Lancelot De Giberne Sieveking DFC (19 March 1896 – 6 January 1972) was an English writer and pioneer BBC radio and television producer.
[1][5] Upon his return to England, he attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and was close friends with fellow-Cambridge student Eric Maschwitz.
[7] Sieveking made his name with the BBC, starting out as assistant to the Director of Education, before "he went on to introduce the first running commentaries and adapt numerous classics for radio drama... it has been argued that the production of the first television play springs from his ingenuity".
[11] Another early BBC radio drama producer, Val Gielgud, said of the "not altogether fortunate" Sieveking: Harry Heuser interprets Gielgud's words in the following way: In 1930, while radio drama was still relatively new, Sieveking found in the still-newer medium of television a place in which he could experiment with new ideas.
His papers (and those of his ancestors, dating from 1724 to 1971) are housed in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, and consist of "correspondence, radio plays, manuscripts for short stories, for novels, and for nonfiction works, diaries, drawings, and photographs"[14] as well as "many photographs from the World War I period showing airplanes, North Africa and from Lance's captivity as a German prisoner-of-war.