IN A distinguished career at the BBC Michael Gill produced some of the most influential documentaries made for television. His landmark productions included Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), hailed the “best TV series ever made”; Alistair Cooke’s America (1972), which earned critical and popular recognition on both sides of the Atlantic; and Royal Heritage (1977). The last named, made to mark the Queen’s Jubilee and featuring her and her immediate family as presenters — achieved the highest ratings of any BBC production.

George Michael Gill was born in Winchester in 1923. His father, the manager of a branch of the Midland Bank in the city, came from a family of mill workers and he had won a scholarship to grammar school and married a mill owner’s daughter. Michael Gill’s childhood was plagued by chronic ill-health — he was bedridden for a lengthy period by tuberculosis — and he was bullied at Wootton Court prep school and St Edmund’s School, Canterbury.

He had hoped to study medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London, but deferred his place in 1940 in order to join the RAF. His first application was rejected because he was not fit enough, but — after six months as a reporter on the Kentish Gazette — his second application was successful.

After basic training Gill was commissioned into the RAF Intelligence Branch. If his early experience of military life left him with an impression of petty rules and hypocrisy, later experiences, particularly when he was an observer attached to a tactical bomber squadron flying missions over Normandy, the Low Countries and Germany in the last months of the war, left him with deeper, more troubling memories.

After the war he decided against medicine. Wishing to commit himself more directly to the promise of “never again”, he went to Edinburgh University to read psychology and philosophy — two disciplines which, according to his son, the journalist A. A. Gill, ran “through him all the time”.

Michael Gill described himself a “doctrinaire socialist” and as he established himself in his career — after a short stints as a journalist at The Scotsman and The Observer, he became a radio producer at the BBC in 1954 — his principles became manifest in his life and work.

He claimed that he and his wife, the actress Yvonne Gilan, whom he had met at university and married in 1951, “were deliberately setting a different standard”. They were open about their affairs, uninterested in money and did not put their sons through the traditional, public-school education that Gill had so hated.

Gill’s approach in his work was similarly modern. As an arts producer for BBC television — he had moved from radio in 1958 — he made scores of programmes on individual artists. These included the first educational art series for adults, Giacometti, with the art critic David Sylvester, in 1966.

The art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, a former director of the National Gallery and a conservative Establishment figure, came round to the idea of working with the left-wing, radical-thinking Gill — both had been initially suspicious of each other — when he saw a programme Gill had made on Francis Bacon. This production had adopted innovative, “staccato” cutting to reflect the unsettling nature of its subject’s painting.

When the BBC’s switched to broadcasting in colour, David Attenborough, then Controller, thought a grand series on art would be appropriate. The result was Civilisation, which won large audiencs and critical acclaim. Clark was awarded a peerage for his work on the series.

It was Gill, however, who devised the “authored documentary” format, in which the camera followed the narrator as he visited the great artistic landmarks of the world and explained their significance to the viewer.

Initially Clark had greeted Gill’s suggestion with some hostility — he had assumed that he was to describe the great monuments of western art from a desk in the studio — but Gill persuaded him to go along with the daringly novel approach.

Civilisation was followed by the 13-part series, America (1972), presented by Alistair Cooke. Subtitled “A Personal History of the United States”, this series naturally capitalised on Cooke’s close familiarity with the US and the popularity of his radio programme, Letter from America, which had already been going strong since 1946.

In 1977, after more than two fruitful decades with the BBC — during which he had produced the first films to be made independently in China since the Cultural Revolution and had struck up cordial relations with the Queen — Gill decided to work independently.

With his friend and colleague Adrian Malone, who had produced, with Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (1969), the BBC’s hugely successful scientific counterpart to Civilisation, he set up an independent production company in the US, Malone Gill.

They moved to Philadelphia — Gill with his new wife, Georgina Denison, whom he married in 1978 — hoping to foster the same high standard of programme making that they were accustomed to in the UK. However, although all their passions had been fuelled by talk of ambitious projects which would make PBS a “Bauhaus” of cultural excellence, as Malone put it, after a year Gill and Denison drifted back to the UK for good. Gill wished to make a programme about the sea, and to use Britain, the great sailing nation, as a base, seemed far more sensible.

For the next couple of decades Gill continued to make programmes for Gill Malone — he kept the name, even though Malone eventually set up on his own in the US.

Later works included Vintage: A History of Wine by Hugh Johnson (1991), The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (1992) — conceived and made in both English and Spanish, and Highlander (1995), a docudrama on Bonnie Prince Billy, written by Fitzroy Maclean and narrated by Sean Connery.

In all, Gill made more than 150 films for television and cinema and won more than 40 major international awards, including four Emmy and three Peabody awards.

Gill also published one book The Image of the Body (1990), which drew comparisons with Kenneth Clark’s seminal study, The Nude (1956). He had begun to work on his memoirs, Growing into War, but the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, diagnosed in 2000, made progress with the work increasingly difficult. However, they were completed with the help of his wife, and are due to be published on Tuesday by Sutton Publishing.

From his first marriage he is survived by his son, A. A. Gill; a second son, Nicholas, a chef, disappeared in 1998. His second wife, Georgina Denison, and their daughter also survive him.

Michael Gill, producer, was born on December 10, 1923. He died on October 20, 2005, aged 81.