The film-maker and television producer Peter Adam, who has died aged 90, was described by David Attenborough as “one of the key figures who helped to establish the character of BBC Two during its golden age”. He joined the BBC in 1968 and as a director and producer during the next 22 years made more than 100 documentaries on art and culture.

He had started his career working in the BBC’s current affairs division with James Mossman, the star reporter of Panorama, but when Jim became disenchanted with the sight of Robin Day in his bow tie, Peter followed him to the music and arts department, producing first for Review, the weekly arts magazine programme. At music and arts, Peter walked the corridors of Kensington House in his bottle-green three-piece suits, flamboyant ties and general air of having just stepped off the catwalk of a fashion parade: this endeared him to just about everybody he met.

In spite of the fact that the BBC had marked his security file with a note accusing him of being a communist from East Berlin, Peter worked at the corporation happily and productively until compulsory retirement at the age of 60. His programmes included profiles of Jorge Luis Borges, André Malraux, Herbert von Karajan, Andy Warhol, Richard Strauss and – my personal favourite – the surrealist Man Ray.

In 1987 he wrote a biography of the architect and designer Eileen Gray (revised in 2000), and his two-part documentary film Art in the Third Reich for the Omnibus series won the Bafta for best arts programme in 1990, with a book of the same title following in 1992. His documentaries Spirit of Place: Lawrence Durrell’s Greece (1976) and George Gershwin Remembered (1987) were both nominated for Bafta awards.

Nazi art was a subject Peter was well qualified to discuss. He was born Klaus-Peter in Berlin, of a Jewish father, Walter, and a Protestant mother, Luise (nee Gurke), which meant he was classified as a “Mischling” or “half-Jew” under Nazi racial laws. His father, who was forced to leave his job and then died of lung cancer in 1935, had his children baptised into the Catholic church, which, according to Peter, was better at defending its own than the Protestant version.

He grew up with his twin sister, Renate, in 1930s Berlin, overshadowed by the constant fear of persecution, attending a school where his mother was forced to make small talk with Magda, the wife of Joseph Goebbels. As a Mischling he was not allowed to stay in school beyond 14.

During the second world war he lived between Berlin and Austria, and after it went to the Free University in Berlin, where he performed as an actor in front of Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht, who advised him not to look at the audience when acting. From there, via a career as a “smalltime diplomat”, as he described it, and a spell in the US with an advertising agency, he came to Britain in 1959, where he finally felt at home, joining the BBC in the late 1960s.

How could Peter possibly not look at the audience? He spent his life looking at the interesting people in the world and he was on first-name terms with a lot of them: Jean Cocteau, the composer Hans Werner Henze, David Hockney – these were all people he knew, not just celebrities about whom he made films.

In 1995 he published an autobiography, Not Drowning But Waving. It is a book worth reading, not only for his graphic account of life under Hitler, but also for its unfailing generosity and humour about what Peter really loved – other people.

He was gifted with unfailing optimism and an incurable sense of fun. There was a story current in the department many years ago that Peter had once spent a night with Rock Hudson. Rochelle, as Hudson was called by some, turned up on his doorstep, unannounced. “I have no idea how he got my number,” Peter told a breathless audience of young BBC employees. “I felt like Doris Day.”

In his retirement he divided his time between Britain and France, where in 2013 he married his long-term partner, the actor Facundo Bo. Facundo died in 2016.

• Peter Adam, film-maker and producer, born 3 August 1929; died 28 September 2019