 finishing a disappointing eighth. Spotting her potential, Yvonne Littlewood asked her to do a television series, Presenting Nana Mouskouri, that continued for 11 years and was sold to countries around the world. She went on to produce all the singer's BBC television series and specials until the early 80s, helping to establish her as an international star. Esther Rantzen once recalled that when she began her television career in the 1960s, apart from Yvonne Littlewood 'no other women producers were allowed on any teams because, it was said, they would be offended by all the bad language.' That Yvonne Littlewood was made of sterner stuff became apparent in 1961, when she was directing an episode of This Is Your Life (then broadcast by the BBC), after a technical fault led to her talkback going out live on air. Viewers heard her yelling: 'Sound on film.){kind=link}
She was for years the only woman producer in the BBC’s Light Entertainment dept and was particularly known for her all-star spectaculars
Yvonne Littlewood, who has died aged 95, was one of the BBC’s most respected television directors and producers and for many years the only woman producer in the Corporation’s Light Entertainment department where, in a career spanning 30 years, she oversaw more than 500 programmes.
During the 1960s and 1970s, when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were fluttering the dovecotes, Yvonne Littlewood beavered away producing shows featuring such reassuring personalities as Val Doonican, Petula Clark, Perry Como and Nana Mouskouri.
In a review of 1968, the year of student protests, riots in the streets of Paris, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the crushing of the Prague Spring, the Telegraph’s veteran television correspondent L Marsland Gander singled out programmes “produced by Yvonne Littlewood with Kenneth MacKellar singing in the enchanted Hebrides” [the Road to the Isles series] as having given him “maximum enjoyment”.
Yvonne Littlewood was also known as the BBC’s premier producer of large-scale all-star spectaculars, including several Royal Variety shows, Christmas galas and, in 1990, the Queen Mother’s 90th birthday gala, held at the London Palladium and featuring a huge cast of top singers, comedians and actors, from Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Rowan Atkinson to Kiri Te Kanawa and Dame Vera Lynn.