DID YOU KNOW? Michael Buerk

Back on our screens presenting How The Victorians Built Britain (9pm, Ch5), Michael, 72, has had a long and distinguished career on television and radio…

As a young man, Michael failed an RAF medical because of poor eyesight, and ended up working as a hod carrier on a building site. He soon concluded that ‘physical work wasn’t for me’.

Deciding that journalism sounded

‘trendy and bohemian’, he wrote letters to numerous newspapers, and was invited to the Bromsgrove Messenger in Worcestershire. ‘The interview didn’t really go anywhere until I mentioned that I played cricket; then, the editor gave me a job.’

While working on the South Wales Echo, he shared a house in Cardiff with fellow reporter Sue Lawley.

After becoming a BBC TV reporter in 1973, Michael worked in some of that era’s most newsworthy countries, among them Chile, South Africa, Northern Ireland, El Salvador and the Falklands. In 1984, his powerful reports on the famine in Ethiopia inspired Bob Geldof to start Band Aid.

He read the first BBC news bulletin of the millennium, at 1am GMT on January 1, 2000. He has hosted the Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze since it began in 1990. In 2013, Michael did the voice-over for a Marmite advert that spoofed his long-running series about the UK emergency services, 999 (1992-2003). In 2014, he was the third person to be voted out of the 14th series of

I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!