Desmond Knew He Was Dying, So He Took off His Oxygen Mask, Gave Me a Passionate Kiss and said:'I Adore You'; Esther Rantzen's Testament to the Man Whose Talent Transformed Filmmaking and Whose Love Lit Up Her Life

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Byline: LYNDA LEE-POTTER

ACCLAIMED documentary maker Desmond Wilcox - husband of Esther Rantzen - has died at the age of 69.

Tributes were pouring in last night to the man who revolutionised television filmmaking in the Sixties with his BBC2 Man Alive series.

He put ordinary people on the screen for the first time and persuaded them to talk - often emotionally - about their lives and issues ranging from marriage to child molesting.

He also homed in on subjects other producers might have shrunk from.

Most famously, he told the story of David, a Peruvian baby abandoned after disease had eaten more than half his face away and whose features were rebuilt by a Scottish surgeon.

He made seven films about him which won five international awards.

Wilcox went to Cheltenham Grammar School, where he claimed he was regularly beaten to eradicate his stammer. It left him with an abiding sympathy for people suffering from disabilities. Numerous charities were set up as a result of his films.

At 18, he worked as a deckhand on a cargo ship, but went on to enter journalism on a weekly paper. He later became a reporter and foreign correspondent with the Daily Mirror.

He took the investigative techniques of Fleet Street to television in 1960, joining ITV's This Week. In 1965 he moved to the BBC, becoming head of features in 1972. Former BBC2 Controller Sir David Attenborough …