Born in Vienna, the son of a dentist who was close to the Mahler family, Hearst had begun to study medicine, but fleeing from the Nazis became imperative after the Anschluss in 1938 had driven him underground because of his Jewish background and anti-fascist activities.
[1] The family settled in Britain, and after a brief period studying horticulture and being interned,[2] Hearst served in the Pioneer Corps during the war.
[3] After working freelance on newsreel scripts, Hearst joined the BBC's staff in 1952,[3] and moving over to documentaries where he continued writing their narration.
[5] In 1967 he became head of television arts features and championed this approach leading to the 13 part series' Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (1969) and Alistair Cooke's America (1972).
He became Controller of Radio 3 on 1 January 1972,[6] and had explicitly stated at his interview the relevance of audience figures, a point which he thought had given him preferment over his main rival, Martin Esslin,[6] another Viennese émigré.