BBC presenter noted for The Living World and Kaleidoscope
Peter France
PETER FRANCE, who has died a few days short of his 90th birthday, was for years the voice of the Radio 4 programmes Kaleidoscope and The Living World, and presented BBC Television’s Everyman, as well as many other series.
Despite an early decision that he “would only stick around as long as I found life to be agreeable and stimulating”, which led him to carry suicide pills with him wherever he went (“my little kit”), he achieved a long and rewarding life full of startling contrasts.
Peter France was born on April 2 1931 at Clifton, a mining village near Brighouse, Yorkshire, to Jack and Florence (née Oade). His father, a butcher, was a committed socialist and rationalist who would not read his children fairy stories “because they weren’t true”. Peter never quite felt at home in the male world of the miners. “When I took to cleaning my teeth, they thought I must be homosexual.”
His Sunday School teacher, Ada Hopper, encouraged his voracious reading which earned him the nickname “the Prof ”, and got him, via Rastrick Grammar School, to New College, Oxford. There, bewildered and even more out of place – “I was so awed by the upper classes I didn’t think the Queen went to the lavatory” – he took refuge in acting, with OUDS.
He married his Oxford girlfriend Charlene Osmond-jones, and after a year in rep he applied to the Colonial Service. Fulfilling a childhood fantasy, he was posted to Fiji, where over 15 years he rose from District Officer to Permanent Secretary.
When Fiji became independent in 1970, he returned to academia at the National University of Australia in Canberra, and then at Nuffield College, Oxford, specialising in Colonial History. Finding that “sherry undermined my constitution”, France sought out a new career: broadcasting.
He turned out to be a natural, aided by his wide reading, natural curiosity, and warm, sexy voice. He presented The Living World for 12 years, relying, he said, on “a unique and precious talent, the inability to remember anything anyone said about the countryside, which led me to be constantly astonished.”
All this time, true to his father’s teaching, he was resolutely rational in his personal philosophy and sceptical of all faiths. He moved from radio to the Religious Department of BBC Television to front a series of new programmes, first Anno Domini, then Everyman, which consciously adopted an agnostic approach to matters of faith and morals.
For 12 years France gently questioned believers of all sorts, from Lakota medicine men to gay bishops, always respectful, often more knowledgeable than his subjects, never wavering in his rationalism. Then in 1974, his first marriage having ended in divorce, he fell in love with Felicia Lambe, who in 1976 became his second wife.
This marriage changed him greatly. He found to his surprise that she managed life in a very different way – admiring, but not sharing, his rationalism. When she was diagnosed with MS she turned fully to her newfound faith, the Orthodox Church, and Peter looked on in astonishment as a healing service seemed to bring about a miracle cure.
In 1988 they acquired a tiny house on the Greek island of Patmos, where Peter taught himself Greek and read the New Testament in its original language. In 1992 following “a direct experience of spiritual realities” he was baptised on Patmos in a 44-gallon drum of warm water. He told the story of how he came to find faith in the 1998 BBC TV series Journey.
In the course of his life Peter France wrote books including The Rape of Egypt, Greek as a Treat, Hermits: the Insights of Solitude and A Place of Healing for the Soul.
He is survived by Felicia, by two daughters from his first marriage and three stepchildren.