Sir Bill Cotton, who has died aged 80, was managerially responsible for many of the BBC's most loved and enduring programmes in its 1960s and 70s golden age of comedy.
He was unusual in being a broadcasting executive whose background was in show business rather than the grimmer-faced bureaucracy of news and current affairs.
Cotton was always close to the centre of showbiz as the son of the popular and raucous band leader Billy ("Wakey, wakey!") Cotton, whose robust drollery enlivened both BBC radio and TV as well as theatre venues and smart hotels.
The younger Cotton was welcomed by a wide range of talent when he became head of BBC light entertainment, then controller of BBC1 and finally managing director of BBC TV, because, unlike many of his predecessors, he was visibly open to drama and light entertainment values.
He knew, without asking a marketing man, what thrilled him and what made him laugh - and what might therefore thrill and amuse an audience.
One of the most genial and least faceless top executives in the BBC's slippery corridors of power, Cotton was tall, bespectacled, a ready listener yet capable of firm decisions.
At a very public reception an anti-BBC campaigning journalist found that Cotton refused to answer his questions or say a word to him and, when the journalist failed to take the hint, pointedly and very visibly turned his back on him. If there were any red faces, Cotton's was not one of them.
A straightforward man, Cotton was rarely frightened to turn his back, recognising that that dangerous process was necessary to looking ahead - even at the risk of knifings. He survived until he retired at the regulation age of 60 in 1988, was made CBE the following year, and was knighted in 2001.
Uncle Bill, as he was known even to people older than he was, was familiar to everyone in the days when the BBC had more than 20,000 staff. Employees found that he was as friendly - and direct - with the cleaning ladies as he was with heads of departments.
Cotton's greatest achievement was as head of light entertainment. He discovered or developed Dave Allen, Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, Porridge, Monty Python, Dad's Army and many others.
He actually liked creative people and the front men he employed. Repeatedly ribbed on air by Terry Wogan, then at the height of his popularity as a chatshow host, Cotton responded by sitting on his lap and kissing him. It was a gesture a million miles over the top by BBC standards, but revealed a controlled flamboyance that was wheeled out when it suited his purpose.
Cotton's background was as respectable as any bandleader's son's could be. Born in London, he was a boarder at Ardingly College in Sussex, and did his national service in the Royal Army Service Corps.
After working in the music division of Chappells, in 1952 he went to the Michael Reine Music Company as joint managing director (1952-56). His father had drummed three things into him: to know what you were doing, to work very hard at it and to have a lot of luck.
It was luck that he joined the BBC as a light entertainment producer in 1956 - the year of the Suez crisis, when it became obvious to the more perceptive that Britain's reputation and values were entering a period of testing change that was bound to be reflected in light entertainment.
The previous year young Bill Cotton had taken over his father's Billy Cotton Bandshow for a broadcast after his father suffered a sudden and temporary nervous collapse. Bill used his father's voice but some of his own humour, and his appearance was praised.
Once he was in the BBC, he produced more than 80 editions of his father's show, which in a sense heralded the changes which were to come. In the hands of Cotton senior, who was never afraid to blow a raspberry at the toffs, the show was already more pawky and irreverent than most popular entertainment.
To the younger Cotton, producing his father's shows was a lesson in staying in control. It was also a contacts book of show business in both Britain and America.
Though charmed by American artists including the singer Perry Como, the American dominance at an impressionable stage of Cotton's life made him determined one day to create British stars for British television, which he did later with Val Doonican as a European equivalent of Como. Cotton was to quip time and time again: "Given the choice, we ought to use our rubbish."
When Cotton joined the BBC, there was still a house directive banning jokes about a whole range of subjects, including honeymoon couples and effeminacy in men.
By the time he became head of variety in 1967, after the subversive That Was The Week That Was and the satire movement of which it was a part, and then head of light entertainment in 1970, the rules were loosening up: Cotton, never lacking in common sense, sometimes felt the need to apply the brakes.
Three years after being appointed head of light entertainment, Cotton found himself putting round directives to producers about the excessive use of bad language that had followed the bridgehead established by the cockney bigot Alf Garnett in the television series Till Death Us Do Part - while at the same time defending the right of writers to deal in comedy terms with previously unacceptable subjects.
He claimed that anything could be the subject of comedy provided the approach was right, and cited the successful series My Wife Next Door, which made divorce funny by treating with affection and respect a couple who found that after divorce they were accidentally living next door to one another.
Cotton revered artists and gave them a chance to breathe - he even gave the puppet Basil Brush his own programme. When he gave the singer Cilla Black her chance, he defended the move by saying he saw her as a version of the British Gracie Fields rather than the American Barbra Streisand.
When he became controller of BBC1 in 1977, his first act was to axe two American series his predecessor had bought. He once boasted that in the 15 years he had been with BBC light entertainment, the Americans Perry Como, Dick Van Dyke and Lucille Ball had disappeared from the schedules.
It was a historical irony that much later Cotton was to protest vehemently - and successfully - when Thames TV wrested the American soap opera Dallas from the BBC while the BBC thought it was still negotiating with the US distributors.
The early 1980s saw Cotton's career apparently in the doldrums as he was shuffled into a job masterminding the BBC's involvement in Direct Broadcasting By Satellite (DBS), which turned out to be a non-involvement.
But the abrupt removal of Aubrey Singer as managing director of a BBC TV service losing ground to ITV gave Cotton his chance as his successor.
He soon brought in Michael Grade, an ex-ITV man but a kindred spirit, first as controller of BBC1 and then as director of programmes. The two men started to win back lost ground - partly through the successful soap opera EastEnders.
Grade dubbed Cotton a very clever negotiator who always told artists the truth about themselves - intelligent if no intellectual; intuitive and wise; unselfish and (a rare accolade) perhaps not ambitious enough on his own behalf.
It was true that Cotton could have made much more money had he accepted one of the share-adorned offers made to him at various times by ITV. He was simply more interested in programme and personal distinction than in greed.
He was a golfer and a magistrate. It was while sitting on the Richmond Bench that he met a fellow magistrate 25 years his junior, Kate Burgess; he shared his life with her after separating from his second wife, Ann Henderson, and marrying Burgess in 1990.
Both resigned from the Bench amid a BBC-bashing campaign by some tabloid newspapers.
Cotton's career, unlike that of most BBC top brass, did not end with his departure from the corporation. He went on to head the TV arm of the Noel Gay Agency, as chairman of Noel Gay Television, luring the presenter Sue Lawley, for instance, to ITV when her BBC TV career appeared to be in the doldrums.
He arranged a deal worth £350,000 while simultaneously keeping her in her prestigious BBC radio Desert Island Discs slot - a feat typical of his avuncular brand of diplomacy. He is survived by Kate and the three daughters of his first marriage, to Bernadine Sinclair, who died in 1964.
WIlliam Frederick "Bill" Cotton, broadcasting executive, born April 23 1928; died August 11 2008