John Tydeman obituary

To readers of books, John Tydeman is a fictional BBC producer who loomed large in the literary aspirations of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole. To Townsend, as for many other writers, he was the real-life radio drama producer who encouraged her, produced her first radio play about the secret diary of “Nigel” Mole, and then introduced her to the publishers Methuen.

As with another of Tydeman’s proteges, Joe Orton, Townsend’s success was dizzying. Between the debut of Nigel in January 1982 and the publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ that September – simultaneously read as a serial on Radio 4 – Townsend had provided Adrian with a book’s worth of diary entries and become a publishing sensation. For the rest of Townsend’s life, Adrian would continue to submit poetry to Tydeman, who would continue to reply with growing exasperation. His letters, with Adrian’s poems, were published by Penguin in 2017.

Whenever Tydeman, who has died aged 84, was asked to recall his first meeting at the BBC in the early 1960s with the unknown writer who would become Joe Orton, he would describe him as “wearing bovver boots and khaki, and intimidating – I didn’t know at the time he was a joker. I asked him, ‘What have you been doing?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve been in prison.’ I was alarmed: ‘What did you go to prison for?’ He said, ‘Defacing library books.’ I thought, that’s all right.”

Tydeman, who rose to head of radio drama in his 35 years at the BBC, was then only a few years out of Cambridge, and had rescued “an extraordinary fresh script” called The Boy Hairdresser from the rejection pile. Encouraged to invite the writer in, he took the young Orton through needed revisions. When Orton brought the final rewrites in, he also handed Tydeman a new script. “I don’t think it’s radio,” he told him. Tydeman had a quick look, found it dazzling and agreed it was not radio. It was Entertaining Mr Sloane.

He put Orton in touch with the literary agent Peggy Ramsay, who liked it, and Orton, and convinced the producer Michael Codron to back it. “Then they got that play on at the Arts theatre [in 1964] before I got the radio play on,” Tydeman said.

The radio play, now titled The Ruffian on the Stair, was also a breakthrough for the 19-year-old actor Kenneth Cranham, cast on the basis of one previous radio performance. He, like Tydeman, became friends with Orton for the rest of the latter’s short life. Cranham recalled that Tydeman “was entwined with everything that was going on; like the Royal Court then, he was part of it all”.

The 1960s were a heady time for new writing and, also in 1964, Tydeman produced his first Tom Stoppard play, “M” Is for the Moon Among Other Things. Tydeman would commission seven radio plays from Stoppard, and their work together produced some of radio’s most memorable events. In the Native State (1991), which came to the stage as Indian Ink four years later, featured Peggy Ashcroft’s final performance.

Another emerging writer Tydeman supported was Caryl Churchill. In her 20s, with small children and little time to write, she had found the freedom of the BBC’s Third Programme, and Tydeman.

“I remember him as reserved but warm, kind and encouraging, and with skills I was incapable of fully understanding then but do now … When I unthinkingly wrote things that needed unusual solutions, like Identical Twins, where the actor has to speak at the same time as himself, John made it an enjoyable challenge, never a difficulty.” Tydeman directed her stage play Objections to Sex and Violence (1974) at the Royal Court, but, as Churchill described it, while she “turned more and more to theatre, John stayed with audio”.

In radio, he was at the top. He won the international broadcasting awards the Prix Italia (1970) and the Prix Futura (1979) with one writer, Rhys Adrian, for whom he directed 27 plays. Working on the classics he loved, and continuing to discover new writers, was what he relished.

John was born in Hertfordshire, to George Tydeman, a rate collector, and his wife, Gladys (nee Brown). John was their only child, but he had four half-sisters from his father’s first marriage. He attended Hertford grammar school and then served as 2nd lieutenant in the 1st Singapore Regiment of the Royal Artillery in Malaya (1954-56).

After national service he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. Theatre and directing was a critical part of his student days, and he worked with his contemporaries Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Corin Redgrave. Slightly younger was Miriam Margoyles, who recalled him as being “impossibly grand and magisterial even then”. He brought her into the BBC from the mid-60s and, she said, was “in my life, guiding me, reassuring me and getting some of my best work out of me”.

Tydeman valued her as well. When Townsend wrote The Queen and I in 1993 (on the 40th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation), he tracked Margolyes down in California and persuaded her to record the book long distance, “directing me down the line and earning the BBC a platinum disc. He pursued excellence and talent with ferocity, he abhorred the mediocre.”

In 1986 Tydeman became only the fourth head of BBC radio drama. There really was not a life away from the corporation until he took early retirement in 1994. His regular attendance at theatres fed into his work; the work fed into his other responsibilities.

After Ramsay’s death in 1991, he joined the board of the Peggy Ramsay Foundation, where he guided money into the hands of playwrights. He sat on the board of the Garrick Club, where he argued to loosen the necktie requirement, and to admit women, and was on the board of the Regent’s Park Open Air theatre.

Those of us who worked with Tydeman – actors, writers, radio staff – mostly knew him as “Tydey”. At Broadcasting House he kept an open door and at the end of the week his drinks cabinet would be open to colleagues from other departments. His was a warm office, with a shelf of teddy bears that somewhat belied the steely dedication that would emerge in the determination to create art.

His partner of 37 years was Tony Lynch, a medical assistant from Sydney, Australia, where they first met in the early 80s. They entered into a civil partnership as soon as it was law. Tony survives him.

• John Peter Tydeman, radio drama producer and director, born 30 March 1936; died 1 April 2020