Andrea Wonfor
Television program executive
In what remains a male dominated industry, nearly 30 years ago Wonfor defied her male colleagues to run the children's and young people's department at regional ITV company Tyne Tees, soon after becoming the outfit's director of programs, where she developed the irreverent rock show "The Tube," for Channel 4.
Wonfor, a Cambridge history graduate, played a big part in helping to shape and sustain C4's outlaw credentials not only via "The Tube," iconoclastically co-hosted by Jools Holland and the late Paula Yates, but during her spell in the early 1990s running the station's arts and entertainment department.
In this job she helped nurture another mold-breaking show that captured the imagination of the young (and the young at heart), "The Big Breakfast," a surreal and fast-moving early morning program fronted by Chris Evans.
While Wonfor's great talent was for upending the conventions of the small screen, her entry into the business was conventional enough. In 1966 she was taken on as a trainee by Granada on the same day as John Birt, a future BBC director-general.
In 1996 she brought the house down at the Edinburgh Television Festival when introducing Birt on stage, she confessed: "I once slept with John Birt...in a taxi." When Birt had finished his speech, a dull plea to increase the BBC license fee, Wonfor added: "And I slept with him again tonight" during his MacTaggart lecture.
At the time Wonfor was again working at Granada TV, having rejoined the company in 1993 as its first female director of programs before being promoted to joint managing director.
Latterly Wonfor worked as an independent producer, having formed Liberty Bell in 2002, best known for its BBC2 hit, "Grumpy Old Men."
She is survived by her husband, the filmmaker Geoff Wonfor, and two daughters.
