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Philip Jenkinson launched the TV show that was the precursor to Barry Norman's long-running film review series. Film Preview on BBC1 was a weekly clip show that sampled all the films to be shown on BBC TV in the week ahead. Phil presented it with enthusiasm and expertise. I was the studio director. It then changed its title to Film Review and broadened its base to include new releases in the cinema, and interviews with film-makers. Phil interviewed Joan Crawford, Robert Wise, Julie Andrews, Dirk Bogarde, Robert Vaughn, Ken Russell, Marianne Faithfull and Alfred Hitchcock – who was impressed by Phil's encyclopedic knowledge of his oeuvre.

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Presenter of the BBC's Late Night Line-Up and Film Night, he was a wildly enthusiastic historian of the cinema

The broadcaster, journalist and film collector Philip Jenkinson, who has died aged 76, was for a few years one of the most popular and familiar faces on British television. His ubiquity was such that the Monty Python team saw fit to satirise him as a machine-gunned victim in a spoof on Sam Peckinpah's movies. He was also enrolled into that hall of fame accorded to guests of the Morecambe and Wise show. In a 1977 Christmas special, he and a gaggle of co-presenters, all dressed in sailor suits, performed There Is Nothing Like a Dame.

Such celebrity might not have come his way had he not been noticed, in 1967, by the BBC producer Mike Appleton, who attended a film lecture given by Jenkinson at St Martin's School of Art, in London.