Pat Weaver

Sylvester Laflin ("Pat") Weaver, television executive: born Los Angeles 21 December 1908; married 1942 Elizabeth Inglis (one son, one daughter); died Santa Barbara, California 15 March 2002.

Pat Weaver was one of the few genuine revolutionaries in the history of American television. Not only did he launch, during his tenure at NBC in the early 1950s, some of the most successful programmes ever. He also turned on their head the very principles by which the commercially funded medium operates.

Weaver arrived at NBC from the advertising industry in 1949, in the fledgling age of television when the dominant and most prestigious network was CBS, which boasted eight of the top ten programmes. Mostly however they were not programmes in the modern sense of the term. In those days sponsoring companies and advertising agencies paid for, produced and controlled the contents of the broadcasts. The networks served as little more than technical conduits to the screens of the few million television sets then in existence.

His innovation was to reverse the process, during his six years as NBC president between 1949 and 1955. Under him, the network would produce its own shows, and finance them by selling commercial time to advertisers. He also launched the first television "spectaculars", the specially commissioned live prime-time specials which notably boosted the young medium's appeal.

Among the programmes he invented was Today in 1952, which broke the stranglehold of early-morning radio on American habits. Weaver's working title, when he conceived the idea of a show combining "the news, weather, time, commuting tips" and a bright host personality, was Rise and Shine. The title perished, but the concept became the breakfast TV format for America, and most of the rest of the world. Two years later came the Tonight show, and then Meet the Press, NBC's pioneer Sunday-morning current affairs talk programme, in which politicians and leading public figures appeared in person, and where Weaver was a crucial moving hand. All three programmes are still running.

In 1955, however, an internal power struggle led to Weaver's being kicked upstairs at NBC to the more honorific post of chairman. Within 12 months he had resigned. A pioneering effort to launch a cable TV service in the 1960s was sabotaged by resistance from the established broadcast networks.

Sylvester Laflin ("Pat") Weaver came from a family steeped in the media and entertainment. His brother Winstead was an actor and comedian, while his sister Sylva was fashion editor of The Los Angeles Times in the 1930s. His daughter is the actress Sigourney Weaver, whose striking height she inherited from her father.

In 1954 The New Yorker described him as "not only the leading showman" in the new medium, "but also its most unrelenting thinker and vocal theorist". To the end of his life Pat Weaver lamented the shortage on American television of genuinely creative programmes, especially arts programmes, which broadened a viewer's horizons and understanding of the world.

Rupert Cornwell