Jim Biddulph was one of the most distinctive voices in BBC journalism over the course of more than two decades, starting in the late 1960s. A print journalist by training, Biddulph became a well recognised television broadcaster, a master of the undervalued technique of spare, concise but punchy delivery which allowed the pictures to “do the talking”.

Biddulph’s excellence in his craft — that of radio as well as television scriptwriting — is recognised in a recording of his, taken from an edition of From Our Own Correspondent, which forms part of the corpus of voices held on the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English.

Biddulph’s arrival at the BBC coincided with a great ferment in world affairs and he found himself covering, in rapid succession, the Torrey Canyon disaster off Land’s End, the popular revolt in France in 1968, the deployment of British troops in Northern Ireland, the Biafran war in Nigeria and the upheaval in East Pakistan leading to the creation of Bangladesh.

After this heady introduction, Biddulph found his niche as the BBC correspondent in the Far East when his reporting of the closing stages of the war in Vietnam helped to shape the British public’s understanding of the conflict in South-East Asia.

Biddulph became intoxicated with the Far East and remained based in the region for most of the next quarter of a century. In the process he fell in love with and married a Malaysian colleague with whom he started a second family.

Albert James Biddulph was born in 1930 in Bilston, Staffordshire. With the onset of the Second World War, Biddulph was, in 1940, evacuated as a ten-year-old child to Canada, an experience which gave him a slight Canadian accent, which stayed with him on his return to England. He started his career at the Walsall Echo, then went on to the Surrey Comet before, in 1957, taking a job at the Rhodesia Herald in Salisbury, then the capital of the self-governing British colony of Southern Rhodesia.

In 1958 Biddulph married Marie Wilson and the couple briefly returned to England after the birth of their first child. While in London he worked for the BBC as a freelance, and this led him to return to Rhodesia with his family, taking a position with the Federal Broadcasting Corporation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, later the Rhodesia Broadcasting Corporation.

One of Biddulph’s first assignments was nearly his last. He was sent to cover the war in the Congo, where the mineral-rich Katanga region had declared itself independent in July 1960. In those days before satellite phones, correspondents would take it in turns to undertake the hazardous journey across the border into Zambia with written copy to be telexed and broadcast tapes to be sent to their home media organisations. Biddulph was acting as such a courier when a late passenger in his vehicle turned out to be a minister in the Katanga independence government of Moise Tshombe, who, carrying a suitcase of bearer bonds, ordered the driver not to stop at a United Nations roadblock.

The car was raked with fire killing the minister and seriously injuring Biddulph. Luckily for him, the Swedish UN troops were able to take Biddulph to a nearby field hospital where an Italian neurosurgeon removed several pieces of shrapnel from his head. Later Biddulph would have pieces of his hip removed to replace missing bone fragments in his skull.

After a brief period of convalescence, Biddulph returned to Rhodesia and started working for the African Daily News and as a freelance, again for the BBC, and for several British newspapers. He found it increasingly difficult to operate as tensions increased between the white minority rulers and the British Government, culminating in the UDI declared by the Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith, in 1965.

Biddulph managed to keep the British public informed of developments despite strict censorship and, together with his colleague, Peter Niesewand, developed a musical code for imprisoned black leaders and the names of prison camps. This failed to amuse Smith when the ruse was discovered, and Biddulph was ordered to leave the country.

Back in England, Biddulph was able to call in the debt owed to him by the BBC for his work in Rhodesia and took a staff job with the corporation. He soon found himself on completely unfamiliar territory covering political upheaval in France and the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But he quickly gained the reputation at BBC television news as being a man for a crisis, especially a foreign one.

After spells as a Commonwealth and Diplomatic Correspondent, Biddulph settled on the post which was to define his BBC career: South-East Asia correspondent. Predictably enough he took up the posting at a time of turmoil in the region, with the Vietnam war entering its final stages. Little expecting to stay, he was based in Hong Kong for more than 20 years.

Biddulph was a journalists’ journalist, liked and respected. This was reflected in the fact that in 1986-87 he was the only BBC man to become president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. He had not even put himself forward as a candidate and accepted the nomination only on condition that he took control of the club’s wine list.

By this time the inevitable strains of his professional life had resulted in the break-up of his first marriage. But in 1985, he married his second wife, a Malaysian reporter for Reuters, Rita Gomez, and two years later, in his late fifties, Biddulph became a father again with the birth of their daughter.

After stopping working full-time for the BBC in 1990, Biddulph remained in Hong Kong. He stayed professionally active, producing excoriating newspaper columns and talks on the vagaries of local politics. He also had a weekly slot on Radio and Television Hong Kong (RTHK) and was in demand as an after-dinner speaker.

The family returned to England in 1994 so that Rita could qualify as a lawyer and their daughter go to primary school here. They settled in Kew, West London, where Biddulph, in between tending his garden and enjoying wine and the company of his large family, continued to write book reviews for newspapers in Hong Kong.

He is survived by his second wife, their daughter and the two sons and two daughters of his first marriage.

Jim Biddulph, journalist, was born on May 5, 1930. He died of a heart attack on April 27, 2008, aged 77