Historian, presenter, documentary maker – and the least glitzy of TV-am's Famous Five
Robert Kee, who has died aged 93, belonged to a vanishing tradition of great TV documentary makers and presenters with roots in print journalism and books. He might be presenting the BBC's Panorama or ITN's lunchtime news programme of the early 1970s, First Report, but his roots and style were always back in the puritanical tell-it-as-it-is ethic of Picture Post magazine. Thus, of the Famous Five who in 1983 founded the commercial breakfast television station TV-am, he was the least glitzy.
His passion for justice, exercised on subjects such as Ireland or British Asian immigrants, was always tempered by his objective sense that both sides of a question must be ventilated. He seemed increasingly a throwback once more raucous and less scrupulous voices had become fashionable in the media.
He did not look a populist, and was not, either as a documentary maker or as the author of many books of history. The finely chiselled, rather saturnine features and piercing eyes were those of a colonial magistrate rather than a bland television personality.
This was consistent with his personal background. He was born in Calcutta, now Kolkata, the son of a Scottish jute trader, himself the son of a Liberal mayor of Greenock, on Clydeside. Robert's father was successful in business in the 1920s and 30s, but rather looked down upon by the "aristocracy" of the army and the Indian civil service.
His father, who was fond of humming the popular ballad Keep Right on to the End of the Road, lost his job in the great depression of the early 1930s. He received a payoff of £900 and no pension, forcing him to work at various makeshift jobs until he was 74. In speaking and writing about his father, Robert showed far more than usual emotion.
All this might have created a reach-me-down revolutionary. With him, it led to an icy determination to pursue the truth wherever it might lie. He gained a scholarship to Stowe school, Buckinghamshire, and an exhibition to study history at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was taught by and became a friend of AJP Taylor. With the second world war under way, he joined the RAF and in 1942 became a bomber pilot, a role that might not have sat as easily on many of his successors in television. While flying over the Netherlands, he was shot down and captured by the occupying Germans and taken to a camp in Poland.
He made two efforts to escape. One took him out of Poland and into Germany as far as Cologne, before he was recaptured on a train while trying to contact the Belgian resistance. He later wrote that it was "all rather fun", and that having attended an English public school was good training for survival in a prison camp.
After the war Picture Post beckoned. Kee slaved away on features about the way Britain was shaping up for the future and trying to live down its colonial past. Then he was briefly a picture editor, a special correspondent for the Observer (1956-57) and the Sunday Times (1957-58), and literary editor of the Spectator (1957). He really began to make his mark in 1958, when he joined BBC TV to work on Panorama, reporting on danger spots including Algeria during its war of independence from France.
Kee exulted in the freedom danger gave. There were no camera stands or static shots, there was no producer or director to tell him what to do. In the view of some colleagues, Kee single-handedly revolutionised television reporting.
From 1964 to 1978 he worked for various ITV companies. Asked by Jeremy Isaacs to join Associated Rediffusion's This Week programme, Kee made his prerogatives crystal clear even in London. Isaacs remembered trying to look over Kee's shoulder at the script Kee was working on and then offering a suggestion. Kee told him: "Oh do shut up. I'm writing this."
Working for the BBC, he displayed the same sovereignty of mind. His 13-part Ireland: A Television History (1980-81) sought, in his words, to "ungarble the past" in telling the island's story over the 1,000 years from the time of Brian Boru. During the Falklands war of 1982 he interviewed in what many thought was an unfair and brutal way the foreign secretary who appeared to have fumbled the warning signs of imminent war, Lord Carrington. But when a documentary he made on the Falklands was edited by the producer in such a way as to give what Kee considered disproportionate coverage to the minority opponents of the war, he split with the BBC. Nothing that transformed the writer into a glove puppet of the manipulators of the media was acceptable to him.
Times were changing. By the time he joined the Famous Five – himself, David Frost, Anna Ford, Michael Parkinson and Angela Rippon – to set up TV-am, heavyweight people such as himself were going out of fashion: audiences were moving towards more comfortable and ordinary presenters in sweaters. Within weeks the Five disintegrated and, scenting blood, the media crowded outside the doors of the studios in Camden Town, north London. Anyone entering or leaving the building was questioned. Frost came and went in his polished blue Bentley, Kee almost unnoticed in a muddy car of lesser make.
As a historian, either in his TV documentries or his books, he was most effective when he had a clear point of view. His books on 1939 and 1945, The World We Left Behind and The World We Fought For, published in the mid-80s, relied on press reports and did not add a great deal, but his books on Ireland – The Green Flag (1972), Ireland: A History (1980) and The Laurel and the Ivy (1993), a dispassionate study of the nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell – made the best of his narrative skills and human insight. Trial and Error (1986), about the Guildford Four, was especially influential in challenging a suspect verdict.
In his later years, Kee campaigned in a quiet way for his main thesis that justice must rest on truth – which was not an easy argument to put across in an age of spin doctors and other partisan manipulators.
He justified The Laurel and the Ivy primarily on the grounds that it might enable British people to understand Ireland better, seeing it from the Irishman's point of view. In order to pursue his goal of home rule, Parnell had at first cultivated the support of the Fenians, seeking outright independence. One interviewer asked Kee: "Had you been an Englishman in 1870, would you have supported Parnell?" This produced the answer: "Yes, I would have been pro-home rule. I might have been, as a lot of home rulers had originally been, a Fenian, but by the 1870s, if one had been a Fenian, one would think them absolutely out of court, not relevant."
The interviewer found it singular that Kee replied from an Irishman's perspective rather than an Englishman's. It was this ability to empathise with conflicting points of view that made him such a good historian, but as a campaigner in his 70s he left many people puzzled.
Kee found himself able to support British governments of any political shade who tried to find a solution to the Irish problem, but he was not the sort of man to indulge himself in the approval of fudges. When the 1993 Anglo-Irish declaration on Ulster was signed by John Major and Albert Reynolds, he pointed out that the key ingredient – that there must be the consent of the Northern Irish majority in deciding whether there was a united Ireland – had been there for 72 years.
"If this is indeed, in Mr Ashdown's cliche of the week, 'a clear sign of a new way forward', the IRA could have found it was such any time in the past 24 years," he said tartly. "It did not do so, and continued to kill and destroy in pursuit of its goal, arousing Protestant paramilitary retaliation."
Immigration, too, was something on which he permitted himself a campaigning as well as an analytical stance. In the early 1990s panic began to set in among the prosperous Hong Kong British subjects that their future after Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997 might be bleak. Kee wrote arguing that the precedents with Asians fleeing from Idi Amin in Uganda in 1972 were not conclusive, because most of the Asian Ugandans had been traders, whereas most of the Hong Kong British subjects wanting sanctuary would be civil servants, teachers and professionals. The worries about the Ugandan Asians' presence in Britain had been unfounded, and it might well be that one day the fears of the Hong Kong British subjects would be viewed as exaggerated.
"Perhaps one day," said Kee, "Britain will even evolve a coherent immigration policy which is something more than a series of kneejerk reactions to emergency situations, concerned, in the initial phase at any rate, with keeping certain people (usually non-white) out."
Kee had three marriages, of which the first two ended in divorce: to Janetta Woolley, by whom he had a daughter; to Cynthia Judah, by whom he had a daughter and two sons, of whom one predeceased him; and to Kate Trevelyan. He is survived by Kate and three children.
• Robert Kee, writer and broadcaster, born 5 October 1919; died 11 January 2013