My husband David Heycock, who has died aged 80, from issues from a number of sclerosis, was a distinguished producer within the music and humanities division of BBC tv within the Nineteen Seventies.
His work with Kenneth Clark on Civilisation and because the director of the ultimate 4 programmes in Alistair Cooke’s America collection have been a lot praised, as was Spirit of the Age, a pairing of movies on Palladian and Twentieth-century structure with John Julius Norwich and Hugh Casson. He was answerable for The place We Reside, a six-part collection broadcast on BBC Two in 1974, through which younger folks described their emotions in regards to the world through which they have been rising up.
Earlier than becoming a member of the BBC, David had made a mark on the Cambridge Union, proposing with James Baldwin the movement “the American Dream is on the Expense of the American Negro” within the well-known 1965 debate with the rightwing commentator William F Buckley Jr.
David was born in Bournemouth, the one youngster of Edward, an organization secretary, and Phyllis (nee Barrett), a receptionist. He grew up in south London and was educated as a scholarship boy at Dulwich school, changing into a Queen’s scout and a member of the workforce that received the Public Colleges Debating Affiliation Observer Mace in 1962.
He received an exhibition to review English at Pembroke Faculty, Cambridge, the place he gained a primary partly one of many tripos and, along with debating on the Union, was president of the Pembroke Gamers. From Cambridge he went on to Brown College, Rhode Island, for a yr, earlier than being accepted for the BBC trainee scheme.
In one among his Letters from America, Cooke described David as “a really sharp and perceptive younger director”. His head of division famous that he managed to be “each human and tutorial”. His sickness, nevertheless, worsened to such an extent that he had to surrender his work within the music and humanities division. He spent a number of years making coaching movies and lecturing for the BBC earlier than taking early retirement in his late 40s.
Though David wouldn’t have wished his BBC profession to finish so early, he shortly moved on to different initiatives, taking a grasp’s diploma in media research, lecturing at Birkbeck Faculty, London, and adapting English classics for the Japanese market.
Though he used a wheelchair for the final 15 years of his life, David was nonetheless in a position to journey, to go to exhibitions and to go to cultural occasions. His final go to to the theatre was in 2023, to see a re-enactment of the 1965 Baldwin-Buckley debate at Stone Nest in central London, the place he was invited on stage to fulfill the actor enjoying his youthful self.
David and I married in 1988 and I survive him, as do our two sons, Tom and Carlos.
