This is taken from The Guardian:

David Rayvern Allen
BBC music producer and author of books about cricket and music
The Guardian, Sunday 26 October 2014

One day in 1959, David Rayvern Allen, who has died aged 76 of cancer, received two job offers – as the pianist for a six-month cruise of the Caribbean or as a music arranger for BBC television shows. He chose the latter and remained at the corporation until 1993, when he retired as a chief producer.

Along the way he befriended John Arlott, cricket’s great radio commentator and Guardian writer. Outstanding among the more than 40 books that David wrote or contributed to were biographies of Arlott and another of the sport’s leading journalists and broadcasters, EW Swanton.

In 1962-63, David worked on every edition of David Frost’s groundbreaking satirical TV show That Was the Week That Was. On Radio 2 he enjoyed two long stints producing Friday Night Is Music Night, and the musical side of his work ranged from old-style variety shows to opera. He developed his own ideas for radio features and documentaries: for The Movie Moguls (1979) he went to Hollywood to interview figures including Billy Wilder, King Vidor, Dorothy Lamour, Joan Fontaine, Orson Welles and Henry Fonda.

Programmes with the songwriter-entertainer Richard Stilgoe in the 1980s resulted in the incidental satisfaction of three Monte Carlo radio festival prizes and two New York gold awards. In 1991 Who Pays the Piper, about patronage since the dawn of musical time, brought them the Prix Italia.

David’s first collaboration with Arlott was a series that combined his two great interests, cricket and music. It was followed by the book A Song for Cricket (1981), drawing in particular on his collection of Victorian material: with Arlott he shared the collecting bug and a love of the game’s literature and art.

Of Arlott’s voice, David wrote that it was “unmistakable, the Hampshire burr that stood out like a marrow in an orchard of plums among the cut-glass distorted vowels of immediate postwar broadcasting”. He admired the way that Arlott “espoused the cause of the common man with an unabashed liberalism”: on a visit to South Africa “he answered ‘human’ to an immigration officer who inquired as to his race” and became an outspoken opponent of the apartheid regime.

Also staunchly anti-racist, Swanton was more of the plum tendency. Arlott: The Authorised Biography (1993) and Jim: The Life of EW Swanton (2004) each won the Cricket Book of the Year award, and David also wrote cricketing lives of the playwright JM Barrie, Peter Pan and Cricket (1988), and of the Test player and Hollywood movie actor C Aubrey Smith, Sir Aubrey (1982).

David was born in Streatham, south London, the son of Leonard, a civil servant and later a BBC manager, and his wife, Elsie (nee Wright). As a result of the second world war, David was seven before he knew Leonard, who was also a church organist. While at Sir Walter St John’s school, Battersea, David became an accomplished keyboard player himself, and a follower of Surrey, the leading side in 1950s county cricket.

National service in the staff band of the REME (Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) provided the opportunity of external study at Reading University, and lessons with the keyboard player Leslie Pearson helped to equip him for work as a pit pianist, as when he played for rehearsals of West Side Story. He gained external LRAM and LGSM diplomas from the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Other book subjects included wine, bibliography, boxing and London. For many years David provided the annual piece in Wisden’s Almanack on the collecting of cricketana, and he gave after-dinner speeches on behalf of good causes in many countries. It was David’s idea for the MCC to launch an audio archive in 2003, and he took the lead in producing more than 250 interviews with former cricket players, administrators and followers.

At the start of this year David was awarded an honorary DLitt by De Montfort University, Leicester. In June he recalled Arlott’s championing, as a radio producer himself, of the poet Dylan Thomas (both born 100 years ago), in the course of a Test Match Special interview. In September David and the former England captain Mike Brearley talked about Arlott at the Winchester poetry festival.

David married Rosemary (nee Clark) in 1966. She survives him, along with his daughters, Lindsay and Briony, and grandsons, Albie and Jonah.

• David Rayvern Allen, radio producer, musician and writer, born 5 February 1938; died 9 October 2014