Frances Line

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.

Early life and education 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.

Line was raised in Norbury, where she lived opposite Peter Sarstedt, with whom she later worked as a producer. She attended Winterbourne Primary School and then won a scholarship to James Allen's Girls' School (JAGS) in Dulwich, the sister school of Dulwich College. She left school with six GCE O levels and a swimming certificate so that, unlike most BBC radio controllers, she was not a graduate, but, as she quipped, "an unqualified success".

Elocution, ballet and piano lessons, and visits to seaside concert parties in Eastbourne and to local venues such as the Croydon Grand Theatre and Streatham Hill Theatre, had made her keen to go into show business, but her father suggested that she should prudently pursue "Show Business with a PENSION", 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. All she could later recall of the Beatles themselves, however, was that "they made paper darts out of [her] carefully typed scripts and threw them at each other", which she deeply resented. and then produced Folk on Friday, introduced by her future husband, Jim Lloyd, who had an extensive knowledge of the folk scene. Sam Costa's late afternoon show; Joe "Mr Piano" Henderson's afternoon show; early morning shows hosted by Tom Edwards and Colin Berry; and John Dunn's Drivetime.

From Chief Assistant to Controller 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. 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. However, Line's changes proved popular with a substantial audience.

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".

At the end of the decade, Line succeeded Bryant Marriott as Controller.

Line as Controller On 1 January 1990, Line took up her post as Controller of Radio 2.

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". 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.

Line knew that her network lost around 200,000 listeners annually to what was called in the BBC "Radio Grim Reaper" and she aimed to attract younger people to Radio 2 by scheduling "access points" for "the Beatles generation" – itself, of course, growing older – while retaining the loyalty of its core audience. 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.

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.