Donald H MacLean
a profile commissioned for a BBC internal publication
So it was that, after war service in REME's electronics laboratories and a spell at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, he joined the BBC in Glasgow as a 'balance engineer'. There he met and married Margaret Thorburn, an exceptional pianist and a shy person who quietly supported him through a succession of increasingly demanding roles, until her untimely death from cancer 34 years later.
Donald is proud that their son Colin Angus, with his mother's endearing personality, when approaching fifty quit a high-reward & high-stress job in computing to teach music, contentedly, at one of the same colleges as his late mother. Also that grandson Finn (23) in his final year at University obtained high marks for a dissertation that featured his grandfather’s exhibition photographs and his father’s guitar playing as well as his own video sequences.
At the postwar BBC Donald was appointed Programme Engineer of their Aberdeen studios where the young couple made their first home. Many years later when he was reorganising a number of companies in Los Angeles an interviewer commented on the simple luxury of his penthouse suite in Beverly Hills and quoted him recalling that in Aberdeen he and Margaret had lived in one attic room, from which he had to walk to work because his income did not stretch to bus fares.
After a year in Aberdeen he was recalled to Glasgow to write and direct a documentary series for radio. Reported nationally as the BBC's youngest Producer, his work was so successful that he was recruited by the entertainment division in London. He recalls that he spent his first day in the capital directing a broadcast from the Maida Vale studios while Margaret and their West Highland, Seumas, sat in the lobby with their suitcases waiting for him to resume their hunt for lodgings that would accept a dog.
By the fifties he had initiated a number of ground-breaking TV and Radio series (including "Come Dancing" which is once again in the hit list - like his father he clearly has an instinct for public taste) and at 27 was appointed Head of Popular Music. In later years he has remarked that being chairman of an international group of companies impresses no one but having known the Beatles gives him star status!