Mike Scott was one of the foremost producer-performers in commercial television, one of an elite group at Granada whose other members included Bill Grundy and Michael Parkinson.

His career on the small screen involved extensive work both in front of camera and behind it. In both capacities, he was regarded as exceptionally skilled at presenting complex and superficially unattractive subjects — of all sorts — in a simple and appealing way. Perhaps his finest achievement in this regard was Nuts and Bolts of the Economy, which he presented and produced from 1975 until 1978; though he will probably be better remembered for presenting ITV’s networked morning-discussion programme The Time . . . The Place, in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

His broad experience eventually won him the position of programme controller at Granada — arguably the greatest commercial TV company in the history of the industry. In that capacity, Scott was drawn into skirmishes with the regulator, notably over charges of left-wing bias in progamming, which he denied.

But towards the end of his career Scott returned to active broadcasting with The Time . . . The Place, which moved from one city to another each day; and changed topics at the same rate. Scott co-ordinated discussions involving several experts and a large number of “ordinary” people too. Always full of enthusiasm, he coped with the many demands of the job throughout a first series of 205 shows; and for five additional series after that — not bad for a man who, at the start of his career, was rejected as front man because of his difficulty pronouncing the letter R.

Michael John Scott was born in 1932, the son of Tony Scott, timpanist in a London orchestra, and his wife Pam. He was educated at Latymer Upper School and Clayesmore in Dorset, where he failed all his A levels. “I took the wrong subjects,” he said later.

Called up for National Service in 1951, Scott joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, where he met his future wife, Sylvia, the daughter of an officer. After leaving, in 1953, he found work as a stagehand with the Festival Ballet and also as a film extra, before joining the Rank Organisation in 1955 as a TV production trainee.

At Rank, Scott met Mike and Joyce Wooller, both of them, like him, to achieve eminence at Granada after readily accepting job offers from Denis Forman in 1956. Salaries at Granada were not especially high, but in other respects the company was considerably more attractive than Rank. All three moved together to the North West, and the Scotts and the Woollers remained lifelong friends, sharing houses in Manchester and Portugal and later acquiring adjacent homes in Wiltshire and Kensington.

Granada, which moved into television from cinema, proved itself a hothouse for broadcasting talent. Leading figures whose careers at Granada overlapped with Scott’s included Jeremy Isaacs, later to be founding director-general of Channel 4, and John Birt, later Director-General of the BBC.

Scott joined the company in time for its launch, as a floor manager. Always good-humoured, he was especially suited to that role. Less successful was his stint as cameraman, largely because he had scant visual flair. He also learnt to operate a boom.

In 1957 he became a director. One programme he directed was Coronation Street, then relatively new to the schedules. But again, as Scott later recognised, directing requires a visual strength that he never possessed.

But he was versatile, producing and performing in daily magazine programmes during the early 1960s. As presenter of the local early-evening news programme Scene, Scott was able to inform viewers that President Kennedy had been assassinated — some half an hour before the BBC or ITN got the story out. Understandably, he always looked back on that achievement with pride.

In 1965 Scott took over as presenter of a programme about films and film-makers, Cinema, handing over to Michael Parkinson three years later (Cinema was eventually replaced by the better-known Clapperboard). For five years after that, Scott was executive producer of local programming. Then in 1974 he moved to the flagship current affairs programme World in Action, as interviewer. He also continued to serve as producer-performer on a range of other programmes.