Bill Cotton was for years one of the best-known figures in British television. This was partly because, as he was always happy to acknowledge, his father had been a household name. The Billy Cotton Band Show had vanished from the screen long before the son of its boisterous compère climbed the ladder of success in the BBC, but the association stuck.

When Cotton was managing director of BBC Television in 1986, an old lady at a Buckingham Palace garden party asked him why he had stopped his television band show. “I’m too old,” said Cotton. “Not at all,” the lady replied, “you look just the same to me.” His father had been dead for 17 years, but he was much amused, and dined out on the story.

But if his father had given him a start, the son who originally called himself Bill Cotton Jr became a substantial television figure on his own merits. Unlike his father, he pursued a career behind the camera instead of in front of it, and he rose steadily up the BBC hierarchy, eventually being responsible for all television output.

He was no intellectual and was cheerfully aware of sharper and better educated minds around him. He dismissed any thought of disadvantage with a typical quip: “The great thing about being mediocre is that I am always at my best.” His showbusiness background may not have had the kudos of an Oxbridge degree but it gave him the common touch, and he was a shrewd judge of popular taste.

William Frederick Cotton was born in London in 1928. He spent a happy childhood mixing with the stars of the variety theatre before being sent as a boarder to Ardingly College in Sussex, “a miserable barracks of a place where the masters beat any cockiness out of me”. After National Service in the Army — he was commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps — he worked as a song plugger for Noel Gay, the music publisher, and in the music division of Chappells. He was later joint managing director of the Michael Reine Music Company.

He joined the BBC as a trainee producer in 1956 and was soon given his chance on mainstream programmes, including the pop show Six-Five Special. The one assignment he decided to steer clear of was The Billy Cotton Band Show, fearing that this might lead to arguments with his father. Cotton Sr talked him round and he worked on the show, without serious disagreements, for four years.

Much later in his career, when performers’ fees were being negotiated, he would explain to importunate agents that it had actually cost his father money to appear on television. BBC fees at the time were so ungenerous that they did not cover the wages of the Cotton Band. The elder Cotton used television as a shop window because the resultant fame made him bookable by theatres and music halls, where the real money was made.

When ill-health forced his father’s retirement, Cotton continued in the BBC as a light entertainment producer. This was the area of television where his true interest always lay and before long he was associated with almost every popular variety programme on the screen. By 1962 he was assistant head of light entertainment and from 1970 to 1977 he was head of the BBC Light Entertainment Group.

He was no administrator, as he freely admitted. In later years, as a member of the BBC board of management, he often complained that to get on in the corporation people had to climb further and further away from “the coal face” of programme making. It was not unknown for him to hand over an important meeting to a deputy and hurry away to visit the set of some new variety show in the making. This caused dismay among BBC bureaucrats, but Cotton’s good humour and his ability to produce a comical story for every occasion usually won them over in the end.

His forte was spotting and encouraging talent. During a trip to the Netherlands he saw a show called One Out of Eight which had been devised by a Dutch housewife. He brought the idea to the BBC, persuaded a somewhat reluctant Bruce Forsyth to be the host and The Generation Game became a Saturday evening staple. He was also instrumental in pairing Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett as The Two Ronnies and in launching Michael Parkinson as a talk show host.

To many television performers whose names were household words, he was something of a father confessor. When they arrived at his office to discuss their problems, they were likely to be whisked away to his favourite table in a dimly lit Chinese restaurant in Kensington where hours might pass before they emerged, problems often solved.

One of his biggest disappointments was losing Morecambe and Wise to ITV soon after he became Controller of BBC1 in 1977, the first person to reach such a position from a background in light entertainment. Back in the Sixties he had helped to bring the pair to the BBC and seen them reach their peak as entertainers, with their Christmas shows attracting up to 28 million viewers.