Death of De'Ath

Melvyn Bragg, who worked at the BBC with Wilfred in the ’60s, was saddened by his fall from grace – and kept him solvent in later years

- Harry Mount

I met Wilfred De’Ath at the beginning of the 1960s, when he and I were both working in the Features Department at BBC Radio. He’d been at Oxford, as I had, but we never met there.

We benefited from the loose rein of Laurence Gilliam, a large, amiable figure, who had, like many others in that department, been involved in some of the best BBC programmes in the war years, when BBC Radio was formidable and globally acclaimed.

Gilliam’s ramshackle but productive empire included Douglas Cleverdon, who nursed to life Under Milk Wood; Rayner Heppenstall, an experimental novelist; Louis MacNeice and others who found in Gilliam a perfect patron for their idiosyncrasies and bohemianism.

Wilfred fitted well into that atmosphere. And so many ambitious producers were fleeing to television that someone as young as Wilfred was a very welcome voice. He was intrigued by his own generation and interviewed John Wells, John Lennon, and a young Judi Dench, as well as convincingly claiming to have discovered and pushed the career of Kenny Everett. He went to San Francisco to bring back news of the hippies. He seemed well settled.

Then, in the 1970s, the roof fell in. His marriage (1963-67) came to an end. He lost his job at the BBC, when nine of his colleagues threatened him with a libel suit. From then on, he struggled.