My friend Dick Gilbert, who has died aged 82 after suffering from vascular dementia, was a BBC journalist, a jazz fan, a lover of pubs and of having a flutter on the horses.
Politically, he was on the left, from his schooldays at Midhurst grammar school, West Sussex, where he impressed fellow students by reading the New Statesman. In November 1956 he joined the great anti-Suez demonstration in London – wearing his RAF uniform because he had just begun national service.
After gaining a first in history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he spent a year teaching at UCLA, California. This led not only to the vivid description of Los Angeles in his book City of the Angels (1964) but to that abiding passion for the jazz he heard from the marching bands and Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Joining the BBC in 1963, he produced a versatile range of interviews with subjects ranging from Marghanita Laski to Kenny Everett, and worked on documentaries including Start the Week and Kaleidoscope.
Later he moved to the Listener, where he became deputy editor in the final years before it ceased publication in 1991. Then he switched to the publicity department of BBC Information Services.
Dick had “a mole’s ear for the quirky revelation, the compelling oddities, the tantalising tangents of life,” a BBC colleague recalled. He brought cheer and laughter to every meeting he joined.
He rode the UK trad jazz boom of the late 1950s and 60s, getting to know groups such as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. He wrote about these bands as a freelance journalist and doubled as a travel writer. “Not a day went by without listening to jazz with a glass of Scotch in his hand,” said his wife, Nikki.
Born in London, Dick was the son of Bertram Gilbert, a dentist, and his wife, Olga (nee Davidson). His grandfather, Simon Gelberg, had been deputy editor of the Jewish Chronicle and the last newspaperman to interview William Gladstone.
He married Nicholette Hicks in 1974. She danced on the stage and ran ballet and creative music classes for young children from their home in north London and at schools in Hampstead, St John’s Wood and Stanmore.
She survives him, as do their two sons, Ben and Sam, and his brother, Chris.
