from under their bushel to find their way into this book.