Career
Trethowan was educated at the independent Christ's Hospital school near Horsham in West Sussex, and started work as a journalist and parliamentary lobby correspondent. He became a presenter for ITN, Independent Television News in the late 1950s and early 1960s, co-presenting ITN's coverage of the 1959 United Kingdom general election, 1959 general election. He moved to the BBC in about 1963, and was part of Grace Wyndham Goldie's group of heavy hitting journalists which included Richard Dimbleby and Robin Day. Trethowan was a regular presenter of political programmes such as ''Gallery (TV series), Gallery'', ''Panorama (British TV programme), Panorama'' and general election and budget specials. He presented the BBC's tribute programme to President John F. Kennedy on the day of his Assassination of John F. Kennedy, assassination. A Conservative Party (UK), Conservative, and a close friend of the former prime minister Sir Edward Heath, Trethowan has been criticised for his support of the MI5, Security Service "vetting" of BBC employees which has often been seen as a means of weeding out leftists in the corporation. Trethowan allowed MI5 to remove half the content from a Panorama (British TV programme), Panorama documentary made by BBC journalist Tom Mangold, 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 BBC but in fact he had met the heads of Security Service (MI5) and the MI6, Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), shown them a tape of the programme and invited them to suggest cuts to it. The programme-makers defended their programme and, although changes were made, the transmitted version still annoyed the intelligence agencies. However, his genuflection to those in power ensured that his five years in charge of the BBC were generally very stable and secure for the organisation. Cautious and conservative-minded, he was responsible for the sacking of Kenny Everett from BBC Radio 1, Radio 1 in 1970 for making a joke suggesting that the wife of John Peyton, Baron Peyton of Yeovil, John Peyton, the transport minister in the Conservative government, had only passed her driving test because she had "slipped the examiner a fiver". In 1979, when Trethowan was Director-General, the BBC 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 BBC saw the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher, 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, he was chairman of Thames Television. He was Knight Bachelor, knighted in 1980. In 1994, when announcing her plans to reduce the dominance of received pronunciation and include more regional accents on BBC Radio 3, Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, Radio 4, Liz Forgan (who then held Trethowan's old post as managing director of BBC network radio) said that she wanted to move away from the attitude she said he had expressed when he heard a Brummie dialect, Birmingham accent on BBC radio and said "What is that sound doing on the BBC? Get it off."References
External links
*Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Brian Wenham, ‘Trethowan, Sir (James) Ian Raley (1922–1990)’