John Peter Tydeman OBE[1] (30 March 1936 – 1 April 2020) was an English producer of radio and director of theatre plays.
He was responsible for commissioning and directing the early plays of Caryl Churchill, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard and Sue Townsend.
[2] Tydeman played the Archbishop of Canterbury in a cast led by Derek Jacobi as Edward II, and student contemporaries including John Drummond, Clive Swift and Richard Cottrell, directed by Trinity alumnus Toby Robertson.
Edward II was broadcast on 31 March 1959, and Tydeman joined the BBC as a general trainee later in the year, working in various parts of the corporation, until he settled into the Radio Drama department.
There he would cut his teeth on productions that would include many episodes of the popular radio soap, The Dales, as well as forays into the classics.
His first radio production credit in drama was Operation Toothless, by Tom Waldron, on the BBC Home Service on 20 July 1959.
he would establish himself as one of the most dynamic new talents in radio drama, progressing through soap opera and the relentless demand for popular afternoon entertainment to the challenges of Jean Genet’s The Maids (with Sian Phillips), and working with many of the leading actors of the time, from radio stalwarts such as Mary Wimbush to rising talents such as Michael Bryant and John Wood.
He also put his hand to adapting works such as Rudyard Kipling's Kim, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Jane Austen's Emma.
Although Caryl Churchill’s first play for radio, The Ants (produced by Michael Bakewell, was broadcast three times in 1962-63, the recording was not retained in the BBC Archives.
The plays Identical Twins, Shreber's Nervous Illness, Henry's Past, Abortive, Not, Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen and Perfect Happiness do survive in the BBC, and foreshadow the freedom and discipline of her later stage work.
Tydeman saw his championing of Orton as more of a successful rescue from the rejection pile, as he recorded his memories for the BBC at the time of retirement as Head of Radio Drama in 1994.
It was called The Boy Hairdresser ... By some chance I read it, and I went to Donald McWhinnie, who was then Assistant Head of the radio drama department, and I said, 'I think it's remarkable, I think it's quite wrong that it should be sent back.'
Tydeman also told that story to Brian Jarman of the Fitzrovia News in 2011, in an interview when he was still living in his flat in Great Titchfield Street, parallel to BBC Broadcasting House where he had worked for more than 30 years.
Adrian's correspondence with a fictionalised version of Tydeman after submitting his poetry efforts to the BBC is a long-term feature of Townsend's Mole novels.