Charles Wheeler:FOR MORE than four decades, Charles Wheeler, who has died of lung cancer aged 85, reported for BBC radio and television from most of the world's troublespots, becoming the broadcaster's longest-serving foreign correspondent. Although his craggy features and shock of white hair were his most obvious trademarks, they were incidental to an investigative skill and sense of judgment that made him one of the most authoritative reporters of his generation.
Wheeler was born in Germany, the son of an RAF wing commander who in the late 1920s was working for a Bremen shipping company. Moving to Hamburg, one of the young Wheeler's formative experiences was to observe the violence which brought the Nazis to power. He was sent to school in the UK and by the time he left, at 17, Britain was at war with Germany. While waiting to join the services, he took a job as a copy boy at the Daily Sketch, sparking off a lifelong taste for journalism. In 1942 he enlisted in the Royal Marines and, with the rank of captain, was assigned to a special unit created by the author Ian Fleming to gather intelligence for the D-day landings.
On demobilisation in 1947 he joined the BBC's external service, initially as a sub-editor on the Latin-American desk and later, in 1950, as its Berlin correspondent, before being brought back to London to serve as a talks writer.
Increasingly frustrated by this desk work, he decided to move to television in 1956, when Panorama offered him a job as a producer. However, as he was the first to acknowledge, the nitpicking imperatives of production did not enthral him (he was notorious for his indifference to deadlines), and after two years he moved to New Delhi as the BBC's South Asia correspondent. Although Wheeler's reporting was generally sympathetic, the robust terms in which it was sometimes couched drew periodic official protests.
The greatest furore came after a trip to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where the government threatened to leave the British Commonwealth after Wheeler called its prime minister "an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a cabinet of mediocrities".
In 1962 he went back to Berlin, by now more concretely divided by the wall. He later moved to Washington, where his observation of Richard Nixon in office tended to confirm the view he had formed of him as vice-president years before when, guiding him on a tour of Berlin, he found him "weird and totally mad".
After a subsequent stint as European correspondent he rejoined Panorama in 1977. This was the format best suited to his journalistic style. It allowed him sufficient preparation and a long enough segment to give the viewer a carefully-considered and stylish perspective. Wheeler's on-screen presence, simultaneously professorial and incisive, was perfectly suited to this more analytical approach.
It may have been this quality that persuaded the BBC that he would be the ideal presenter for Newsnight when it was launched in 1980. This was a less than successful experiment and Wheeler's distaste for the apparent omniscience required of a frontman was evident.
The assignment ended in tears when, in the midst of some mammoth technical disaster, Wheeler told the audience that he had no idea what was going on and simply sat mutely while it was sorted out. He was, as he later acknowledged, quite rightly sacked.
But this was to the benefit of both the BBC and viewers. It put Wheeler back on the road, for Newsnight among others. His masterly reports soon came rolling in from the disintegrating Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War - where he exposed the torture of Palestinians in Kuwait and the attacks on Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussein.
He was also there when the BBC needed a critic, confronting the then director-general, John Birt, and denouncing BBC News 24 as the corporation's "worst idea yet".
He was twice married. In 1962 he married Dip Singh, who survives him, as do his two daughters, Marina, a barrister married to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and Shirin, who works for the BBC.
Charles Wheeler: born March 26th, 1923; died July 4th, 2008