Michael John Mason

1924 - 2014  (89 years)

• Name	Michael John Mason
  Born	4 Dec 1924	Maida Vale, Middlesex, England, UK
  Gender	Male
  Occupation	BBC Radio Producer
  Occupation	Editor - Sheed & Ward Publishing House
  Died	14 Jun 2014	Dorking, Surrey, England, UK
  	Michael Mason, who has died aged 89, was once mocked by a newspaper columnist as "the Cecil B DeMille of steam radio". Mason certainly pushed the medium of sound broadcasting on BBC Radio to its limits - and occasionally beyond. Listeners who tuned in to the BBC Home Service one October evening in 1966 for the programme A Bayeux Tapestry got their first taste of a Mason production and a foretaste of greater things to come. Made to mark the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, the programme mixed music, effects and voices to vivid effect, employing for the first time the signature vox-pop recordings that helped to set Mason's productions apart from the formal talking-head style that was very much the stock BBC radio output at the time. Mason was born in Maida Vale, London, to Herbert, a stage actor who moved into film-making, and Daisy, a novelist and playwright. Educated at Haileybury school, Hertfordshire, he was planning to go to Cambridge when the second world war intervened. Mason served briefly in the Home Guard before volunteering to join the army in 1942 at the age of 18. He entered the Royal Artillery as a gunner and was wounded by enemy shrapnel shortly after the Battle of the Bulge. After demobilisation he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read English. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Mason went to work as an editor for the Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward; here he met his future wife, Pamela (nee Greig), proposing to her in the course of a walk through a snowstorm on Hampstead Heath. Editing led Mason into freelance scriptwriting and radio, and in 1965 he secured a much sought-after job as a BBC radio producer at Broadcasting House. In addition to the bread-and-butter fare of interviews, scripted talks and the rest, his programmes included a feature in which a youthful Anthony Hopkins portrayed a passionate, flawed Beethoven, and Icarus With an Oilcan (1975), about the early days of powered flight. The most remarkable was The Long March of Everyman , a 26-part series of 45-minute programmes broadcast weekly on Radio 4 from November 1971. These ambitious historical soundscapes presented "themes and variations in the history of the people of Britain", from Roman times to the present. They told the story primarily through the words and voices of "the people": letters, diaries, official pronouncements, court proceedings, gravestone inscriptions, graffiti, popular rhymes, lyrics and jokes - each read by somebody who was the nearest equivalent of the original author. The recordings were intercut with music, sound effects, literary excerpts (read by actors) and the voices of many of the country's leading historians, from Asa Briggs and Christopher Hill to radical young Turks such as Raphael Samuel . The final ingredients were mixed in the BBC's radiophonic workshop at Maida Vale. In The Long March and other characteristically multilayered productions such as Rus (a history of Russia) and The British Seafarer (1980), Mason aimed at what he called "total audio": a thematic, quasi-symphonic use of sound through which he believed he could communicate a far richer and more nuanced evocation of the past than could ever be achieved by a linear, narrator-led presentation. Many listeners became - and remain - passionate devotees; others complained that they wanted more facts and dates. Mason's fondness for expensive, grandiose projects did not always make him popular with his corporate masters. Nor were all his productions unmitigated successes; Mason's much cherished electronic opera for radio, recorded quadrophonically (much of it under water in a municipal swimming-pool), left most listeners baffled. His most ambitious project, The Landscape of European Music, consisting of 50 live concerts, each to be broadcast with an accompanying hour-long documentary - was stillborn due to the difficulties of marshalling the necessary resources. But Mason's earlier experiments with the spoken word led him to create what was in some ways the most innovative production of them all: a kaleidoscopic evocation of the final years of Britain's recently lost empire. Plain Tales from the Raj (1974) was built around field recordings of some 60 veterans of British rule in India, from the nonagenarian Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, the last commander-in-chief of the pre-independence Indian army, to the comedian Spike Milligan , born in Poona, the son of a soldier. The programmes struck an immediate chord and the series went on to generate outstanding audience figures, confounding Mason's bosses who had previously expressed doubts about giving air time to such an unenticing subject. A second series was commissioned, as well as a book based on the original series, which briefly vied with Edward Heath 's Sailing for the top of the bestseller list. Oral history became an accepted part of the radio repertoire with Mason's further exercises in colonial history, Tales from the Dark Continent (1979) and Tales from the South China Seas (1983) - programmes condemned by one Marxist historian as exercises in colonial nostalgia, but defended by Mason as part and parcel of British history. In his later years, Mason cast off his Catholicism and become increasingly influenced by some of the teachings of Buddhism. Some of his BBC colleagues undoubtedly saw him as an eccentric or even an irritant; others came to regard him as a wise and gentle friend who saw in radio a wonderful instrument through which to awaken the imagination and the spirit. In 1984, Mason left the BBC, moving with his wife and family to Surrey, where he enjoyed a long and serene retirement. He is survived by Pamela, two sons and a daughter, and by seven grandchildren. Michael Mason, radio producer, born 4 December 1924; died 14 June 2014. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jul/13/michael-mason
  Person ID	I44354	Lasbury Family
  Last Modified	19 Feb 2024

  
  

  Father	Samuel George Herbert Mason, MC           b. 7 Apr 1891, Solihull, Warwickshire, England, UK           d. 20 May 1960, Hendon, Middlesex, England, UK  (Age 69 years)
  Mother	Daisy Gertrude Fisher           b. 7 Nov 1887, Hampstead, London, England, UK           d. 2 Apr 1969, Hendon, Middlesex, England, UK  (Age 81 years)
  Married	23 Jun 1914	Brondesbury, Middlesex, England, UK
  	Address: Christchurch, Brondesbury, Middlesex, England, UK
  Family ID	F17973	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Wife	Pamela F. Greig
  Children	1. Nicholas M. Mason   2. Andrew S. Mason   3. Antonia Jane Mason
  Last Modified	10 Jan 2024
  Family ID	F40988	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

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  Born - 4 Dec 1924 - Maida Vale, Middlesex, England, UK Died - 14 Jun 2014 - Dorking, Surrey, England, UK  = Link to Google Earth

  
  

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