My husband, David Arscott, who has died aged 81, was a producer and presenter at BBC Radio Sussex (originally Radio Brighton), in his words the most wonderful job he had ever had. He was a believer in what he called “local Radio 4” – good speech programmes for local audiences – and disliked what he called “pop ’n’ prattle”.

From the mid-1970s to 1991, David interviewed academics, archaeologists, wildlife experts, gardeners – anyone with a good story to tell about Sussex, the county he adopted and took to his heart. When new management emphatically went for “p’n’p” and asked him to “pop it up”, David bowed out of his morning programme with Lulu’s Shout.

Freelance programmes for national Radio 4 followed, but David threw himself into doing more books on Sussex, having already co-authored Hidden Sussex (published in four volumes between 1984 and 1990) under the BBC’s own imprint. He wrote more than 40 titles on the county. Perhaps the most eccentric was Sussex Privies (1998), part of a national series.

David felt local history was undersung, and went about correcting that as much as he could with talks around the county. He would turn up with the briefest of notes, if any, photocopied sheets for his audiences and, very recently, a few PowerPoint slides.

The eldest of three brothers, David was born in Tottenham, north London, to Rose (nee Buckey) and Leslie Arscott, who met at the royal solicitors, Farrer & Co, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Rose was a shorthand typist and Leslie was at first a secretary and later managing clerk. David took his 11-plus a year early and went to Sutton County grammar school, where he was unhappy and did badly.

Aged 16, he got a job working out share yield at Investors’ Chronicle; eventually he was allowed to write short reports and features. After five years he went to the Evening Standard city desk as a financial journalist. His next job, in 1966, was at the Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was a subeditor until his spoken Spanish was good enough for him to become a reporter.

In 1965, he married Pauline La Roche, and they had four children. They returned to the UK after an earthquake in 1967, and David edited the house magazine of Westland Aircraft in Yeovil, Somerset, before working at the Dorset Echo in Weymouth for two years.

In 1971, at the age of 29, he went to Hertford College, Oxford, to study English literature, where he gained a first in his first-year exams. The family moved to Sussex in 1975.

He and I met after his divorce, on a press trip to Tunisia in 1987. We married in 1991 and had three children.

A devoted reader of the Guardian, David noted ruefully that reports of deaths over the age of 75 were rarely accompanied by the cause. He died of a sudden cardiac arrest in the ground of Lewes Priory, sitting on a bench with a view of his much-loved Downs.

David is survived by me, his seven children, 10 grandchildren, and his brother, Andrew.