This is taken from The Independent, Monday, 31 March 2008:

Nigel Acheson has been described by the Radio 4 commissioning editor Andrew Caspari as "simply one of the greatest radio producers of our time". One of his former BBC colleagues, the radio producer Vanessa Harrison, said that "Nigel was one of the most talented radio producers ever". Matt Thompson, his colleague in Loftus Productions, the independent company he formed when he left the BBC in 1996, has described Acheson's programmes as having "a peculiar magic".

Acheson would have smiled gently if he had read these tributes and suggested that perhaps there was an element of exaggeration in them for, as Matt Thompson also said, "Nigel was not a flash person, nor was he a flash producer." But he would have been pleased to be remembered above all as a radio producer. He was dedicated to radio, and always deprecated the suggestion that it is just another form of the media, which all reasonably competent, journalists or producers could turn their hands to. For Acheson, radio was an art form which demanded special skills and particular talents.

After studying Modern Languages at Brasenose College, Oxford, Acheson trained as a teacher at Goldsmiths' College, London, and got a job through the British Council lecturing in English in Rio. On returning to Britain he joined the BBC World Service and made a mark for himself by devising English Language Teaching programmes. It was when he moved to Radio 4 that he really came into his own as a producer.

Acheson had one of the sharpest ears for what makes great radio I have come across in many years of broadcasting. He was often asked to listen to other producers' work in the last stages of production and would suggest two or three apparently slight changes which lifted the programme to a different level. His own programmes were charactised by his wit and sensitive use of sound. Music can all too easily be a sort of optional add-on in radio. Acheson's wide knowledge of music meant it was always appropriate in his programmes.

He was always able to see the funny side of a situation, and nothing ever phased him. He was the last person I would ever have thought of as suitable for the aggressive, competitive, business world. But his company, Loftus Productions, was one of the pioneers of private radio and he was rightly proud of its success. Just two months before he died he was talking enthusiastically about plans to expand his small office in Shepherd's Bush.

Nigel Acheson used to come to India to produce some of the Radio 4 Something Understood programmes I present. We would run through scripts together on the day before we went into the studio and he would mildly suggest places where he felt an idea could be put better. If I disagreed he would let it pass, but very often by the time we got to the studio I realised he was right. In the studio he would nudge me from time to time, suggesting that I could read a link with more, or sometimes less, emphasis. When I was interviewing someone for the programme he would be editing it in his head, and often came up with the one question needed to make the point of the interview absolutely clear.

During those weeks we used to spend together in Delhi I learnt to admire Nigel's skills as a radio producer and to delight in the laconic, but never sarcastic, wit which enriched his programmes. He loved to observe people and then discuss his observations, and he observed by being an excellent listener. One evening in a Delhi bar, an inquisitive lady, a friend of mine, asked him a series of questions about his personal life. Nigel answered each question openly and with a smile. When his inquisitor left I apologised profusely, but he said, "Actually I rather enjoyed it." Many years earlier, when he was in Brazil, he had become a friend of the writer Bruce Chatwin, who found he had to be very careful with Nigel, otherwise he would end up telling him everything. It was in Rio, too, that he met the great love of his life and long-time partner, Fernando Soares.

Nigel's sense of humour didn't desert him when his rare and incurable stomach cancer was diagnosed. In the laconic messages he used to send about his treatment he wrote as though he were observing rather than suffering from the cancer. In one he reported doctors congratulating him for surviving a particularly strong experimental drug which most patients could not tolerate, and went on to suggest that he might be "a footnote in medical history".

His description of the evacuation of the Marsden Hospital when a fire broke out was hilarious. He emerged in a procession headed by a woman patient seated on a portable commode and ended up, as he put it, "making a cameo appearance in my dressing gown on the six o'clock news".

Mark Tully

A radio documentary can be a procession of facts or a piece of music, writes Piers Plowright. The best radio documentary-makers are, in my opinion, composers and Nigel Acheson was a composer par excellence. Thirteen years older than he was, I was already "established" when Nigel arrived in the same feature- and documentary-making department at the BBC in the early 1990s, and yet he it was who did the inspiring. He had a wonderful pair of ears, a fascination with the stories that lie around the ordinary world, and an ability, far beyond mine, to make those stories sing.

As a colleague he was warm, funny, enthusiastic and daring, and the range of his work, from a prize-winning programme about the Holocaust, via a hilarious fly-on-the-wall impression of an annual ventriloquists' conference in the States, a brilliant "thriller" about the duplicity of men, to a touching portrait of three young men "coming out" to their parents, was astonishing. And all done with a wit, compassion and that terrific sense of music which told you immediately you were listening to a Nigel Acheson production.

These were the qualities he brought to a Sony Award-winning series Going Back and to the still-running Radio 4 series linking past with present, Document. But his real love was the extraordinary and the one-off and he left the BBC in 1996 so he could give the time and care to making things like She's Alright, My Mum Is (2004), about young carers, which won the top prize at the Chicago Third Coast Festival, and It's All Down to Ben (also 2004), about a young heroin addict, which scooped the top Spanish radio award, the Premio Ondas.

In Loftus Productions, Nigel Acheson created one of the leading independent radio companies in Britain and, what would have probably pleased him more, a real, happy and creative family. He was, quite simply, one of the radio greats.

Patrick Nigel Acheson, radio producer: born Bridstow, Herefordshire 21 June 1950; staff producer, BBC Radio 1980-96; producer, Loftus Productions 1996-2008; registered civil partnership 2007 with Fernando Soares; died London 28 March 2008.