LONDON — Bryan Magee, a philosopher, writer and broadcaster who sought to bring philosophy to a mass audience in Britain through radio and television, died on Friday in Oxford, England. He was 89.

His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by Henry Hardy, his executor.

A prolific author familiar to readers on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Magee was best known in Britain as a television personality who challenged a popular aversion to programs showing only talking heads. He sought to demonstrate that ideas could be as entertaining as images.

On the television program “Men of Ideas,” broadcast in the late 1970s, he interviewed prominent philosophers of his time, including Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch and Noam Chomsky.

“There is, throughout television, an urge to translate all subject matter into entertainment, and because this militates against the making of serious demands on the viewer, the result is a common refusal to confront the making of difficult things clear as a task to be tackled,” he wrote in the introduction to his book “Men of Ideas” (1979), which was based on the television show.