Sir John Tusa (born 2 March 1936) is a British arts administrator, and radio and television journalist. He is co-chairman of the European Union Youth Orchestra from 2014. chairman, British Architecture Trust Board, RIBA, from 2014. From 1980 to 1986, he was a main presenter of BBC 2's Newsnight programme. From 1986 to 1993, he was managing director of the BBC World Service. From 1995 to 2007, he was managing director of the City of London's Barbican Arts Centre.
Born in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, [1] in March 1936, Tusa moved to England with his family in 1939. His father, also John Tusa (Jan Tůša), was managing director of British Bata Shoes, established by the Czechoslovak shoe company, which, following its international pattern, also created a pioneering work-living community around its factory in East Tilbury, Essex. Two days before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, Tusa senior flew out of Czechoslovakia on a Bata company plane, via Poland, Yugoslavia and France. He then became general manager of the Bata factory and its associated village in East Tilbury, living in the nearby village of Horndon-on-the-Hill where his son grew up. [2]
Tusa junior was educated at St Faith's School, Cambridge, Gresham's School, Holt, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained a first class degree in History. [3]
In 1960, Tusa joined the BBC as a trainee. After presenting the BBC's 24 Hours and later Newsnight (from its inception in 1979), he became managing director of the BBC World Service from 1986 to 1993. Tusa was President of Wolfson College, Cambridge from January to October 1993. He was then a newsreader on BBC's One O'Clock News for two years during the mid-1990s. He anchored the BBC's coverage of the D-Day 50th anniversary celebrations in June 1995, and of the Hong Kong handover on 30 June 1997.
From 1995 until 2007, he was managing director of the Barbican Arts Centre in the City of London. For several years, he was chairman of the board of the Wigmore Hall in London and was appointed chairman of the University of the Arts London in 2007. For many years, he sat on the governing Council of Imperial College London on which strength was then offered vice-chancellor positions at Reading and then York University, but decided against accepting them because of his lack of financial expertise.[ citation needed ] In 1987, he had been rejected for the position of Director-General of the BBC for the same reason. He was announced as having accepted the position of chairman with the Victoria and Albert Museum on 18 June 2007, but stepped down from the post a month later, recognising a conflict of interest with his position at the University of the Arts London. In 2013, it was announced that Tusa would be leaving his post at University of the Arts London from August that year, and that Sir John Sorrell would be the new chairman. From January 2009 to 2014, Tusa was chair of the Clore Leadership Programme. In February 2010 he became honorary chairman of theartsdesk.com. In 2014, he became co-chairman of the European Union Youth Orchestra.
Since leaving his BBC World Service post in 1993, Tusa has been critical of some BBC policies. He deprecated the focus and management style of (former) director general John Birt and has been vociferous about subsequent decisions to pare down World Service activities in Europe, including the Czech section. [4]
From 2000 until 2005, Tusa interviewed 55 major figures in the arts for BBC Radio 3. From October 2009, until the end of the year, Tusa presented a 91-part series on BBC Radio 4. Day By Day used original archive news material to track events on a daily basis from 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall.
John Tusa's Engaged with the Arts: Writings from the Frontline was published in 2007. [5] It explores ways that the arts can be encouraged within a cultural and political climate in which funding is constantly under threat. He wrote two books jointly with his historian wife Ann Tusa: The Nuremberg Trial (1983) and The Berlin Blockade (1988). [6] His writings on the arts include Art Matters, On Creativity, and The Janus Aspect: Artists in the C20. Tusa married Ann Hilary Dowson in 1960; she died in November 2021. The couple had two sons. [6]
Co-author – with Ann Tusa:
Jan Garrigue Masaryk was a Czech diplomat and politician who served as the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948. American journalist John Gunther described Masaryk as "a brave, honest, turbulent, and impulsive man".
The Bata Corporation is a multinational footwear, apparel and fashion accessories manufacturer and retailer of Moravian (Czech) origin, headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Newsnight is BBC Two's news and current affairs programme, providing in-depth investigation and analysis of the stories behind the day's headlines. The programme is broadcast on weekdays at 22:30 and is also available on BBC iPlayer.
Tomáš Baťa was a Czech entrepreneur and founder of the Bata shoe company. His career was cut short when he died in a plane accident due to bad weather.
John Meisel is a Canadian political scientist, professor, and scholar, and former chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
Raymond George Hardenbergh Seitz is a former career diplomat and U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on December 8, 1940. He is the son of United States Army Major General John F. R. Seitz and Helen (Hardenbergh) Seitz.
Sir Matthew Christopher Bourne is a British choreographer whose work includes ballet, contemporary dance, dance theatre and musical theatre.
Tomáš Jan Baťa,, also known as Thomas Bata Jr. and Tomáš Baťa ml., was a Czech-Canadian businessman and philanthropist. He ran the Bata Shoe Company from the 1940s until the 80s.
Claus Adolf Moser, Baron Moser, was a British statistician who made major contributions in both academia and the Civil Service. He prided himself rather on being a non-mathematical statistician, and said that the thing that frightened him most in his life was when Maurice Kendall asked him to teach a course on analysis of variance at the LSE.
Sir David Edwin Hatch, was an English broadcaster, involved in production and management at BBC Radio where he held many executive positions, including Head of Light Entertainment (Radio), Controller of BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 4 and later managing director of BBC Radio.
Nitin Sawhney is a British musician, producer and composer. A recipient of the Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement award in 2017, among multiple international awards throughout his career. Sawhney's work combines Asian and other worldwide influences with elements of electronica and often explores themes such as multiculturalism, politics, and spirituality. Sawhney is also active in the promotion of arts and cultural matters, is chair of the PRS Foundation, on the senate of the Ivor Novello Academy, on the board of trustees of theatre company Complicité, and is a patron of numerous film festivals, venues, and educational institutions. In 2021 he was an ambassador for the Royal Albert Hall.
Stephen Lowe is an English playwright and director.
Sir Nicholas Roger Kenyon CBE is an English music administrator, editor and writer on music. He was responsible for the BBC Proms in 1996–2007, after which he was appointed Managing Director of the Barbican Centre. In September 2021 he left to become opera critic of the Telegraph and a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge.
East Tilbury is a village and former civil parish in the unitary authority of Thurrock borough, Essex, England, and one of the traditional Church of England parishes in Thurrock. In 1931 the parish had a population of 353.
Jan Antonín Baťa was a Czech-Brazilian shoe manufacturer from Uherské Hradiště, half-brother of Tomáš Baťa.
Sir John Akomfrah is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films".
The Bata shoe factory in East Tilbury is what remains of an industrial estate in Essex, England, which produced shoes for over 70 years. Founded in 1932 by Tomáš Baťa, the factory was "one of the most important planned landscapes in the East of England" in the 20th century. The factory closed in 2005.
George Edward Entwistle was Director-General of the BBC during 2012, succeeding Mark Thompson. After a career in magazine journalism, he joined BBC Television in 1989, becoming a producer with a primary focus on factual and political programmes. He rose to become the director of BBC Vision, and became the Director-General of the BBC on 17 September 2012.
The Arts Desk (theartsdesk.com) is a British arts journalism website containing reviews, interviews, news, and other content related to music, theatre, television, films, and other art forms written by journalists from a variety of traditional and web-based publications.
Graham Edward Sheffield CBE is Director Arts for the British Council. He was previously Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) and Artistic Director of the Barbican Centre in London.
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