In his years as a radio producer with the BBC World Service, my friend and colleague, Dan Zerdin, who has died aged 98, interviewed musicians such as Daniel Barenboim and his wife, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré. However, his talk with the conductor Leopold Stokowski, a childhood idol, ended abruptly when Stokowski stormed out after a being asked a personal question.
As an accomplished studio producer, Dan worked across the board, for example on the innovative 1980s World Phone-In when leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher took live telephone questions from listeners from around the world.
Born in Wimbledon, south-west London, to Bertha (nee Goldesgeyme), a pianist, and Noah Zerdin, a businessman and a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, Dan was only seven months old when his mother died in an Oxford Street shop fire.
Noah sought comfort in spiritualism and became a leading practitioner. Seventy years later, Dan discovered a cache of seance recordings in the family garage, ostensibly containing the voice of Dan’s mother. Dan maintained a benign scepticism about these recordings (now in the British Library), which he used with Noah’s granddaughters as a basis for the 2002 Radio 4 feature What Grandad Did in the Dark (a Guardian Pick of the Day at the time).
Dan was raised by nannies and his large Jewish family; when he was still a child his father married Bertha’s sister, Golda. In 1937 he moved to Brazil for a year, where his father pursued the mica trade. There, Dan suffered an attack of impetigo and was helped by a form of acupuncture. Back in London, as a pupil at Rutlish school, in Merton Park, he excelled at acting and went to Rada in 1945, studying alongside other aspirants such as Roger Moore.
National service with the RAF then took him to India. His ambition when he returned to London was no longer acting but a career with the BBC, which he fulfilled when, after freelancing as a contributor, in 1962 he joined the European English Service, ultimately part of the wider World Service. He married the broadcaster Hilary Osborn in 1970. He continued as a producer, then senior producer, working also with the World Service Classical Music Unit both before and after his retirement in 1986.
Dan inherited his mother’s love of classical music and was a regular contributor to the Today programme when it was fronted by Jack de Manio, in the late 1950s and early 60s, often on musical topics. Over 60 years later, he was still at it and in 2023 he published a book, Tales from the Proms.
Hilary survives him, together with their two children, Judith and Paul, two grandchildren, Samuel and Helena, and his half-sister, Ruth.
