Roy Walters RIP

Roy Walters, who's died aged 91, was a grand and mischievous travelling companion in the 1980s, when he was Deputy Editor News and Current Affairs, BBC Radio. 

We first met when I was a news trainee having a short spell in the Radio Newsroom in 1974; Roy, twenty years my senior, was already a dapper manager, running the summaries desk with wry and sardonic humour, clutching a clipboard of previous scripts that concealed The Times Crossword. 

With the arrival of John Birt as Deputy Director General, Roy came out well from a senior managers' overnight trip to a West London hotel - a living audition for John to pick a new management team. Tony Hall and Jenny Abramsky got the skip-a-generation-game-plan early, being ready and willing to join John on the tennis court. Some Newsroom recidivists carried on as if unobserved; late at night, one set fire to the carpet in the hotel reception, dropping a still-flaming sambucca en route from deserted dining table to rowdy bar. 

Jenny and the Newsroom were never going to be on the same wavelength, so Roy was a necessary concession, genuinely good at keeping a lid on an uppity team now steaming with resentment at 'bi-media', 'change' and other Birtian concepts. 

Our first trip to the States was supporting Mr Birt at a large joint conference of the European Broadcasting Union and North America News Broadcasters Association in Washington...I'd joined the Radio News Management corridor as an assistant working on the development of a new News HQ building. Over three nights, we developed a coded series of yawns and whinges about jet lag, turning in early after dinner, only to re-rendezvous an hour later for trips to local bars for Rolling Rock and Bombay & Tonic. 

A second trip, sans Birt, was to let Jenny pacify sharp-elbowed correspondents in Washington and New York, who were jostling unpleasantly for their next role. Roy insisted we flew the Trump Shuttle from Washington to La Guardia, just so he could use the plane's mobile phone (in those days, the size of two house bricks) to check what car was picking us up. It was harder to shake off Jenny. Roy fixed a night's jazz at Sweet Basil in Greenwich Village, and during a chilled ballad by the Art Farmer Quintet, tipped back his wooden chair at the head of our table beyond the balancing point, catapulting a dish of Fettucine Alfredo into the air.   

Down the third-floor management corridor, there would often be a Friday panic, but Roy's patience, mixed with a marvellous sense of the ridiculous, usually calmed things down before home-time. His later spell running journalist training gave starts to many of today's big BBC names.    

• A colleague from my corridor days reminds me of an update Roy had to give to DDG Birt on how the Radio Newsroom was taking to his reforms. "How do they regard me, Roy ?" "Well, John, it's a mixture of fear and loathing...."