David Heycock obituary

My husband David Heycock, who has died aged 80, from complications from multiple sclerosis, was a prominent producer in the music and arts department of BBC television in the 1970s.

His work with Kenneth Clark on Civilisation and as the director of the final four programmes in Alistair Cooke ’s America series were much praised, as was Spirit of the Age, a pairing of films on Palladian and 20th-century architecture with John Julius Norwich and Hugh Casson . He was responsible for Where We Live, a six-part series broadcast on BBC Two in 1974, in which young people described their feelings about the world in which they were growing up.

Before joining the BBC, David had made a mark at the Cambridge Union, proposing with James Baldwin the motion “the American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro” in the famous 1965 debate with the rightwing commentator William F Buckley Jr .

David was born in Bournemouth, the only child of Edward, a company secretary, and Phyllis (nee Barrett), a receptionist. He grew up in south London and was educated as a scholarship boy at Dulwich college, becoming a Queen’s scout and a member of the team that won the Public Schools Debating Association Observer Mace in 1962.

He won an exhibition to study English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he gained a first in part one of the tripos and, in addition to debating at the Union, was president of the Pembroke Players. From Cambridge he went on to Brown University, Rhode Island, for a year, before being accepted for the BBC trainee scheme.

In one of his Letters from America, Cooke described David as “a very sharp and perceptive young director”. His head of department noted that he managed to be “both human and academic”. His illness, however, worsened to such an extent that he had to give up his work in the music and arts department. He spent several years making training films and lecturing for the BBC before taking early retirement in his late 40s.

Although David would not have wished his BBC career to end so early, he quickly moved on to other projects, taking a master’s degree in media studies, lecturing at Birkbeck College, London, and adapting English classics for the Japanese market.

Although he used a wheelchair for the last 15 years of his life, David was still able to travel, to visit exhibitions and to go to cultural events. His last visit to the theatre was in 2023, to see a re-enactment of the 1965 Baldwin-Buckley debate at Stone Nest in central London, where he was invited on stage to meet the actor playing his younger self.

David and I married in 1988 and I survive him, as do our two sons, Tom and Carlos.