Nancy Thomas, who has died aged 96, was a prominent figure in the BBC’s Talks Department in the late 50s and early 60s, when BBC and ITV were the only UK channels, and programmes were transmitted in black and white to tiny screens. She played a significant part in the postwar surge in production which saw the emergence of such dominant figures in British television as her colleagues David Attenborough and Huw Wheldon.
She was one of the handful of clever women who flourished in the basically male preserve of the Lime Grove studios – in her case by building a reputation for efficiently and coolly controlling live studio productions week after week. Her first direction jobs were in 1956 for the hugely popular nature programme Zoo Quest, presented by Attenborough, and the game show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?. She also inaugurated Patrick Moore’s The Sky at Night but made her most lasting mark on the arts magazine Monitor, where she was one of the producers from its early days until its concluding season in 1965, when she loyally backed up Jonathan Miller’s controversial editorship.
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