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In 1978, a team from the BBC Tonight programme flew into Kampala to interview the dictator Idi Amin. As the camera was set up, Amin, surrounded by henchmen, asked David Lomax what questions he had. David replied: "I want to ask you, what happened to Dora Bloch?" Bloch was the elderly British woman who had disappeared during the Entebbe hijack of 1976 and had later been murdered. There was total silence before Amin roared with laughter at what he took to be a joke: "Mr Lomax, you are a very brave man." When the interview began, David repeated the question. He followed up with: "Do you eat the hearts of your enemies?"
David, who has died aged 76, was one of the most admired BBC current affairs reporters. He was never a specialist correspondent, and his reports, for 24 Hours, Tonight, Nationwide, Newsnight and Panorama, ranged across Britain and Northern Ireland, Africa and the Middle East. In an era when the personality of the reporter did not deliberately fill the screen, there was a signature to his films that made him the one with whom every producer wanted to work. He was animated by a sympathy for the individual stories of those caught up in grim and extraordinary situations, and by his fierce sense of injustice. He was as fearless as he was courteous, and the clarity of his voice and lucidity of his writing, along with a hawkish eye for the ridiculous, exemplified the best aspects of the liberal tradition and independent voice of BBC journalism.
In 1979, he interviewed in Dublin a representative of the Irish National Liberation Army, which had claimed responsibility for the recent murder of Airey Neave. In the Commons, there were angry calls for David to be prosecuted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. David, however, was always clear that the journalist's responsibility, in telling a story, was to ask the straight questions of anyone, including terrorists and tyrants.
David's films defined Newsnight in its first months on air in 1980. With his producer and close friend Mike Dutfield, he chronicled the last days of white Rhodesia, disappearing into territory occupied by Robert Mugabe's Zanu forces. A few weeks after independence, returning to Zimbabwe, they were imprisoned as they uncovered the first indications of the nature of Mugabe's regime. Newsnight's editor, George Carey, arriving in Harare to seek their release, was met at the underground prison by the cheerful welcome of David and Mike who had made friends with their warders. In 1982, reporting for Panorama from Beirut, under constant bombardment, pinned down by sniper fire, with a bullet through the back of David's jacket and their sound recordist wounded in the foot, they brought home the most memorable film of that war.
A tall craggy rock of a man, David was in some ways an unlikely television reporter; incredibly scruffy, usually wearing a vast shapeless woolly jersey, with a satchel overflowing with paper. His size, open face and straightforward friendliness to everyone smoothed his way through checkpoints and gained access to places he was never meant to see. In 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he tried to bluff his way into the Russian military HQ in Prague brandishing an invitation to the general for a game of chess (he was a formidable player).
Though he was best known for his overseas reporting, much of his work dug into the grain of British life, away from the world of Westminster politics, which never much interested him. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, David gained access to Hull Prison; his report for Panorma, The Boys on B Wing, revealed the degrading conditions in which young boys, under 16, were being held alongside adults. He claimed to know nothing of business but was fascinated by technology and won an award as business journalist of the year, which much amused him, for his interviews with Steve Jobs (who walked out) and Bill Gates.
David was born in Normanby, North Yorkshire. He learned to fly during his national service in the RAF in Canada. He kept up his pilot's licence, taking a single engine Auster with two RAF friends to Nepal and back. His fascination with aircraft later informed a Panorama investigation into the Eurofighter, which led to the full legal force of BAE being launched unsuccessfully against the BBC. In 1958, David went to Brasenose College, Oxford, to study history; he claimed to have attended one lecture in three years but loved to return for reunions.
In 1961, he secured a BBC traineeship which took him to Plymouth, Devon, where he was in the same newsroom as Hugh Scully, his lifelong friend. At Oxford he had met Judy Lawson, and they married in 1962. Judy introduced him to sailing, which came to be the compulsive interest of their lives. In 1985, in a shabby internal BBC manoeuvre, David was fired; he used his redundancy to buy a racing cruiser, Cloud Walker. They sailed to the Caribbean, sending postcards at every port to Brian Wenham, the BBC director of television: "Dear Brian, Thank you for the yacht." He returned to the BBC as a freelance and was on air more than ever before.
Other more ambitious voyages followed. Friends would receive postcards from Spitsbergen as he sailed far into the Arctic and the west and east coasts of Greenland, exploring waters only recently made navigable by the melting icecap. He and Judy crewed for six months on a Viking ship across the Atlantic in 1991. He was a vice commodore in the Royal Cruising Club, and as the years passed, his face become ever more weather-beaten and he seemed to become part of the sea and rugged landscape he so loved.
His home for many years was a rambling house outside Newbury, Berkshire, full of children, dogs, books, friendly argument and anecdote, and music, with David conducting a stream of friends for enormous suppers around the kitchen table. In the garden were his beehives. A pot of Lomax honey was invariably presented to interviewees; its label read "Beenham Honey. By royal appointment to President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya, and" – as the only person ever to have interviewed the Thai royal family – "Her Majesty Queen Sirikit of Thailand". In his last decade, he and Judy moved to Dartmoor, setting up a bed and breakfast, a magnet for his friends; an open invitation brought more than 200 of them to his 70th birthday.
Often the most respected journalists are difficult human beings when known close up; David was an exception, a man as much loved as admired; his unassailable generosity and restless, unpretentious nature bred a mischievous delight at the absurdity of power and an interrogative seriousness about its abuse. The BBC archive records 900 of his stories over more than 40 years; he taught generations of producers not just the craft but the values of humane reporting.
David is survived by Judy, his two sons, Alistair and Michael, three daughters, Jane, Megan and Emily, two foster daughters, Alicia and Laura, and 11 grandchildren.
• David Lomax, television reporter, born 18 May 1938; died 5 September 2014
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