Tuning up to Linz

You never know who you might meet on a river cruise. It was my 89-year-old father-in-law, Noel, who first recognised a tall, professorial man only a few years younger than him remonstrating with an uninterested official at Munich airport about a pre-paid taxi to Passau, where we were due to board our ship.

‘That’s Humphrey Burton,’ said Noel. ‘We worked together at the Beeb, though he was far more important than me.’ Noel is forever modest but you could argue that Burton was the Melvyn Bragg of his day — a description I later put to him but one from which he recoiled not exactly in horror, but certainly in mild disgust.

‘I greatly admire Melvyn, particularly for hundreds of editions of In Our Time and nearly 30 years of The South Bank Show, but writing and politics always took up a substantial proportion of his working life,’ he said. ‘At one time I had 150 directors, 36 producers and researchers under my leadership. But that’s quite enough trumpet-blowing.’

Burton joined the BBC as a trainee studio manager in 1955 and rose to be the corporation’s first head of music and arts, before becoming a founder member of London Weekend Television, where he presented Aquarius. The recipient of four Emmies and two British Academy Television Awards, he wrote an acclaimed biography of his friend Leonard Bernstein and was made a CBE in the millennium honours.

So it was good to have him on board our naffly named Classical Music on the Danube cruise. In fact, Noel, Mrs P and I shared a table with Humphrey and his delightful Swedish wife, Christina, who (to continue the banding around of names theme) was something of the Selina Scott of her day on Swedish TV.