IN MEMORIAM: On 24 August "The Daily Telegraph" carried an obituary for Gerald Eichler (Johnstons 56/60), who passed away on 17 August. He was a television reporter who turned philosophical discussions between academics into unlikely but much admired late night viewing. He was a man of ideas and his best known productions were "Something to Say" and "Voices". In "Something to Say" intellectuals discussed serious ideas in a studio. It was the forerunner of "Voices", which was simple, but into which Eichler brought the most talented thinkers of the day. The critics loved it, but it was less successful with the viewing public, even though he produced 42 of them.

He was born Gerald Rainmar at Graz, Austria, on January 12 1942, and later adopted the name Eichler from a dance teacher. At 13 he came to England to visit his step-father and decided to stay. He arranged for himself to be taken into local authority care and was sent to a reception centre, where he remained for six months, before going to Woolverstone Hall and then studying for a sociology degree at Regent Street Polytechnic..

Later, lodging with the radio producer Tony Cash, who was working on the BBC's Russian Service, Gerald showed him a piece he was writing. It was not always clear where one sentence ended and another began; but what shone through was Eichler's originality and great intelligence. Through Cash, Udi, as he now called himself, made his first contacts with the BBC. In 1964 he joined the BBC general trainee scheme, and embarked on a career in television, working at Lime Grove.

In the late 1960s, he left the BBC for Rediffusion, later to become Thames, and joined the documentaries department where he stayed for 15 years. At Thames he was a director on This Week, the producer of Something to Say, the maker of documentaries and the executive producer of Take Six. He also produced Sex in Our Time, a frank and explicit look at contemporary sexual behaviour. However, it proved too frank and too explicit for the regulators at Thames.

In 1981, Udi co-founded the television production company Brook, which provided him with the flexibility to combine television production with his lifelong interest in therapy. In.1987 he took an MSc at Roehampton Institute and began working as a therapist, while at the same time keeping up his career in television production. His later programmes, in. particular Museums of Madness (1991), which he made with Jonathan Miller, and Family Therapy (1995) were much more popular with viewers than his earlier philosophical programmes.

The Telegraph described him as "intelligent, bold, direct, honest and often provocative. Having grown up in post-war Austria, he had little respect for authority, and this brought him to challenge almost everything - his particular bete-noirs being restrictions on smoking and parking." He had a fine Billie Holliday record collection, was fond of windsurfing, boats and skiing and owned a vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Udi Eichler married Diana Davies in 1962 and had two daughters. That marriage was dissolved. He later married the novelist Judith Summers (cousin of Keith Pittel - Ed) in 1997; they had a son.