My friend and former work colleague Simon Welfare, who has died aged 78, was a writer and pioneering TV producer whose programmes aimed to make science accessible to all.

Together with the science fiction author Arthur C Clarke and a fellow producer, John Fairley, in 1980 he cooked up the format for the British TV series Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, which examined unexplained phenomena around the globe and became a huge success, with bestselling spin-off books.