After she became secretary to Brian Matthew, who was then, most unusually, both a BBC producer and presenter, she was involved with two major pop programmes of the period – Saturday Club and Easy Beat.
[8] When Brian Matthew was especially hard-pressed, he would allow Line to undertake tasks that exceeded her remit as a Secretary, such as talking to artists about the songs they would be performing and, occasionally, choosing a record for the programme.
On 22 February 1961, Line's twenty-first birthday, Matthew let her cast a whole Easy Beat show; she took much time and care over this and aimed to make her selection as "dispassionate" as possible, but was glad to be able justifiably to include one of her favourite groups as they were then chart-toppers: Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen.
[8] Line therefore moved to television and became a Producer's Assistant (PA) in Light Entertainment, where she worked on musical, drama and comedy series: Juke Box Jury; the very first episode of Top of the Pops, broadcast on 1 January 1964 and starting off with The Rolling Stones live from a converted church in Manchester;[8] Z-Cars; Blandings Castle, based on the P.G.
She worked with many popular music stars of the time, including Victor Sylvester, Edmundo Ros, the Oscar Rabin Band, Cyril Stapleton and Acker Bilk.
Line aimed to clarify the station's musical identity in terms that would enhance its appeal to older listeners; her keywords were "melody, familiarity, excellence and breadth"'.
Line's focus was on daytime programming, when Radio 2 had the most listeners, but she did recruit Paul Jones, an actor and once the singer with the group Manfred Mann, to host a new blues and country music series in the evening.
[21] Not everyone welcomed the over-40s emphasis: DJ David Hamilton, for example, departed from Radio 2 in high dudgeon, calling the network "geriatric" and complaining that "there’s only so much Max Bygraves and Vera Lynn you can play".
One of Line's most notable achievements in this phase of her career was to persuade Bryant Marriott that the network should hire Derek Jameson, whom she had seen on a BBC 2 TV programme called Do They Mean Us?
[2] In her first three months, Line moved Brian Matthew from the Round Midnight slot he had occupied for 12 years to the Saturday morning programme Sounds of the '60s, and dismissed Adrian Love.
As Controller, Line pursued a programming policy that combined music aimed at listeners in their fifties, as she herself was at the time, with a thrice-weekly arts series, and discussions on contemporary issues.
The BBC Annual Report in July 1994 praised Radio 2 for keeping its audience share the year before in spite of greater competition and for retaining the loyalty of its older listeners.
[24] During 1994, Radio 2 featured appearances by a constellation of stars such as José Carreras, Cybill Shepherd and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, some of whom performed exclusively for the network.
[8] There were also, however, many accolades from listeners, for instance from "Norm", who cut out cartoon strips of Garfield the Cat, whited out the words in the balloons, and put in his own texts praising Radio 2.
A "Mr S" from Hull invoked Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in a laudatory verse: For she doth teach the torches to burn bright And entertains me late into the night With harmony, and melody and mirth On Radio 2 – the greatest show on earth.
[29] Her funeral service at Eastbourne Crematorium took place on 2 November 2021 and was conducted by the Reverend Canon Roger Royle, whom she had appointed as the regular presenter of Sunday Half Hour when she was Controller of Radio 2.