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.
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