Margaret Elizabeth Douglas

Margaret Elizabeth Douglas (22 August 1934 – 20 August 2008) was an English television producer and executive for the BBC. She joined the BBC in 1951, as a secretary to the Panorama editor Michael Peacock in 1951. Douglas worked on the 1959 United Kingdom general election and was subsequently given the responsibility of covering the proceedings of party conferences at the BBC in 1972. She was appointed as chief assistant to the Director-General of the BBC Alasdair Milne in 1983 and was promoted to chief political advisor when his successor Michael Checkland took over from Milne four years later. Douglas decided to retire from the BBC in 1993 and became the Supervisor of Parliamentary Broadcasting at the Palace of Westminster, a post she held until 1999. Early life Douglas was born in Poplar, London on 22 August 1934; she was the only child of the Metropolitan Police constable Thomas Mincher Douglas and his wife, the teacher Dorothy May, Jones. Douglas grew up in Islington and liked to refer to herself as a "Blitz kid", apart from a year staying with her grandmother in Glasgow before returning to London. She was taught at Parliament Hill Grammar School, which she left at the age of 17, to the disappointment of the school because she knew the only advantage for a woman hold a degree in that era would put her on the road to becoming a teacher, which had no appeal to her and did not want to be a burden to her parents. Career In 1951, Douglas joined the BBC in the lowest possible secretarial grade. She was selected for the production secretaries' course and secured her first job at Lime Grove Studios, Shepherd's Bush as production secretary to Michael Peacock, the editor of the Monday night television current affairs programme Panorama. Douglas was overseen by Grace Wyndham Goldie, the Assistant Head of Talks, and became "the princess of Panorama, the right hand of the producer in the gallery, and in the office, the wiper of noses, the stroker of egos, the calmer of the frightened and corrector of the inept." She was taken by Wyndham Goldie prior to the 1959 United Kingdom general election to help run the inaugural challenge of broadcasting an election between the BBC and ITN. Douglas also worked as a director, producer and researcher for the programmes Gallery and 24 Hours, and impressed enough to be given the responsibility of covering the proceedings of party conferences for the BBC in 1972.