Richard Lindley
TV reporter, who was the first western journalist to interview Saddam Hussein
RICHARD Lindley, who has died aged 83, made his name as a television news reporter with ITN in the 1960s before moving to the BBC’s Panorama, where for 15 years he filmed dispatches from the world’s trouble spots and briefly took the chair as the programme’s studio host.
During the Falklands crisis in May 1982, Lindley was the anchorman questioning Margaret Thatcher’s defence secretary, John Nott, after British troops stormed ashore at San Carlos to retake the islands.
Credited with an authentic screen presence, albeit “a rather chilly one”, Lindley always looked more at home where the going got rough.
Joining Panorama when it was still a prime-time feature on Monday nights, Lindley soon found his feet as a quick-witted and sure-footed operator.
In 1980, early in the IranIraq war, he was the first western television journalist to interview Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, who readily admitting torturing political opponents.
During his time at ITN, Lindley reported from Vietnam and Cambodia, and from Bangladesh when it emerged as an independent state after the war between India and Pakistan.
In December 1971, Lindley led his film crew out of the football stadium in Dacca where four Pakistani collaborators, bound hand-and-foot, were tortured before being bayoneted.
Two stills photographers remained to capture the killings in horrific images that earned them a Pulitzer prize. Lindley always had his doubts about his decision to walk away with no coverage.
In May 1967 he was dispatched to cover the climax of Francis Chichester’s roundthe-world solo voyage in Gypsy Moth as he approached Land’s End.
Aiming to stymie the BBC, ITN had hired an ocean-going yacht from which Lindley had planned to send live pictures, but when she ran into a gale off the Scilly Isles and began to flood Lindley and crew were taken ashore by lifeboat.
They did finally manage to beat the BBC by transferring their equipment to a Dutch coaster, from which Lindley reported live, with Gypsy Moth bucking the waves in the shot behind him, as Chichester headed towards Plymouth and a hero’s welcome.
Lindley’s expenses claim itemising 300 tons of gravel ballast for the coaster was reckoned among the most bizarre to reach ITN headquarters.
Lindley quit Panorama in 1988 after the BBC publicly criticised his filmed profile of India’s young new prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. He left the BBC within weeks to join the Independent Broadcasting Authority as a television regulator for ITV and Channel 4.
The son of a career soldier, Richard Howard Charles Lindley was born in Winchester on April 25, 1936. After Bedford School and National Service with his father’s regiment, the Royal Hampshires, he won an exhibition to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he read English.
His on-screen debut was in a networked religious magazine programme called Sunday Break. Lindley’s journalistic career began in 1963 when he joined Southern Television as a reporter, presenter and newscaster on the local news programme Day by Day.
A year later he moved to ITN.
Sent abroad later that year despite his lack of experience, Lindley flew to Tristan da Cunha, a British outpost in the South Atlantic, to interview islanders returning from Britain after the volcanic eruption of 1961.
On the way home, he was diverted to the Rhodesian capital Salisbury to cover the declaration of UDI by the prime minister Ian Smith.
In 1972 he moved from news to current affairs, joining the BBC’s flagship Panorama programme as a reporter and presenter, also working on the Saturday Briefing programme.
He remained with Panorama for 15 years before being appointed as a senior programme officer at the Independent Broadcasting Authority, forerunner of Ofcom.
Returning to programme making after only a year, he was invited to become a reporter and presenter for Thames Television’s This Week.
Lindley subsequently rejoined ITN to present its World News and make special reports for News at Ten.
Latterly he formed his own television production company with his second wife, Carole Stone, formerly the producer of Radio 4’s Any Questions?
In the course of his career, Lindley interviewed several presidents, prime ministers, assorted dictators and despots and such varied 20th Century luminaries as the Shah of Iran and The Beatles.
He served as president of the Media Society and chairman of the Voice of the Listener and Viewer organisation.
He married, in 1976, Clare Fehrsen, with whom he had a son and daughter. They divorced in 1986, and he married Carole Stone in 1999. She survives him, with the children of his first marriage.
Richard Lindley died on November 6.