John Wilson
Angler whose television series drew in millions of viewers and sparked a boom in the tackle industry
JOHN WILSON, who has died aged 75, made angling hugely popular with his enthusiasm for the sport in the long-running Anglia Television series Go Fishing, broadcast from 1986 to 2002; he was voted “The Greatest Angler of All Time” in a 2004 poll by readers of the Angling Times newspaper.
The series – 108 half-hour episodes altogether – featured the bearded and irrepressibly chuckling Wilson waxing lyrical about grayling, roach, dace and bream – or, as one reviewer put it unkindly, “whooping and dancing for joy after pulling some miserable old tench or whatever out of a muddy Norfolk ditch”.
Viewers were introduced to techniques ranging from centre-pin fishing to artificial lure fishing, and from fly fishing to big-game fishing. In its early years the series attracted up to three million viewers who soon became familiar with diving plugs and spinner baits, slider and stret-pegging. Fishing tackle manufacturers credited Go Fishing with sparking a boom in demand for their products.
The son of a bricklayer and grandson of a rag and bone man, John Wilson was born in Enfield, North London, on July 24 1943 and brought up in a high-rise flat with no garden. As a young child he loved visiting his father’s allotment and exploring adjoining streams and brooks where, amid the detritus, he netted newts, toads, sticklebacks and other small fry and had the chance to get his “wellies dirty”. By the age of six he had his first fishing rod and later he began attending meetings of the Enfield Town Angling Society, which organised outings to rivers and lakes around southern England. In the 1955-56 season he won the club’s junior angler award.
Wilson left the Chace Boys’ School, Enfield, aged 15 and became an apprentice hairdresser, trained as a printer, then returned to hairdressing for two years on the P&O cruise ship SS Oronsay. In his early twenties he joined the Merchant Navy, and later settled for three years in Barbados, where he ran a chain of hairdressing salons. Throughout these years he always found time to fish, and in 1971 he returned to Britain, settling in Norwich, where he opened a tackle shop and set about making a name for himself catching specimen fish (large trophy fish), hoping the publicity would bring in customers.
His angling achievements led to invitations to write for local papers and fishing magazines and to the publication of the first of some 40 books, Where to Fish in Norfolk and Suffolk, which is still in print. For many years he wrote a column for the
Sunday Express.
He presented Go Fishing after being spotted by Anglia Television
filmmakers in his shop. Go Fishing was the country’s longest-running angling series, and as travelling round the world in search of exotic species became more popular, Wilson’s programmes and books moved from the humble Wensum and Waveney to more exotic waters, and he began escorting groups of anglers on fishing safaris.
He fished for sturgeon in British Columbia, Nile perch near Uganda’s Murchison Falls, bronze whaler sharks on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, tarpon in the Florida Keys, bonefish and barracuda on the Bahamas flats and peacock bass in Brazil’s Rio Negro. His most impressive catches included a 92lb mahseer in India, a 220lb bigeye tuna in Madeira, a 95lb vundu catfish in Zimbabwe and a huge 300lb giant white sturgeon from Canada’s Fraser River.
In 2003, after the final series of Go
Fishing, Wilson was disappointed when all five terrestrial channels rejected his new series, John Wilson’s
Fishing Safari, which only appeared on the satellite Discovery Channel. “Wherever I go, people ask me when they are going to see me back on terrestrial television,” he said. Fishing Safari was followed by John Wilson’s
Dream Fishing (2008) and Fishing World (2009), all on the Discovery Channel.
In 1982 he bought a house in the village of Lenwade, outside Norwich, where he created a two-acre fishing lake, stocking it with tench, carp, roach, rudd and catfish, and made a wildlife haven in what was previously rough ground. In 2013, however, fed up with British winters, he and his wife Jo upped sticks and moved to southern Thailand, where he bought a seven-acre plot in the middle of the jungle and built a house and four-acre lake, stocking it with 10,000 fish such as barbs, tilapia and many different varieties of catfish.
During the 1990s Wilson had begun warning of the danger to Britain’s natural fisheries that otters and cormorants, both protected species, would eventually pose, and later he became the leading light of the newly formed Predation Action Group, which campaigns to control predators decimating Britain’s fish stocks. He called for an end to the practice of releasing otters into the wild and called for fishery owners to be given the same rights in law as farmers have to kill predators threatening their livestock. In his book My Way (2010), Wilson wrote: “Forget restocking, every Environment Agency employee should be given a shotgun and a couple of hundred cartridges.”
John Wilson was appointed MBE in 2009 for services to angling, and in 2011 became the only British angler to be inducted into the International Game Fishing Association’s Hall of Fame.
Earlier this year the Wilsons announced that they were returning to Norfolk, after deciding they were missing their family too much. But they were still in Thailand when John Wilson died from a cardiac arrest following a stroke at his lakeside home.
He is survived by his wife Jo and by a son and daughter.