Founder of New Scientist, Sunday Times journalist and BBC broadcaster who made complicated subjects easy to understand
A powerful mind coupled with a gift for rendering complex ideas in popular terms made Tom Margerison, who has died aged 90, an outstanding ambassador for science. Equally at home in print or on radio and television, he was in at the beginning of New Scientist, a notable science correspondent on the Sunday Times and the resident boffin of the Tonight programme. His popular science books were acclaimed, and he was drawn to the executive side of the press and broadcasting.
He joined the Sunday Times in 1961, the year that the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. When Gagarin visited Britain, Margerison looked after him at his press conference. He became a trusted source for news of Soviet technology, and reported for the BBC's Panorama programme on the Red Army's ammunition production at Novosibirsk, in south-west Siberia.
For a BBC documentary on Siberia, Margerison, who never wore a coat, impressed his Russian hosts by walking out in -40C in a light Marks and Spencer suit. He also took part in sub-zero swimming competitions under the ice, outdrank his hosts and evaded his minder and hotel room bugs, filing secretly to the Sunday Times.
When MI5 tried to harness his exceptional access to the Russians, he was unimpressed by its recruitment technique. Asked to lunch at the Cumberland Hotel in London, he looked around the room and saw a number of identical meetings taking place.
It was in his Sunday Times days that he predicted the possibility of fire in the Mont Blanc tunnel under the Alps – he was proved right in March 1999 – and the potential for failure of the bow doors on cross-Channel ferries - the fate of the Herald of Free Enterprise in March 1987 – as well as other intrinsic technical faults. He also foresaw the role of traffic-congestion charging and the continuing need for nuclear energy.
In the early 1960s he appeared several times a week on Tonigh, presented by Cliff Michelmore, explaining science stories in the news. Later in the decade helped develop the BBC Young Scientists of the Year award.
The Sunday Times's owner, Roy Thomson, had a Canadian paper with a colour supplement and Margerison realised that the new technology made a similar venture feasible in the UK; the Sunday Times Magazine was launched in 1962, with Margerison as its deputy editor. He applied computer technology to Thomson newspapers and persuaded Thomson to found several spin-off ventures, including a radar device for tracking fish in the North Sea.
In 1967, believing that the BBC was not fulfilling its Reithian remit, Margerison joined a group that included David Frost to bid for the weekend ITV franchise, becoming the first deputy managing director of London Weekend Television and rising to chairman and chief executive after two years. His main task was troubleshooting, which included dealing with the unions, and in this role his natural charm and tact certainly helped. It was a difficult time for commercial television, and LWT's board was becoming annoyed by press reports of low ratings, poor financial performance and a confused identity that did not know whether it wanted to be highbrow or appeal to a mass audience. Margerison presided over the first colour transmissions, but axed the station's remaining highbrow pretensions and achieved a wider commercial success.
The involvement of Rupert Murdoch as a major investor led to disputes about the active role that he sought in programming decisions. Margerison concluded that: "You cannot have two people running a ship." He left in 1971.
Tom was born in Finchley, north London, to Isabel and Ernest, a senior tax inspector whose career demanded that he move around the country. Thus Tom attended schools in Huntingdon, Hull and Macclesfield before going to Sheffield University.
The government considered Sheffield's physics department crucial to the war effort and 20 of its best students, including Margerison, were selected by CP Snow and his colleague, Harry Hoff, carefully vetted and fast-tracked in a two-year degree course. "They set up an organisation to issue degrees to people of sufficient merit to put them into the war effort; the same thing happened with my PhD," said Margerison.
The government was particularly interested in locating distant objects through radiolocation: Margerison found this undercover work to be "glamorous but boring". He continued with it into peacetime for several years, interspersed with his academic training. Snow and Hoff were later to achieve fame as novelists, the latter using the pen name William Cooper.
At Sheffield Margerison also became involved with the drama society, and he directed productions for Sheffield's repertory theatre. Latterly, with his dark hair and deep-set eyes, he was often mistaken for the actor James Mason, an advantage he would use to obtain the best table at a restaurant.
After the war he was approached by both MI5 and the KGB, the latter hopefully leaving him bottles of vodka in a phone box behind a West End theatre. The idea did not appeal. Nor did he want to continue in an academic career, and answered an advertisement in the Stage for a scientific film script writer. This led to a year with the Film Producers Guild. In 1951, he joined the academic publisher Butterworth Scientific, where he was the founding editor of their journal Research.
Keen to see science treated as part of mainstream culture, Margerison wrote a letter to the Times about the need for a popular science magazine. He was looking for collaborators and assembled a design and production team that produced a dummy magazine – New Scientist. The newspaper and magazine publishers IPC, which later became Reed, took it on and appointed as editor Percy Cudlipp, the former editor of the Daily Herald. Margerison was science editor, and Cudlipp ensured that everything was intelligible to the lay person.
I remember visiting the New Scientist office some years later, where Margerison, who always had a twinkle in his eye, rejoiced in a letter he had pinned to his noticeboard: it urged the editor to sack him. Nigel Calder, a former colleague there, said of him: "I was to watch with fascination as Cudlipp and Margerison turned a rather vague idea for a magazine into what must surely be counted one of the least vague publications in the world."
After the Sunday Times and LWT, Margerison returned to science as chairman of Computer Technology (1971-75), still concerned with newspaper production, and later director of the Nuclear Electricity Information Group and a consultant for the British Nuclear Industry Forum. For many years he served on the UK national commission for Unesco.
In 1950, Margerison married Pamela Tilbrook. They had two sons, Peter and Angus, and Pamela died in 2009. In the 1970s, he met the journalist and campaigner Marjorie Wallace. Eventually they set up home together, and had a daughter, Sophia. Margerison contributing to the work of Sane, the charity that Marjorie founded in 1986, and they wrote a book, The Superpoison (1979), about the dioxin disaster at Seveso in Italy in 1976.
Margerison's hobby was sailing. In 1997 he developed Parkinson's disease, which eventually compelled him to retire.
He is survived by Marjorie and his children.
• Thomas Alan Margerison, science journalist and broadcaster, born 13 November 1923; died 25 February 2014
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