A storyteller until the very end
As the editor of Panorama in the 90s, Steve Hewlett was not afraid of digging out home truths. His biggest scoop was airing ‘‘that’’ interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, in November 1995. About 23 million viewers tuned in to BBC One to watch her declare that ‘‘there were three of us in this marriage’’, referring to Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
Decades later he turned that same journalistic instinct on himself, broadcasting a candid series of interviews about being treated for cancer that gripped listeners to Eddie Mair’s PM programme on Radio 4.
With typical frankness Hewlett said he was determined to record every stage of his illness and ‘‘approached the whole thing with a kind of journalistic head on ... I have never had much trouble talking, after all.’’
His trademark phrase ‘‘to cut a long story short’’ punctuated his no-nonsense, chatty style. When he became editor of Panorama, the flagship programme was ‘‘no longer a must-watch’’, he said. Hewlett was charged with pulling in larger audiences, while keeping the programme’s venerable reputation.
Often accused of going downmarket with ‘‘Diana-rama’’, he insisted: ‘‘Television is entertainment.’’
Privately, he admitted that, in discussions with the TV crew at his house in Shepherds Bush beforehand, he had panicked: ‘‘The minute they left I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach ... I felt that could be career-ending.’’ Instead, it went down in history.
Days later, Hewlett recalled viewing a rough cut of the film with several BBC executives. ‘‘They all had pens and paper and were all writing furiously, then after about 30 seconds, one by one, they stopped writing and their mouths just dropped open.’’
The interview between the princess and Martin Bashir had taken place on Bonfire Night while Hewlett waited at home nervously. He finally had a call from his producer to say it had gone well. They hadn’t been able to telephone earlier because the princess had invited them to drink champagne at Kensington Palace.
He managed to keep the programme secret from the rest of the Panorama team. Hewlett recalled: ‘‘I said we were doing a top secret story about police corruption and that shut them all up.’’
Born Stephen Edward Hewlett in 1958, he was brought up by his adoptive parents, Larry and Vera. They chose him from a home in Birmingham where he lay among rows of other babies. His grandmother had spotted him at once.
‘‘I had the rosiest cheeks and fair curly hair,’’ he said.
He grew up knowing that he had been adopted. ‘‘I don’t know when I was told ... You feel a bit special because someone’s picked you.’’
He attended Harold Malley Boys’ Grammar School in Solihull and then sixth form college, before graduating in 1981 from the University of Manchester with a BSc in liberal studies in science.
When he joined the BBC on a permanent basis, he was vetted by an in-house MI5 spook who placed a Christmas tree on his file, the mark indicating that he was considered potentially subversive.
Arriving at Panorama in 1995 he described his mission: ‘‘I want to get to the point where people say on a Monday, ‘It’s Panorama tonight - I wonder what it’s about this week?’’’
Before he had become editor, he recalled watching an episode that included the secret filming of some nurses, one of whom threw a toddler in a walker across a room.
‘‘It was absolutely horrifying,’’ he said. ‘‘But that was 25 minutes into the programme. I would have put it in the pre-title sequence.’’
TV programmes, he argued, could not be ‘‘a space into which you just throw a lot of facts’’.
His first big story was ‘‘Child B’’ - an 11-year-old girl with leukaemia who was refused treatment. He liked to focus on people. ‘‘Analysis is the bane of the thinking classes,’’ he often said.
On his BBC desk he kept sheafs of documents showing viewing figures for young audiences and different social groups. He felt vindicated when an edition on race in America - the week after the Princess of Wales interview - attracted 3.8 million viewers, about a million more than normal.
Water shortages, the next week, got 5.6 million, more than some BBC dramas. Colleagues often described his ‘‘newsroom approach to life’’. In moments of doubt he insisted: ‘‘Come on, we can make this happen.’’
After he left Panorama, he spent a period troubleshooting as director of programmes at Carlton, before taking over as presenter of Radio 4’s The Media Show.
He lived in London and Hertfordshire and had a relationship with Karole Lange, an artist and teacher with whom he had three sons: Freddy, a musician who now works in advertising; Billy, studying politics; and Bertie, studying film and philosophy. He and Karole parted amicably and remained friends.
Playing cricket with his boys was a pastime that gave him great pleasure - and he turned to umpiring when he became ill. He was also a committed bon viveur who, for many years, included smoking among his bacchanal vices.
He said his first thought when he learnt of his cancer of the oesophagus in March 2016 was, ‘‘OK. My luck has finally run out.’’
He was inundated with emails, post and presents after he began his Eddie Mair interviews and a ‘‘cancer diary’’ in The Observer.
‘‘Hundreds of people are in touch,’’ he said, smiling, joking that his social media following had never been so healthy. One woman even wrote to say she had taken her husband to the doctor because of Hewlett’s broadcasts, and he had been diagnosed with cancer in its early stages.
He discussed researching each drug and clinical trial with the mind of a ‘‘question-asker’’, as well as the moment he had told his sons.
‘‘People say I am brave about cancer, but I am just realistic. I have my moments, of course, when I well up.’’
He took the same phlegmatic approach he had applied to his career: ‘‘In situations where you might be forgiven for panicking because everything’s at stake, I never really felt that.’’
In the last weeks of his illness he told Mair how the Royal Marsden Hospital had helped him to marry his long-term partner, Rachel Crellin, a TV producer, after his consultant had told him, ‘‘If you want to do this marriage thing, I think you should probably do it now’’.
‘‘The whole thing is organised within an hour,’’ he said.
‘‘They got a Chelsea registrar, they got a Chelsea vicar hauled out of a dinner she was in. The staff amazingly produced a wedding cake, the wife of a gent sitting next door offered to help with the cosmetics, the nurses produced bunches of flowers.
‘‘A couple of bottles of prosecco appeared from goodness knows where. And then this ceremony begins. It was like a combination of All Gas and Gaiters and The Vicar of Dibley. The idea that Britain doesn’t have people that really care about other people or go the extra mile when it matters is such nonsense. In this little room here, this was Britain at its best.’’
He remained a tenacious journalist until the end, recording each experience. ‘‘I now realise that is really what I am about. I am a storyteller,’’ he said.
The Times