Known universally throughout Irish and British theatrical and broadcasting circles as Ronnie, among the writers Mason championed, Brian Friel perhaps became the most prominent.
He joined the BBC six years later in 1955 as a radio producer in Belfast, finding a kindred spirit in the novelist, radio producer and broadcaster Sam Hanna Bell against BBC Belfast's prevailing caution in political matters, standing with Bell as an advocate for the shipyard worker turned controversial playwright, Sam Thompson.
As his successor as Head of Radio Drama, John Tydeman, described it in his obituary in The Independent, "he became executive producer of an innovative new series of 15-minute-long single plays broadcast every weekday evening at 11.45 under the title Just Before Midnight.
He also oversaw a series of new plays called Double Image, among which he produced Tom Stoppard's British television debut, A Separate Peace[6] in 1966 .
Security was a continuing issue, bringing staff into safer buildings in the midst of a bombing campaign, and balancing the complicated demands of Protestant and Catholic communities.
Although Mason's time at Belfast's Broadcasting House saw him facing serious civil unrest, shown through the bomb attacks on the BBC, the violence had impact through all the province's cultural life, reducing audiences and seeing the closure of theatres.
[2] On the back of his success in Northern Ireland, Mason was one of five people who might have become Controller of BBC Radio 4 in 1976[8] along with Monica Sims and David Hatch, both of whom were appointed some years later.
He did this with considerable success, and was held up as a model by European broadcasters also facing contractions in the relatively expensive form of radio art.
Although Mason also presented a fully costed alternative series of cuts across the drama output, BBC management opted for the simple expedient of axing the soap.
When McIntyre blocked the broadcast of a Mason-commissioned radio drama by the writer and director Mike Leigh in May, 1979, Too Much of a Good Thing, recorded on location with convincing sexual activity, it set up a continuing conflict.
After his retirement, he returned to radio to produce John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's Whose is the Kingdom?,[10] a nine-play sequence of dramas about Christianity.
Arden and D’Arcy wrote to The Irish Times after Mason's death, reporting that his funeral had needed to be postponed by a week to accommodate the people who wished to attend, and, in their tribute, gave an insight into his working practices: ‘As a drama director, he was a natural radio genius and an educator both to playwrights and actors.
He never seemed to forget that he had begun his adult life as a teacher: he would inspire his casts by getting up from the directorial chair, moving all over the studio, telling stories, and more or less improvising the whole play from start to finish, with a running fire, of folklorish anecdotes from his childhood in County Antrim.’ [11] In his last years, Mason suffered from emphysema, related to his devotion to cigarettes,[2] but even then, as Oscar Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, wrote to The Independent,[12] Mason called in his estimable contacts to secure Wilde's place in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey when he realised that a "fellow Irishman" had been denied his rightful place.