Norman Collins - Early Career in Publishing, The Press and The BBC

Early Career in Publishing, The Press and The BBC

Collins began his career as an editorial assistant at the Oxford University Press in London. He left around 1930, apparently after a dispute over his low salary, and went to work under Robert Lynd as a Literary Editor on the London News Chronicle newspaper. Meanwhile he wrote novels, publishing several successful works such as London Belongs to Me (which was later filmed) in the 1930s. After 1935 he worked in broadcasting as a producer for BBC Radio. In 1946 he was appointed the 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 incredibly long-lived Woman's Hour, first broadcast in 1946 and still running every weekday on BBC Radio 4.

Collins’ huge success as Controller of the Light Programme led to his appointment in 1947 as Controller of the BBC Television Service, during which time it began to take its first steps into becoming a truly mass medium, with television licence numbers breaking into six figures for the first time. This was helped by the extension of broadcasting beyond London with the opening of transmitters in other major cities such as Birmingham, and also by the appeal of the programming Collins and his team were able to offer. Perhaps the high point of his time in control of the channel was the broadcasting live on television of much of the 1948 Olympic Games, being held predominantly in London at Wembley Stadium, where the majority of the BBC’s television cameras were placed for the duration of the games.

Despite a generally successful tenure as Controller, Collins resigned from the BBC in October 1950, when one of the Corporation’s radio executives, George Barnes, was appointed as his superior – he believed that he, as Controller of Television, should not have to answer to a man whose background was in sound broadcasting. Collins left the BBC with a strong desire to see the establishment of a televisual competitor to the Corporation, which since the 1920s had held a complete monopoly on broadcasting in the UK, both radio and television.