Bernard Queenan

His studies were interrupted by the Second World War, and his flair for languages took him into the Royal Corps of Signals and to the rank of major during the Burma campaign.

He ended the war in charge of a quarter of Rangoon, with the responsibility to restore civilian rule after Japanese occupation and to get British troops back to the UK on the first ships available.

After the war, Queenan taught at Glasgow's St Gerard's Secondary and then, after postgraduate studies in psychology, joined Lanarkshire Child Guidance Service. He was then recruited by the Nuffield Foundation and worked with the film-maker John Grierson, the so-called father of documentaries, as a researcher for This Wonderful World and similar programmes that Scottish Television commissioned in its early years.

Since he was fluent in both Portuguese and Spanish, he was sent to Brazil and neighbouring countries to train students in the early use of audio-visual education. He was then invited to Chile by the doomed President Allende and was unfortunate enough to have been in the country in 1973 when General Pinochet launched his bloody military coup. His politics, forged first of all in Irish nationalism, identified him as being on the wrong side and he was lucky to escape to Canada.

There he met up with old Scots friends and found a post in audio-visual studies in the Jesuit Loyola College in Montreal. When the college became part of Concordia University, he was appointed director of the audio-visual department, where he trained a generation of grateful students at the beginning of the electronic revolution.

Nobody could have been more at home in polyglot Montreal than Queenan. A life-long bachelor, he chose a different language restaurant each evening for dinner. Shortly before his death he collaborated with an Indian colleague on a book where his familiarity with Sanskrit was acknowledged.

An annual challenge was the worldwide Nemo competition of elusive literary references which he won in 2005. With all this, he was modest to a fault.

He was buried in Our Lady of the Snows in Montreal and leaves behind in Glasgow his sisters, Molly and Angela, whom he regularly visited from Canada when catching up with former colleagues.

Appreciation by Matt Spicer I e-mailed Ben Queenan a few weeks ago to say that my wife and I were looking forward to seeing him in Montreal in June. He replied by letter in a sloping, spidery hand, so unlike his normal immaculate script that it was clear he was very ill. He died a few days later and we were denied one more meeting with this most engaging man.

He and I first became friends when we both worked at STV briefly in the early 1960s. Thereafter, we met infrequently, most often on his trips back to Glasgow, as he moved gracefully and influentially through the world of educational television. I treasured these meetings. Ben had a breadth of intellect and a depth of knowledge that made conversation with him endlessly enthralling. Teacher, scholar, soldier, linguist, psychologist, film-maker, author; he could have made a successful career in many things and many places. Yet he was endearingly modest and disarmingly passionate about other people, their views and careers.

He was generous with his knowledge and know-how. I told him once that I had an idea for a television programme about feature films which involved Scotland in location, story, character or cast. Fifteen minutes later when he stopped talking, I had enough titles for several series.

The last time he visited, he admired the posters of medieval art we have in one part of our house. We admitted we were looking for something from the same period for a bathroom door that indicated "toilette". Within days of his return to Canada, he had found, sourced and despatched exactly the illustration we needed. "Now," he joked, "you'll remember me regularly."