Simon Welfare: Pioneering Yorkshire Television producer and writer who worked with Arthur C Clarke dead at 78

He took pleasure in recounting the intricacies of the old boy network that got him there.

Keen to try his luck in the burgeoning world of TV, he found himself talking at an Oxford party to a woman who mentioned casually that “daddy’s in charge of one of those TV companies”.

Daddy, it transpired, was Donald Baverstock, the BBC producer who had just been appointed managing director of the newly enfranchised YTV.

A meeting was arranged and Simon quickly found himself transplanted to Leeds and installed as a TV journalist.

As part of the small group of mavericks who created the nightly news magazine programme Calendar, Simon was an on-screen reporter and presenter but was soon recruited into the team Yorkshire was developing to honour its franchise pledge to make science programmes for the ITV network.

Under the leadership of Duncan Dallas, the science department produced not only a stream of documentaries, giving Simon experience of extensive world travel, but also devised the first prime time science series on ITV: Don’t Ask Me, a hugely popular show that made stars of Dr Magnus Pyke, David Bellamy and Dr Miriam Stoppard.

This was a time of creative exuberance in YTV and Simon had already – together with John Fairley – made a documentary about Arthur C Clarke at his home in Sri Lanka.

Between them, the trio cooked up the format that would become the worldwide success, Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World.

It spawned two other series of the same ilk, each programme filled with intriguing tales of unexplained phenomena, balanced and assessed through commentary from the unique mind of Clarke. They were internationally acclaimed and the series spin-off books became worldwide best sellers.

All 52 programmes and their associated books bore the hallmark of Simon’s erudition, his insistence on painstaking and accurate research and, through it all, his irreverent humour. He never forgot that his adult audience were at heart still children who liked a laugh.

Other YTV productions included an epic, three-part history of 20th century China, in which Simon’s co-producer was Gwyneth Hughes, lately the writer of ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

Simon married Mary Gordon and the couple settled in Aberdeenshire close to her childhood home, Haddo House.

The building and the history of the Gordon family came to so fascinate Simon that when he retired from television and took to writing biographies he published Fortune’s Many Houses, an enthralling window into the glamorously philanthropic world of the 7th Earl of Aberdeen and his wife, Ishbel.

He left on his desk the nearly completed manuscript of his latest work, The Stolen Earl, which he was working on to the end.

He is survived by Mary; their son and daughter, Toby and Hannah; and two grandsons. Another daughter, Alice, predeceased him.