Jonathan Douglas (broadcaster)

Born in London, Douglas began his career with RTHK Radio 4 in 1986, where he presented classical music for three decades.[3] His show, Artbeat, was among the station's regular programming during his tenure.[3]

Douglas's broadcasting career with RTHK Radio 4 also encompassed Morning Call, a program combining classical music, interviews, and arts reviews.[3] Throughout his broadcasting career, he interviewed various personalities in the classical music domain, including Isaac Stern, Joshua Bell, and Tan Dun.[3][4] Joint Publishing (Hong Kong) published a selection of thirty of these interviews in 2005.[3]

Douglas was also involved in the 2016 production Crystal at the University of Hong Kong's Black Box Theatre, where he contributed original songs.[3] He also co-founded Worldplay, an English-language radio drama festival, partnering with international broadcasters such as the BBC World Service, CBC, and ABC.[3] Among the plays he directed for the festival was a 2002 adaptation of Weekend Quartet, originally penned by Nobel Prize laureate Gao Xingjian.[3]

Douglas's acting credits included roles in plays such as Shakespeare's Hamlet and Samuel Beckett's Endgame.[3] In 1995, he undertook the role of World War I poet Ivor Gurney in The Ivor Gurney Show: The Silent One and revisited the role in 2015.[3] In 2011, in collaboration with his two sons, he participated in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with The Douglas Trio.[3]

In 2008, Douglas received an Member of the British Empire (MBE) for his contributions to the arts in Hong Kong.[3] Following a mandatory retirement from RTHK in 2017,[4] Douglas performed in Elstob at the Camden Fringe Festival in 2018, focusing on the last day in the life of a World War I soldier.[3] Douglas died in 2022.[3] After his death, his family released his last album, Time and Again, on Spotify, which he had been working on.[1]