Some are in the grave he would say some are in the loony bin and some are in the advertising

“Some are in the grave,” he would say, “some are in the loony bin and some are in the advertising business.”In 1964, 21 years after the New Yorker published “Professor Sea Gull” and seven years after Gould died imitating a gull in a psychiatric hospital, Mitchell revealed that the bags Gould carried, which many believed to hold hundreds of dime-store notebooks containing his Oral History research, merely contained other paper bags. Mills always acknowledged her superiority at the keyboard, though there was a time in the 1950s when they appeared together on television in piano duets in both Dublin and Belfast.John EganIvor Mills, broadcaster and media executive: born Belfast 7 December 1929; married 1956 Muriel Hay (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1987); died London 30 May 1996.. Joseph Mitchell was a poet of the waterfront and a writer of surpassing tales that captured the unsung and unconventional life of New York and its denizens from before the Depression to the mid-Sixties. As a reporter at large for the New Yorker, he avoided the standard journalistic palette of moguls, tycoons and movie stars and preferred to pursue the hidden characters that gave the city its relief and colour: gypsy fortune-tellers, gin-mill owners, flops and drunks on the Bowery, abrasive bartenders, the American Indians who worked high iron on skyscrapers, bearded ladies and even a man who sold racing cockroaches.
Most famously, Mitchell’s last signed article in the New Yorker in 1964 was a two-part portrait of Joseph Ferdinand Gould, a self-described genius and fast talker who claimed to have written 9 million words of An Oral History of Our Times Admired by e.e. He would turn out in brave form at gatherings where he could meet former television or BT colleagues.He married in 1956 Muriel Hay, also of Belfast, a concert pianist who is a now a distinguished private music teacher in London.

It was time for an impromptu performance without notes or autocue.After retiring from BT in 1988 he carried out consultancy work with, among others, Sunset & Vine, the television production company, until poor health, including the effects of suffering a hit-and-run accident outside his home in north London, curbed his activities. With some 2,000 guests assembled in Hong Kong and a three-way teleconference link to London about to open, Mills’s autocue failed. In the event, most of the managers involved found the actual interview itself easier than the training bout with Ivor Mills.He supervised BT’s lobbying of members of both Houses of Parliament, ensuring that MPs and peers obtained full briefings on any aspect of telecommunications that interested them and sometimes on less obvious aspects of the industry that really needed their attention.He still loved, of course, to be involved in the big television occasion – working closely with the Queen, for example, in preparation for the royal opening, through multi-video conference links, of the Anscam cable linking the United Kingdom to Australia via North America.He was on parade, too, when BT was involved in the opening of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. He had to build up a unit that would make this nationalised industry more capable of dealing with attention from Parliament, political parties, academic, CBI and other pressure groups and release some managers from timidity or ignorance about the fruitful conduct of public affairs.This was not too onerous for, as a freelance, he had already been training top Post Office people in television and radio interview techniques.Other well-known broadcasters, also acting as freelances, took over Mills’s former training role, but he remained available to tune up the appropriate board member or senior manager when a major television interview was imminent. When that failed, however, he could assume a daunting mien.He was also a noted bon viveur, a keen exemplar of the extended lunch, and close pal of fellow broadcaster Reggie Bosanquet at whose tennis parties he was able to play an accomplished and stylish game.For a while after leaving ITN his contract with the Post Office allowed him to undertake a limited number of freelance broadcasting contracts, but before long his task as Head of Public Affairs took up all his time. In the mid-Seventies he conducted an eyeball-to-eyeball live interview with Jocelyn Stevens over an industrial dispute in Fleet Street – still recalled by broadcasting colleagues as a model of its kind.Although a supporter of the rights of the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland Mills was totally free of bigotry and utterly opposed to violence of any kind. He boldly displayed these views when visiting Ireland as an ITN reporter, and it grieved him that the resultant personal threats from extremists on both sides curbed his excursions to his beloved Ulster for a number of years.Both on the screen and off he was envied for the skill with which he could crack a joke, suggest a bit of tap-dancing or lift an eyebrow in a way that would banish nervousness (often masked as pomposity) from most occasions.

He became a member of a new breed of “national figures”, though he acknowledged that this was a kind of strange fame. He never took himself too seriously, but he approached his work with a high degree of professionalism.As a reporter he covered a wide range of stories, including the sad thalidomide drug affair. Among those he interviewed were Margaret Thatcher, Freddie Laker on the launch of his airline, Harold Wilson, Sophia Loren, Robert Kennedy, George Brown on his (final) resignation, Dr Barnes Wallis (the inventor of the bouncing bomb), Sean Connery and the racing driver Graham Hill. While building up a curriculum vitae that would take him into Geoffrey Cox’s team at ITN, he also worked for the World Service of the BBC and for Southern Television.It was in 1965 that he achieved his ambition to work for ITN. Instead, he was drawn into working as a journalist and then as a producer, editor and presenter of programmes – first for the BBC and Irish radio as well as for Ulster TV. He always acted as a man with a mission to inform with as much grace and skill as possible.Educated at Stranmills College and Queen’s University, Belfast, he had seemed destined for a career in music, having studied classical composition and musical history, becoming an LRAM and teaching for a while in Belfast.