Derek Cooper, who has died aged 88, was for many years the presenter of BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme. His interrogations on behalf of the listener impaled ministry spokesmen and representatives of food manufacturers, as well as publicists for the agrochemical industry, on sharp stakes of deadly understatement. His rich baritone voice and faultless enunciation were described by one enthusiastic critic as lolloping "out of the ether like a gigantic labrador hewn from honey-baked ham". The programme was an arresting, yet familiar and well-loved, accompaniment to the preparation of Sunday lunch.
Derek was born in London and spent his (Catholic) childhood in three places. There was his parents' home in New Malden, south-west London – he went to Raynes Park county grammar school – his father, George, working as a clerk on the railways. He also spent time on the Isle of Skye, in the Hebrides, where his mother, Jessie, grew up, and attended Portree high school during the early years of the second world war. And there were the billowing orchards of Kent, where his father's family had been brickmakers and fruit growers. His university studies were postponed by service in the Royal Navy from 1943 to 1947, but eventually he settled at Wadham College, Oxford, where at least one of his contemporaries thought him "the wittiest man in Oxford".
Fulfilling a childhood dream to work in radio (and turning down the offer of a job at the Times), he went to south-east Asia for the following decade, to Radio Malaya, which he left in 1960 as controller of programmes. When he returned to Britain, he thought at first of working in television, and joined ITN, but found his production technique was bad at the best of times and that writing and presenting were more agreeable – and that he was better at them.
World in Action, Tomorrow's World and programmes for the BBC Schools service were the first to hear his mellifluous tones – they became hot property in the voiceover market – and he also undertook reporting for Radio 4's Today programme. A piece for Today in 1965 on the British tourist industry and our hopeless attitude to food was reprinted in the Listener where it caught the eye of the publisher Colin Franklin. Franklin's proposal that an expanded version would sell well proved correct when The Bad Food Guide appeared in 1967. Derek's weary despair at the pretension of cooks, hoteliers and restaurateurs and the gullibility of their customers was the more effective as they were invariably condemned out of their own mouths – a standard Cooper technique for years to come.
While researching this book, he wrote to the director of the British Hotels and Restaurants Association to inquire why eating out in Britain enjoyed such a poor reputation. "Eating in Britain does not enjoy a poor reputation," came the swift, and final, response. It was against such monumental stupidity that Cooper battled. Bad Food gave rise to The Beverage Report in 1970, Cooper's analysis of the drinks market: an excoriating view of the rise of the theme pub, an exposure of the fiddles of the world's barmen and a sharp bodkin deflating the aspirations of wine waiters everywhere. The humour was slightly less knockabout than in his first book – a sense of crusade more palpable.
This literary success was a passport to journalism, which Derek pursued with gusto (particularly in the Guardian and the Observer magazine) throughout the 70s. Latterly, he wrote regularly for Saga magazine and for Scotland on Sunday. His books, meanwhile, were more usually about Scotland or Scotch whisky than food or wine, although he did revisit the horrors of restaurants in The Gunge File (1986) – the exploits of Ray Gunge, "catering wizard of the north" – whom he had created for Catering Times.
His evocative accounts of Skye and the Hebrides had long currency and were the result of summer migrations with his family to a house on Skye bought in the late 60s. His wife, Janet, an architect, was from Yorkshire. Her substantial country cookery was the acme of Derek's dietary vision: fresh food, wholesome and attractively cooked. He himself was never a cook; nor, really, did he think himself a gourmet, more a "public stomach" in the Raymond Postgate (founder of the Good Food Guide) sense.
He was a panegyrist of single malt whisky, with books such as The Whisky Roads of Scotland (1982), with eloquent photographs by Fay Godwin. Aptly, he was many times a laureate of the Glenfiddich awards for food and wine writing and broadcasting.
He was the regular presenter of The Food Programme from 1979 until 2001, working closely with the producers Vanessa Harrison and Sheila Dillon. While the weekly half-hour addressed the achievements of British food producers (and there were as many cheerful stories as there was scandal and outrage at commercial excess), it was remarkable for its consistent engagement in what Derek came to call "the food wars". His view was that food should be close to nature, should have as few chemicals involved either in its creation or subsequent processing as possible and that big business was generally (exceptions were allowed) inimical to good eating.
This did not slip easily down the throats of the battalions of scientists intent on efficient production, taste manipulators wishing to gull the innocent (whether children or the indigent) into stuffing themselves full of pure rubbish, or corporations taking profits from food in whatever form: agribusiness, supermarkets, processors and manufacturers. It was even less palatable to those government spokesmen that Derek discovered obfuscating or distorting the truth or insensibly acting as spokesmen for the interests or industries they were meant to be regulating.
These merry grillings were never hysteric but though impeccably courteous they were remorseless: honey turned to vitriol. His time at the microphone coincided with many excitements: the infighting over dietary guidelines, food labelling, salmonella, BSE, vCJD, poverty and agricultural exploitation in the developing world, genetic modification and more. For many of us, The Food Programme was the voice of sanity. Derek's political engagement was mirrored by that of food writers in general, so that his part in founding in 1984 the Guild of Food Writers, of which he was first chairman then president, was a natural extension of his public broadcasting and journalism. He was appointed OBE in 1997. In recent years he had been suffering from Parkinson's disease.
Janet, whom he married in 1953, died in 2010. He is survived by their son, Nicholas, and daughter, Penny, and by two granddaughters, Alice and Iona.
Tom Jaine
Paul Vaughan writes: Derek Cooper and I were boys together at Raynes Park county grammar, a school started by John Garrett, a charismatic headteacher whose large circle of friends included poets, novelists, theatre people and fashionable dons, most of whom visited the school and talked to the boys. The novelist and poet Rex Warner taught classics, the Euston Road group painter Claude Rogers taught art, WH Auden wrote the school song and his fellow poet Cecil Day-Lewis came regularly to read to us.
The school produced a good few broadcasters (Robert Robinson was another of us) and we were all, Derek included, influenced in one way or another by the school's atmosphere and Garrett's bullying but beguiling personality. Derek was an accurately cast Falstaff in the school play – the rich, deep voice was already in place – and a famously witty member of the Sixth.
He left school in 1943 for a naval short course at University College, Cardiff (now Cardiff University), and his letters from there, and from the Royal Navy at the end of the war, were not only hilarious but an accurate record of service life.
When he was demobbed in 1947 he went to Wadham to read philosophy, politics and economics, which he swiftly changed to English. He did some acting – the Bastard in King John (directed by Tony Richardson) – and then became editor of the Isis. His writing was blossoming: he had always written fluently and attractively, but his wonderful talent for mimicry was accompanied by a gift for unerring literary parody. A pastiche of Graham Greene ("Derek Cooper Meets a Refugee from Greeneland") prompted a telegram from its victim, reading CONGRATULATIONS GRAHAM GREENE.
He won first prize in a New Statesman competition for the best parody of Betjeman ("O flat was the road to St Edderby's Hall, As we cycled together along the sea-wall. Roman the vicar, Spartan the grub, Delectable Catholic play-reading club."): Betjeman himself, it was said, had come second with another pseudonymous entry.
It was all enough to guarantee a flying start in journalism and broadcasting, and the professional success he richly deserved. And throughout his life I could recognise the funny, un-pompous and generous friend I shall always remember from our youth.
• Derek Macdonald Cooper, broadcaster, born 25 May 1925; died 19 April 2014
