Frances Line

Frances Line died on 13 October 2021, at the age of 81. Her funeral service at Eastbourne Crematorium took place on 2 November 2021 and was conducted by the Reverend Canon Roger Royle, whom she had appointed as the regular presenter of Sunday Half Hour when she was Controller of Radio 2.

Line moved with her husband to Eastbourne, where she had once enjoyed the concert parties that contributed to her desire to enter show business. Under her married name of Frances Lloyd, she was a Vice-President of the Eastbourne Society and a member of the Eastbourne Ashridge Circle, possibly Britain's largest lecture society; from 2012, she was a Director of Marlborough Court (Eastbourne) Ltd, where she lived, and for several years she edited its newsletter; she was also one of the Ambassadors for Eastbourne Theatres, helping to promote and publicise their shows.

Line retired from "the greatest show on earth" in February 1996 and Jim Moir replaced her.

In the spring of 1995, Radio 2 was named UK Station of the Year at the Sony Radio Awards. In the same year, Line was elected a Fellow of the Radio Academy and in the 1996 New Year Honours list she was appointed OBE for services to broadcasting.

The BBC Annual Report in July 1994 praised Radio 2 for keeping its audience share the year before in spite of greater competition and for retaining the loyalty of its older listeners. Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR) figures released on 24 October 1994 showed it had become Britain's most popular radio station in terms of audience share – 12.9 per cent compared to its nearest rival, Radio 1, which had 11.8 per cent (though the latter still had more listeners).

During 1994, Radio 2 featured appearances by a constellation of stars such as José Carreras, Cybill Shepherd and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, some of whom performed exclusively for the network. It also offered a series of classic musicals such as Finian's Rainbow, Guys and Dolls, Salad Days and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, implementing one of Line's clear policy objectives: "In the same way that Radio 3 is the home of the opera, we have consciously decided that Radio 2 is to be the home of the musical".

Radio 2 also offered programmes tackling controversial and difficult topics such as testicular cancer and prostate problems, in the July 1994 campaign Man Matters, and domestic violence, in the October 1994 programme When Home Is Where The Hurt Is.

As Controller, Line pursued a programming policy that combined music aimed at listeners in their fifties, as she herself was at the time, with a thrice-weekly arts series, and discussions on contemporary issues. She recruited Sheridan Morley to present a weekend arts programme that, in Sue Gaisford's view, proved to be as good as, and sometimes better than, its competitors on Radio 3 and Radio 4; moved Derek Jameson, in January 1992, from the breakfast show to a four-day-a-week late-night slot between 10.30pm and 12.00 midnight with his wife, Ellen; persuaded Terry Wogan to return to Radio 2 in January 1993, where he took over the breakfast show Good Morning UK! (duly renamed Wake Up to Wogan) from the Australian broadcaster Brian Hayes; inaugurated Hayes's own weekly phone-in current affairs programme Hayes over Britain, and his Saturday and Sunday slots; secured Michael Aspel's services for a Sunday morning programme; made the Reverend Canon Roger Royle the regular presenter of Sunday Half Hour from September 1990, a role he fulfilled until April 2007; and brought in Sarah Kennedy in 1993 to front the early morning show The Dawn Patrol.

On 1 January 1990, Line took up her post as Controller of Radio 2. Her aim was "to make Radio 2 as good as I possibly could, and the top station"'. Over the next five years, she turned it from a network that had been "something of a joke" into one that started to be "taken much more seriously", as Robert Hanks expressed it in an Independent article in 1996.

In late 1985, Line returned to Radio 2 as the network's first female Head of Music; Bryant Marriott was the Controller at that time. Line aimed to clarify the station's musical identity in terms that would enhance its appeal to older listeners; her keywords were "melody, familiarity, excellence and breadth"'. Line was quoted in The Times (21 January 1986) as saying: “Radio 2 had been drifting about without a clear music policy. The youth audience has been overindulged and now it is time to return to the over-40s. There are an awful lot of over-40s in the country and perhaps some of them have given us up in the past". Big band and jazz would predominate on Mondays, "big strings sounds" and a series about past and present musical stars on Tuesdays, and folk music on Wednesdays. Line's focus was on daytime programming, when Radio 2 had the most listeners, but she did recruit Paul Jones, an actor and once the singer with the group Manfred Mann, to host a new blues and country music series in the evening.

One of Line's most notable achievements in this phase of her career was to persuade Bryant Marriott that the network should hire Derek Jameson, whom she had seen on a BBC 2 TV programme called Do They Mean Us? and thought would be the person for radio. Jameson began presenting Radio 2's breakfast show on 7 April 1986; in mid-May the BBC declared that he had "increased the number of listeners by 500,000, or 25 per cent" and Jameson himself was reported as claiming that listeners' letters "were coming in at the rate of 500 a week and all but a handful approved of his style".

By 1980, Line had decided to move from production into management; she became a Chief Assistant, a Controller's right-hand person with particular responsibility for network scheduling. She was Chief Assistant to David Hatch, who was Controller of Radio 2 and then of Radio 4. An especially challenging task in this role was the scheduling of Radio 4 bulletins on the Falklands War, which Line discharged successfully. Throughout the war, Radio 4 kept all its listeners and gained many hundreds of thousands more who still used radio, rather than television, as their primary information source.

When the Light Programme morphed into Radio 2 in 1967, Line became a producer of the series Roundabout and then produced Folk on Friday, introduced by her future husband, Jim Lloyd, who had an extensive knowledge of the folk scene. Line and Lloyd married in 1972; she had two step-children from Lloyd's first marriage.

Line therefore moved to television and became a Producer's Assistant (PA) in Light Entertainment, where she worked on musical, drama and comedy series: Juke Box Jury; the very first episode of Top of the Pops, broadcast on 1 January 1964 and starting off with The Rolling Stones live from a converted church in Manchester; Z-Cars; Blandings Castle, based on the P.G. Wodehouse stories; and Meet the Wife with Thora Hird and Freddie Frinton.

When Brian Matthew was especially hard-pressed, he would allow Line to undertake tasks that exceeded her remit as a Secretary, such as talking to artists about the songs they would be performing and, occasionally, choosing a record for the programme. Still only 20 years old, she found this "very exciting" and began to develop the skills that would stand her in good stead as a producer. On 22 February 1961, Line's twenty-first birthday, Matthew let her cast a whole Easy Beat show; she took much time and care over this and aimed to make her selection as "dispassionate" as possible, but was glad to be able justifiably to include one of her favourite groups as they were then chart-toppers: Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen.

Line presented herself for interview at the BBC at the age of 16, while still at school, and declared that her long-term ambition was to be a producer, arousing much amusement in the lady who was interviewing her. She landed a job as a clerk-typist and began work at the BBC at a salary of £6.13s a week, rising to £9.5s.6d after she passed the Proficiency Tests for Junior Secretaries in June 1959. She took full advantage of the free tickets that were available to attend BBC audience shows at studios such as the Paris Theatre, formerly a cinema, at 12 Lower Regent Street; 201 Piccadilly; and the Playhouse Theatre in Northumberland Avenue.

Frances Mary Line OBE (22 February 1940 – 13 October 2021), whose married name was Frances Lloyd, was a British radio executive. From 1990 to 1996, she was Controller of BBC Radio 2, the first woman to hold the post and only the third to run a BBC Radio network after Clare Lawson Dick and Monica Sims, Controllers of Radio 4 from 1975–76 and 1978–83 respectively. Line had previously worked at the BBC as a clerk-typist, secretary, producer's assistant on BBC Television, and producer and then Head of Music on Radio 2.

Line was born in Croydon on 22 February 1940, the first child of Charles Edward Line, a bank manager, and Leoni Lucy Line (née Hendriks). Her maternal grandfather, Theodore Johan Hubert Hendriks, was Dutch and worked as a hairdresser at the Elizabeth Arden salon under the name of "Mr Robert". Her sister, Julia "Jools" Evelyn Line, was born on 24 July 1947, and became a writer on the occult and a cross-stitch sampler designer.