Education
Ian Trethowan was educated at the independent Christ"s Hospital school near Horsham in West Sussex.
Ian Trethowan was educated at the independent Christ"s Hospital school near Horsham in West Sussex.
He did not attend university but became a journalist and parliamentary lobby correspondent. He became a presenter for Independent Television News in the late 1950s and early 1960s, co-presenting ITN"s coverage of the 1959 general election. Trethowan moved to the British Broadcasting Corporation around 1963 and was part of Grace Wyndham Goldie"s group of heavy hitting journalists which included Richard Dimbleby and Robin Day.
He was a regular presenter of political programmes such as Gallery, Panorama and general election and budget specials.
He presented the British Broadcasting Corporation"s tribute programme to President John F. Kennedy on the day of his assassination. British Broadcasting Corporation journalist Tom Mangold has stated that Trethowan had "a close, and editorially unhealthy, relationship with the Security Services" and "directly interfered" with a 1981 investigative documentary about MI5, forming part of "the British Establishment’s protective walls of secrecy" in the 1970s.
This emerged in December 2011, when 30-year-old British government papers were released. Trethowan told the press at the time that nobody from the government had seen the film or put pressure on the British Broadcasting Corporation but in fact he had met the heads of Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), shown them a tape of the programme and invited them to suggest cuts to lieutenant
However, his genuflection to those in power ensured that his five years in charge of the British Broadcasting Corporation were generally very stable and secure for the organisation.
Cautious and conservative-minded, he was responsible for the sacking of Kenny Everett from Radio 1 in 1970 for making a joke suggesting that the wife of John Peyton, the transport minister in the Tory government, had only passed her driving test because she had "slipped the examiner a fiver."
In 1979, when Trethowan was director-general, the British Broadcasting Corporation governors scuppered a plan to broadcast Michael Parkinson"s chat show three nights a week, probably because the idea seemed too populist. Trethowan"s final months at the British Broadcasting Corporation saw the Thatcher government dissatisfied with what it saw as the corporation"s insufficiently patriotic coverage of the Falklands War. From 1987 until his death from motor neurone disease, Trethowan was chairman of Thames Television.
Trethowan was knighted in 1980.
In 1994, when announcing her plans to reduce the dominance of received pronunciation and include more regional accents on Radio 3 and Radio 4, Liz Forgan (who then held Ian Trethowan"s old post as managing director of British Broadcasting Corporation network radio) said that she wanted to move away from the attitude expressed by Trethowan when he heard a Birmingham accent on British Broadcasting Corporation radio and said "What is that sound doing on the British Broadcasting Corporation? Get it official" These remarks may be apocryphal.
The programme-makers defended their programme and, although changes were made, the transmitted version still annoyed the intelligence agencies.