Cardiff Singer creator J Mervyn Williams remembered

There's been a lot of nostalgia about during the last few days in music broadcasting circles in Cardiff, since the news of the death of J Mervyn Williams was announced.

"Merv" was Head of Music at BBC Wales in the heady times of the first half of the 1980s. St David's Hall in Cardiff opened in 1982, as the Welsh fourth TV channel, S4C, went on the air. Merv was in charge of all the broadcast output of the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, and his growing TV department, in which I worked, produced many programmes for the BBC and S4C. Cardiff Singer of the World was Merv's invention - he is remembered here on the competition website, and you can also read his own account of his fight to make it happen.

Merv was a man of contradictions. He excelled at BBC meetings, but his best deals were made over his legendary lunches. He loved to develop new talent, but also to work with established artists. He was a geographer, but had no sense of direction, once famously nearly driving Sir Colin Davis the wrong way up a dual carriageway. He was brilliant at working internationally, but hated flying (Merv had therapy for this, and convinced the therapist to share his phobia rather than curing it - or so the story went).

He was a talented executive producer of TV outside broadcasts, but tense and uncomfortable when directing them. Whilst recording Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces in Gloucester Cathedral, Merv became increasingly impatient during the change of set-ups. When the lighting director explained that it took time to move lights up and out of the way, Merv commented that it would be "quicker to lower the cathedral".

Running the department, he was a dictator, but a benevolent one. Merv always had time for lively discussions with all his staff, particularly during the weekly outings to the BBC Club. He was an eccentric, whose best ideas came to him in the bath, or sitting on an upturned waste paper bin, shoeless, puffing on a cigarette.

Merv's famous exhortation to the first Cardiff Singer competitors was 'Don't compete - make music!' - surely a contradiction, as they were all hoping to win! Merv wasn't a performer himself, but he knew that you couldn't do well if you were trying too hard. You just had to throw everything into your performance.

Merv left the BBC to form one of the first and most successful independent production companies in Wales. We missed him sorely when he left the BBC, and now his passing marks the end of an era.

Thanks, Merv - diolch yn fawr.

Viv Goldberg worked in a number of roles in the BBC for many years, both in TV production and orchestral management. Closely involved in Cardiff Singer of the World since its inception, latterly as Interactive Producer and programme book editor, she now runs her own company, Viv Goldberg Media

• The upper photo shows soprano Karita Mattila, who won the first Cardff Singer of the World competition, and who went on to become one of the world's leading operatic artists.
• The lower photo shows Mervyn Williams backstage at Buxton Opera House during a recording of 'Dennis O'Neill and Friends' for BBC2, sometime in the mid-80s. 
• You can read a Welsh language obituary here.

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