Ian Messiter, who has died aged 79, invented a host of radio panel games and quiz shows. They include the old favourite Just a Minute, which is still running after 30 years. He once said that his preferred epitaph would be simply that he helped to broaden people's minds. He believed that in listening to parlour games people could absorb information without realising they were doing so. At the same time he relished in a sense of fun, including having a working submersible submarine in his front-garden pond.
The origin of Just a Minute was in a sense directly educational. At Sherborne school he was once caught day-dreaming during a lesson on Henry VIII and his wives. The master, who was fond of using the cane, slammed it on a desk beside Messiter's ear and demanded that he talk for two minutes on what he had just been talking about or face the cane. The cane it was. Always kindly, Messiter later saw to it that the panel of Just a Minute talked - without repetition, hesitation or deviation - for half the time that had been expected of him.
David Hatch, the BBC production executive who first brought Just a Minute to the British airwaves, always found Messiter unusual in never being openly critical of his colleagues. Quiet and self-effacing, Messiter might well have given up hope of getting Just a Minute on to radio in Britain if Hatch had not dug his heels in.
The birth of Just a Minute, enlivened by the talents of the deadpan Clement Freud, the ingenious Peter Jones, the stuttering Derek Nimmo, the outlandishly camp highly entertaining Kenneth Williams and Nicholas Parsons as chairman, had a chequered history. It was as far back as 1949 that Messiter, then a junior producer for BBC radio, first suggested the idea of a programme called One Minute Please (with the actress Valerie Hobson, later the wife of John Profumo, and the testy Gilbert Harding). It did not find favour. Joining the BBC as a recording programme assistant, he had earlier worked on ITMA with the cult comedian Tommy Handley, and - more in his line - Twenty Questions.
Messiter left the BBC in 1952 to join a commercial station in Johannesburg, and it was there that Just a Minute was broadcast for the first time. When he returned to Britain two years later, the BBC did not want to buy the format or broadcast the show, so Messiter sold it to the Dumont television station in the US. It was the first British game show seen in America, was nationally networked and attracted many US celebrities.
The reaction of the BBC was to claim the rights and the fees for itself because Messiter had been working for them when he had conceived the idea. They gave him a consolation prize of £100, which he gave to charity. The measure of Messiter's unusual good nature was that this did not sour his relations with the BBC.
In 1968, Just a Minute was first broadcast in Britain, and became the BBC's longest-running gameshow. Messiter also worked on Many a Slip, in which the panel were asked to spot mistakes in bits of prose, and Fair Deal, with the conjuror David Nixon, later superseded by Paul Daniels. Among his other creations were Lucky 13, Leave Your Name and Number, and False Evidence.
The flirtation with conjuring came from his early years. The son of a doctor in Dudley, in the west Midlands, Messiter joined the army when war broke out but was invalided out and horrified his parents by becoming a conjuror. It was a great relief to them when he joined the "respectable" BBC, albeit as a humble production assistant on Alistair Cooke's Junior Bridge Builders programme.
Apart from game shows, Messiter wrote several plays for the BBC, including Mr Drake's Duck, a comedy which was filmed in 1950 with Douglas Fairbanks Jnr as the star.
Messiter is survived by his wife Enid Senior, and a son and daughter.