GOLDEN AGE OF TV NEWSREADERS
Richard Baker’s death broke the last link in a chain back to a time when TV anchormen were heard but not seen, writes NEIL CLARK
AND here is the news. The death at the age of 93 of the veteran newsreader Richard Baker evokes memories of the days when newscasters had a real air of authority, were always immaculately dressed and never gave any hint as to what they thought of a particular story.
Baker made history when, at 7.30pm on July 5, 1954, he introduced the first BBC Television News bulletin. Not that we saw his face. The BBC felt that newsreaders changing their expression could threaten impartiality. And in those days the BBC took impartiality very seriously.
The first Television News was billed as “an illustrated summary of the news”. It was merely a rerun of radio bulletins, with photographs, maps and newsreels, read out by radio broadcaster John Snagge. It was only in September 1955, when faced with competition from the new kids on the block at ITV, that the BBC had a change of heart and allowed their newsreaders to be visible.
Baker was joined on the rota by Kenneth Kendall and Robert Dougall. They became three of the most familiar faces on television.
Baker, the youngest of the trio, was the son of a plasterer from Willesden, northwest London. He won a place at a grammar school and went to Cambridge University. In the Second World War he worked on the dangerous Arctic convoys, bringing war supplies to the Soviet Union.
He wrote to the BBC in 1950 and was offered a job on the Third Programme, the forerunner of Radio Three. Four years later, when the BBC decided to launch their television news, Baker was the man chosen to present it. However, Kenneth Kendall was the first BBC newsreader we actually saw on screen, in 1955. A public school man who had been born in India, he read modern languages at Oxford. He served in the Army in Normandy in the Second World War and in Palestine. He joined the BBC as a radio announcer in 1948 and never looked back. Always elegant and dapper, he once received an award for best-dressed newsreader.
ROBERT Dougall, the third of the BBC’s “Big Three”, didn’t go to university. He joined the accounts department of the BBC after leaving school but later became an announcer on the BBC Empire Service, the forerunner of the World Service. He read the BBC Television News from 1955 until his retirement on New Year’s Eve 1973. “In television one must talk to people and not at them,” he once said. With his avuncular style he achieved it.
When they started out the first television newsreaders had no autocues or teleprompters so they had to read from sheets of paper. “There were no autocues in those days. Eventually we had teleprompts, which we pedalled under the desk. If we forgot to pedal, the screen story didn’t change,” Kendall once recalled.
Often there were technical hitches but the early newsreaders, who had all seen service in the Second World War, always kept calm. Even when they were reading out emotional stories such as news of bomb attacks in London, the newsreaders kept it cool. Their job was simply to tell you what happened, it was up to viewers to make their own minds up about it.
In the early 1960s the BBC newsreading team was joined by Peter Woods, a former newspaper journalist. He was known for a rather gravelly voice and the big bags under his eyes. In 1976 one of the news bulletins he was reading was faded out after readers rang in to complain that he was slurring his words. Woods denied he had been drinking and the problem was blamed on sinus trouble. Woods read his last bulletin in 1981 and died in 1995, aged 64. Many years later, the BBC broadcaster Justin Webb revealed that Woods was his biological father. He had had an extra-marital affair with Webb’s mother when they had worked on the Daily Mirror together.
Rivalling Woods as the most colourful newsreader of the golden age was the ITN News At Ten anchor Reginald Bosanquet, the son of a England cricketer who was credited with inventing the googly. It was well known that Reggie liked a drink, but although he sometimes struggled with foreign-sounding names, he maintained his professionalism at all times. “Reggie was a dear. I mean, you wouldn’t have chosen a man who had epilepsy, was an alcoholic, had a stroke and wore a toupée to read the news, but the combination was absolute magic,” said Anna Ford, who co-read the news with him in the late 1970s. The thrice-married Bosanquet sadly died of cancer, aged just 51, in 1984.
The first woman to read a television news bulletin was Barbara Mandell on ITN in 1955, but the first to do so regularly on national television was Angela Rippon, who joined the BBC’s newsreading team in 1975.
Rippon was from Plymouth and began her BBC career in local radio at the age of 21. She soon became very popular with viewers and achieved national celebrity status when she appeared on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show in 1976. Emerging from behind her newsreaders desk, dressed in top hat and tails she partnered Eric and Ernie in a high-kicking ballroom sequence to Cole Porter’s Let’s Face The Music and Dance.
It would have been hard to imagine Richard Baker doing the same, but he did join other BBC presenters, including fellow newsreaders Kendall, Dougall and Richard Whitmore in a performance of the song There Is Nothing Like A Dame, on the next Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. While it was all very entertaining, you could argue that this transformation of newsreaders into celebrities marked the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of “the golden age”.
IN THE 1980s the earliest television newsreaders handed the baton to a new generation. Kenneth Kendall read his last bulletin in December 1981, Richard Baker in 1982. That was one year after John Humphrys made his debut. Humphrys had left school at 15 to become a local news reporter in his native Wales. He read the main BBC News bulletins until the 1990s. But by then things were changing fast. The late-20th century newsreaders, while still highly professional, were less formal than their predecessors and often gave away more from their body language and changing expressions about what they thought of a story. And with that, arguably, came a certain loss of authority.
The whole nature of television news was anyway becoming revolutionised, with 24-hour news channels appearing as the new century dawned.
The BBC’s main news bulletins were now very hi-tech with live reports and presenters no longer stuck behind a desk, but often seen standing up and moving around the studio. It was all a far cry from that first broadcast in 1954, when we didn’t even see the presenter’s face.
The phrase “end of an era” is often overused. But it applies when we consider the significance of the passing of Richard Baker.