Mary Grace Agnes Adams [née Campin] (10 March 1898–15 May 1984), television producer and programme director, was a producer and administrator in the BBC. She was instrumental in setting up the BBC's television service both before and after World War II.
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Mary Adams was born on 10 March 1898 at Well House Farm, Hermitage, Berkshire. She gained a first class honours degree in Botany at Cardiff University. She then went on to study tissue culture in Cambridge at the Strangeways Laboratory under Professor Strangeways. In 1930, after having her series "Six talks on Heredity" broadcast on BBC Radio, she left research and joined the BBC's Further Education Department in 1930.
In 1936 she joined the fledgling television service at Alexandra Palace, London, becoming the first woman appointed as a television producer.[1] From January 1937 she was active in setting up the service and producing television programmes (e.g. Clothes-Line, the first television programme dedicated to fashion history, with James Laver and Pearl Binder). She was a working mother with a child, notable at a time when married women were expected to stay at home and not go out to work[2].
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the BBC television service was shut down. She spent the war in BBC Radio and the UK Ministry of Information. When the television service resumed in 1946 she helped build it up again – producing programmes on all subjects apart from drama and light entertainment. She was appointed Head of Television Talks in 1954. She retired in 1958.
She encouraged David Attenborough to join BBC Television in 1952, appointed staff and commissioned ground-breaking programmes – such as Zoo Quest; The Quiz Programme; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral; Your Life in Their Hands and A Matter of Life and Death (early medical programmes), as well as programmes for children – Muffin the Mule (with Anne Hogarth, who pulled the strings), Andy Pandy, and Bill and Ben The Flowerpot Men (with Freda Lingstrom and Maria Bird).
Mary Adams (née Campin) married in 1925 Samuel Vyvyan Adams (1900-1951), Conservative MP for Leeds West (1930-1945) who, along with Duff Cooper, were the two Conservative MPs to oppose the Munich agreement with Hitler in 1938. He was adopted for the safe Conservative seat of Darwen early in 1951, but died later that year.