Mike Chaney, his manager at Radio Norfolk and former ly of Bush House and then current affairs group at BH, has asked me to add the following:
Ian had the indispensable journalistic quality of irrepressibility. He was truly an india-rubber ball of a man, constantly on the move, but it was not just energy for its own sake: he always had an accurate eye for a suitable outlet for whatever story he was handling.
He joined the BBC as a teleprinter operator, a skill he had learned in the RAF. But unlike so many doing the dull work of the old Creed room, Ian read the copy that passed through his hands and had the enterprise and nose for news to direct it to the editors and programmes that could make the best use of it.
Because of his lowly entry point into the BBC editorial edifice, he suffered a great deal of sniffy snobbery from "proper" journalists and had to endure endless rebuffs in his inexorable rise up the news tree. But he had (or at least pretended to have) a skin like hide and his obvious talents won him the promotions he deserved.
As a neighbour in Norfolk, and as a family friend, I lament the passing of a true family man: in the Yiddish of his East End background, Ian was mensch - a man you could always rely on.