TV champion of the people
AS A crusading “pen and sword” journalist, Lynn Faulds Wood won many hard-fought victories because of her unflinching determination to expose the cheats and wrongdoers in society.
While a newspaper columnist she successfully led a campaign to shut down a live animal market in London’s East End in the 1980s.
A march to Downing Street followed by a Private Member’s Bill helped save thousands of animals from a pitiful existence.
The passion in her prose shone through when she moved into television presenting and reporting. The Glasgow-born campaigner joined TV-am as its consumer champion from 1983 to 1984 then moved to the BBC’s Breakfast Time from 1984 to 1986.
In 1985 she teamed up with Nick Ross to present Watchdog and the public saw her in action fronting up fraudsters, tricksters and company bosses whose products posed a safety risk.
The programme led to many changes in safety regulations and laws to protect the public.
When Ross moved on she was joined on the programme by her husband, popular Nationwide presenter John Stapleton, whom she had married in 1977 after meeting in a pub in Richmond.
They presented the show until 1993. They also presented a successful spin-off aimed at children, warning them about harmful toys and dodgy bikes and teaching them how to safely handle fireworks.
In 2003 her consumer slot Lynn’ll Fix It began on GMTV and in 2006 she teamed up with Esther Rantzen for investigative programme Old Dogs, New Tricks.
In 2016, Faulds Wood turned down an MBE, saying “I would love to have an honour if it didn’t have the word ‘empire’ on the end of it.We don’t have an empire, in my opinion.”
She was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 1991 and launched the Beating Bowel Cancer charity in 1997. In an episode of World In
Action called Bobby Moore And Me, she persuaded Stephanie Moore, widow of the World Cup hero, who died from bowel cancer aged 51, to speak movingly about the disease.
A skin cancer diagnosis led her to chair Action Against Cancer in 2009, examining a European plan to beat cancers.
Faulds Wood died after suffering a stroke. Her husband and their son Nick were by her side.
In a social media tribute her husband wrote: “A wonderful mother to Nick, a loving and hugely supportive wife to me and a campaigning journalist on so many fronts who really made a difference to the world we live in. We’ll miss her always.”