Presenter’s Nationwide appeal
Bob Wellings Television presenter BORN APRIL 1, 1934 – DIED MARCH 1, 2022, AGED 87
TELEVISION presenter Bob Wellings helped boost audiences for the BBC’s evening magazine show Nationwide to up to 20 million viewers with his genial, affable style of interviewing.
While fellow presenter Michael Barratt was seen as a no-nonsense Yorkshireman, Wellings teased out irony and humour in the stories and features he covered.
In 1979, he introduced viewers to then barely-known gardener Alan Titchmarsh and he often interviewed big Hollywood stars of the era, including Gregory Peck.
Interviewing Kirk Douglas, he prised an anecdote from the star about how he wound down his car window to ask a young hitchhiker if he wanted a lift, only to be told: “Do you know who you are?”
He sharpened his presenting skills on That’s Life! with Esther Rantzen and George Layton, fighting for consumers who had been ripped off, and amusing viewers with odd-shaped vegetables.
Robert Arthur Wellings was born in Jerusalem to Francis Wellings, the Shropshire-born chief geologist of the Iraq Petroleum Company, and Louise, from Texas.
During the Second World War, the family moved to America, then in 1947 they settled in Amersham in Buckinghamshire.
While studying English at Cambridge, he discovered a love of acting through performing with the Footlights. A succession of jobs followed, including teaching and cartoon-drawing, before he landed his first TV job reporting on About Anglia in 1960.
But his big break came when Nationwide launched in 1969, and he established himself as one of its stalwart presenters until 1980, before the show was axed in 1983.
In 1963 he married Pennie Tennyson, great, great granddaughter of Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. They divorced in 1984.
He died after a fall, and is survived by two daughters and a son.