Robert Kee - Telegraph It also scored a notable coup when the Republic of Ireland broadcaster and co-producer RTE screened the last two episodes uncut, despite the fact that they contained statements from organisations banned in that country. Kee's aim was not to spark debate among historians and politicians, but to give a largely ignorant British audience its first detailed insight into the history of Irish politics - especially the issues surrounding sovereignty and identity. Whether success was ever a real possibility is doubtful, as media coverage associated with Ireland quickly reverted to banner headlines with the death of hunger striker Bobby Sands and the restoration of the IRA's bombing campaign in London. But the series won Kee well-deserved accolades, including the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. Robert Kee was born on October 5 1919 in Calcutta, where his father ran a jute business. From Stowe he won an exhibition to read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his tutor was the historian AJP Taylor, of whom he became a great favourite. Uncomfortably for both men, Kee also became a great favourite with Taylor's wife Margaret, who fell passionately and unrestrainedly in love with her husband's handsome young protégé. She harassed him in his lodgings, throwing herself physically at him. Puzzled that Kee seemed increasingly reluctant to come to their house, Taylor discovered his wife's obsession only when, picking up an extension telephone by chance, he heard Kee saying: "You know it is impossible for me to come to the theatre with you. I am sending the tickets back. When Kee left Oxford in 1940 to join the RAF, Mrs Taylor followed him to his camp and he had to warn the guard against her, cowering in the camp until he was certain that she had left. Kee trained as a pilot and in July 1941 he was commissioned and joined No 44 Squadron at Waddington, flying the Hampden bomber against naval targets; these included the port of Brest, where Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were berthed. There were also missions to Germany, but it was clear that the Hampden was too vulnerable for such operations. No 44"s Hampdens were passed to No 420 (RCAF) Squadron, forming at Waddington, and Kee moved with them. No 420 was employed against shipping and on mining operations. On the night of February 18 1942 Kee took off to lay mines off the Frisian Islands. His aircraft was hit by flak at 8,000ft, and he ditched the aircraft off Schiermonnikoog. Two of his crew were killed, but Kee and his navigator were able to release the carrier pigeon carried by bomber crews at the time. Three days later an Army signaller found the exhausted bird at Spurn Head. Strapped to its leg was a message sent by Kee giving his position, but by the time the message was found he and his navigator had been picked up by the German air-sea rescue organisation. They were sent to a PoW camp in Poland, from which he made two unsuccessful attempts to escape. On the second occasion, disguised as a French labourer, he got as far as Cologne before being recaptured. He was repatriated in May 1945, and left the RAF the following February. Kee recounted his experience in two novels, A Crowd is Not Company (1947) and The Impossible Shore (1949), and in the 1980s published two books in which he chronicled the events of the years 1939 and 1945 through compilations of newspaper and radio accounts of the time - without historical hindsight. These included such gems as a 1939 letter from George Bernard Shaw hailing the "joyful news that Hitler is now under the thumb of Stalin whose interest in peace is overwhelming"; an editorial from The Times in 1945 opining that the settlement of the Polish question had been "one of the greatest achievements of the Yalta Conference"; and Harold Nicolson's 1945 judgment of Stalin as "about the most reliable man in Europe." After the war Kee worked for Picture Post from 1948 to 1951, as a special correspondent for The Observer in 1956-57 and for The Sunday Times in 1957-58. In 1957 he was briefly literary editor of The Spectator. He published two more novels - A Sign of the Times (1955) and Broadstrop in Season (1959) - and with a friend, James McGibbon, founded a small publishing imprint, McGibbon and Kee, a modestly successful enterprise which was later sold to the Granada Group. In 1958 Kee joined the BBC to report on the Algerian war for Panorama, helping to set new standards for television reportage. In a series of vivid on-location reports, he gave the viewers a sense of being in the thick of the action. Yet for a man who was capable of devoting so many years of his life to the history of Ireland, Kee's broadcasting career betrayed a surprising restlessness. In 1962 he left the BBC to become one of the founders of a freelance agency, Television Reporters International. When that did not get off the ground, he accepted Jeremy Isaacs's invitation to join Associated Rediffusion's This Week. For the next 14 years he worked on and off for various other independent television companies, most notably, from 1972, as presenter of First Report, ITN's first lunchtime news programme, for which he won the Bafta Richard Dimbleby Award. In 1978 he returned to the BBC to work on the Ireland series. Three years later he replaced David Dimbleby as presenter of Panorama. It may have been Kee's training as a historian that made him uncomfortable with television current affairs. Though he was unsurpassed as a guide, bringing clarity to complex issues, and was a skilful interviewer, he never rushed to judgment. "They're very fond of judgment on television," he observed. The great cliché at the end of a programme is to say 'One thing is certain. But the one thing that is certain is that almost nothing is certain. Thus his time as Panorama anchorman proved short-lived. A year after his appointment he resigned in protest at its controversial programme about the Falklands conflict. Kee maintained that the programme had identified its "own view of the Falklands crisis with that of the minority view it was claiming to look at objectively." In 1983 he became one of the original presenters at the new TV-am, but ended his contract after a boardroom coup replaced its "mission to explain" with a "mission to entertain." From 1984 to 1988 he worked for Channel 4"s Seven Days series. In his book Trial and Error (1986) Kee took up the case of the Guildford Four, who had been given life sentences for the Guildford pub bombings of 1974 in which six people died. The studied moderation of Kee's argument convinced many people of the innocence of the four and began a process which led in 1989, following an extensive inquiry into the original police investigation, to their convictions being quashed by the Court of Appeal. Kee's other books included Munich: The Eleventh Hour (1988) and The Laurel and the Ivy (1984), the story of the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell. He was appointed CBE in 1998. Kee's professional restlessness was mirrored in his private life. His first marriage, to Janetta Woolley, daughter of the Reverend GH Woolley, VC, ended after two years, in 1950. His second marriage, in 1960, to Cynthia Judah, was dissolved in 1989 after he had left her for Kate Trevelyan, 23 years his junior and the daughter of Lord Trevelyan, Britain's former ambassador to Moscow. They married in 1990. He is survived by his wife and by a son and two daughters by his previous marriages. Robert Kee, born October 5 1919, died January 11 2013