Charles Campion, a long-standing critic on MasterChef, has died.

The food journalist - a contributor to the Evening Standard, The Times and The Independent over his career - is said to have died on December 23 of unknown causes.

Over the years Campion made numerous appearances on the regular, professional and celebrity editions of MasterChef and regularly set the special star-ingredient challenges.

Fellow critic Jay Rayner wrote on social media: "Charles Campion was a great and lovely man, with a brilliantly droll sense of humour. And boy he knew his subject.

"I held my breath when he was at the @MasterChefUK table to find out whether I'd screwed up a point of detail and he was gently going to put me right. A great loss."

In an affectionate tribute on Instagram, William Sitwell wrote: "He was a lovely man who I got to know well over the years, particularly while filming countless episodes of MasterChef. For which I'll mainly remember him constantly bemoaning the lack of chips or potatoes on a plate, his loathing of things like micro-herbs; he'd pick up a delicate, miniscule head of baby coriander and study it with understandable bemusement, and his genuine, heartfelt and absolute adoration of sitting down.

"We did sometimes wonder when he lowered himself gently down into a sofa in the green room and then exerted a little pleasurable moan, whether we'd manage to get him up back again in time for filming.

"Of all the critics I have ever known he was surely the definitive, professional eater. I remember him leaving the set one day, bound for Australia where he would, for five days, diligently, seriously and with great care, attention and pleasure eat; breakfast, lunch, tea, nibbles, dinner and doubtless a few more meals in between."

He added: "Charles, I'll see you in that little place in the sky where you'll be happy in the corner; a large napkin around your neck, an enviable appetite, unflappable as you set about devouring a gargantuan feast. How lucky were those that knew and fed you."

Campion is survived by wife Sylvia and children Geoffrey and Ashley.