Frances Line

Frances Mary Line OBE (22 February 1940 – 13 October 2021), whose married name was Frances Lloyd, was a British radio executive.

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".

She believed, however, that this gave her a better understanding of what her audience wanted: "I am able to represent the listeners because I am one of them".

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", and this meant the BBC.

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.

Line moved on from Administration to a job as Production Secretary in the BBC Light Programme, the forerunner of Radio 2.

She spent some time as second secretary on the comedy series The Navy Lark and worked for a short while on the variety programme the Billy Cotton Band Show.

After she became secretary to Brian Matthew, who was then, most unusually, both a BBC producer and presenter, she was involved with two major pop programmes of the period – Saturday Club and Easy Beat.

She also coined the title for a series on which she worked that featured an up-and-coming group: Pop Go the Beatles.

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.

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 continued to progress upwards through the Secretarial Grades in BBC Radio but reached a ceiling beyond which no secretary could rise.

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.

At that time, however, very few women were employed in the higher echelons of television, and Line once more found her upward progress blocked.

In contrast, BBC Radio was beginning to encourage its female secretaries to train as producers and so Line returned to radio, her first love, as a junior producer.

Despite the greater opportunities BBC radio offered to women, gender discrimination remained: Line was one of six new producers, three men and three women, but the three permanent staff posts went to the men and the three temporary posts to the women; the rationale for this was that the men probably had families to support while the women had only themselves and were likely to get married eventually.

Line was, however, delighted to be a producer "in the last glow of the golden days of Radio. The old Light Programme – the days of really funny comedy, of live music and massive listening figures. The days when Radio was king".

One of her first assignments was on the series Music While You Work.

She worked with many popular music stars of the time, including Victor Sylvester, Edmundo Ros, the Oscar Rabin Band, Cyril Stapleton and Acker Bilk.

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 also produced Tony Brandon's afternoon show; 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.

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.

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.

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.