James Hawthorne: James Hawthorne, who has died aged 76, was more diplomat than militant, but as head of the BBC in Belfast at the height of the Troubles he faced critics on all sides.
The third BBC controller of the Troubles years, his was the watch that saw the 1981 hunger strikes, the Mountbatten murder, unionist protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and repeated confrontations with government about the style and content of BBC coverage.
He was universally known as Jimmy rather than the formal James: Labour Northern secretary Roy Mason habitually called him "Jimmy boy" mid-tirade.
But Hawthorne's decision to cancel the BBC's live coverage of the Twelfth probably demanded more steel than dealing with Mason. Protestants took it as the most insulting single shift in an organisation once regarded as the broadcasting arm of unionist government. (Live coverage was reinstated in the mid-90s, under BBCNI's first Catholic controller.) The establishment of Radio Foyle, the first Irish-language programmes and what many perceived as a novel proliferation of Irish and Catholic names on air all brought complaint, on top of unhappiness about interviews with republicans deemed insufficiently hostile. The convivial Hawthorne, proud to be considered non-sectarian and liberal unionist, seemed particularly dismayed by the reactions he got off-duty.
"I had a problem with a wide influential sector of the public which would include the civil service, the army, the RUC and commerce and industry and much of the unionist-oriented middle class," he said in 1990.
The aggression during his nine years in the job had meant "living and eating the BBC 18 hours per day. Patricia [ his wife] found that a strain. She had to be at my side for many a boring evening which might end up in personal abuse - on one occasion, an accusation of murdering young policemen! Almost every time we went out for dinner, the subject quickly became the performance of the BBC." After loyalist threats he sent his family out of Northern Ireland for a time, and varied his route to work on police advice. A colleague recalled him driving "a variety of anonymous battered Minis".
Earlier this year he told Indian journalists visiting his home in Co Down (Crossgar Les Deux Églises, he loved to joke) that the questions about the language of news reports that plagued him most were the pronunciation of the letter H, and should it be Derry or Londonderry, the army or the British army? "And should Martin McGuinness be on the box?" The last referred to the greatest controversy of his term as controller, over the Real Lives programme scheduled for August 1985 which jointly profiled McGuinness, then thought to be an IRA leader, and the DUP's Gregory Campbell.
Under pressure from the Thatcher government the BBC in London decided the programme should be banned. Hawthorne threatened to resign, but was persuaded to change his mind.
The National Union of Journalists held a UK-wide one-day strike in protest against the ban, and the programme, with changes, was shown some months later. But it proved the prelude to the Thatcher ban on Sinn Féin appearances and interviews.
Hawthorne joined the BBC aged 30 to develop schools broadcasting after teaching in a north Down grammar, and was proud of producing an even-handed, still useful history text for teachers.
Published as Two Centuries of Irish History, it represented considerable daring for the BBC - as Hawthorne himself noted much later - by presenting material on the Fenians and Home Rule rather than the traditional England-centred account.
He spent the first years of the Troubles in Hong Kong, seconded to set up the television service. He came back in 1978 to take the top job in Belfast, two years into Mason's crusade to destroy the IRA by stepping up military operations and insisting republicans be seen as simply criminal. At their first meeting Mason "claimed we as professionals were deliberately distorting the truth for some unspecified political end".
Like most senior BBC executives, Hawthorne was convinced the complaints they got from both sides meant programming struck a decent balance.
He was awarded a CBE in 1982, retired in 1987, and went on to chair the Community Relations Council and Cultural Traditions Group among much other committee work. Queen's University gave him an honorary doctorate in literature in 1988, a title of which he was extremely proud. His wife Patricia died four years ago. He is survived by daughters Fiona and Deirdre and son Patrick.
James Burns Hawthorne: born Belfast, March 27th, 1930; died Belfast, September 7th, 2006