Biography

He has served as a Labour peer in the House of Lords since 1998. He is also close friends with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, although he publicly opposed his government's legislation against fox hunting.

He studied Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford.

He is a great admirer of modern playwrights Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard.

He is a prolific and critically respected author. He won the WH Smith Literary Award (2000) for his acclaimed book "The Soldier's Return".

He was named after Melvyn Douglas by his mother.

I will be a short-haired person from now on. I think my hair has delighted the British public for long enough.

We need the BBC not only to celebrate and sanctify the past, we need it to use the documentary form to look at and take risks with the present.

I'm not a great writer. I am a writer who has moments.

Sometimes I am baffled by the lack of intellectual ambition in British television. Am I alone in feeling that there is not so much a dumbing down as a failure to engage at the highest level? British television is still led by some extremely able people, and yet at times they can seem like thoroughbreds happy to pull milk carts. Am I alone in believing that here, as elsewhere, trash television is welcomed because there are those in the opinion-forming seats who still feel that all television is trash, and all proofs to that absurd theory are welcome?

Bryan Cowgill was a feisty, original and immensely successful top television executive. He had the great talent of taking on other peoples' ideas, backing them and seeing them through, often to the benefit of all - most especially the viewers who were always his chief concern.