Sir Humphrey Burton, music and arts supremo who presided over a golden age of culture at the BBC

Sir Humphrey Burton, who has died aged 94, was a prolific television arts producer of multiple talents who anticipated Melvyn Bragg in making his image on the small screen as well publicised as his entrepreneurial endeavours behind it.

As BBC Television’s head of music and arts in the 1970s, Burton presided over what must now seem to many practitioners to have been a golden age of arts on television. In one year alone his department screened 22 operas, as well as numerous ballets, documentaries and workshop programmes.

Opera buffs were dazzled by a procession of Saturday nights on BBC Two which included the first British television performances of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina and Alban Berg’s Lulu. Never one to undervalue his own achievements, Burton described 1979 as “the most significant year in the history of opera on BBC TV”.

Then as now, the BBC arts budget never stretched as far as those deploying it would have liked. Even in the 1970s, a single relay from Covent Garden would have cost Burton’s department £150,000, blowing a serious hole in his annual budget of £3 million.

Burton amassed his on-screen cornucopia by buying opera productions from foreign television producers. Thus he was able to give viewers a German Lohengrin for a mere £12,000, half of what it would have cost the BBC to repeat its own production of Die Fledermaus, had it been able to afford it.