Jan Leeming: I hate the histrionics of today’s news
SHE was the trusted face of BBC News in the 1980s. But you won’t catch Jan Leeming hanging on the every word of today’s presenters.
At 74, she can’t bear to watch TV news because she finds the ‘arm-waving and histrionics’ of her successors too irritating.
Instead, she prefers to pick up the headlines by listening to bulletins on Classic FM.
She also lamented the tendency to throw female newsreaders ‘on the scrapheap’ when they get to a certain age, despite their experience.
Miss Leeming, who left the BBC in 1987, said she approves of Channel 4’s Jon Snow, who ‘enunciates properly’ and of ITV’s new anchor Tom Bradby, who has ‘a pleasant manner’.
But she does not like the voice of BBC’s Huw Edwards and claims she has never seen Fiona Bruce read the news. Miss Leeming said: ‘Most TV news irritates me. It’s become a sort of docudrama. I was in television when it had standards. Call me an old fogey, but in my day we’d have got through, say, 15 stories in a major bulletin, but without all the arm-waving and histrionics.’
She also agrees with Sian Williams, 51, who now presents Channel 5 news, that there are too few older women fronting current affairs.
‘It’s unfair and it always has been,’ said Miss Leeming, who stopped presenting in her mid-40s. ‘Get to a certain age here, as a woman, and you’re thrown on the scrapheap. I don’t understand it. We’re an ageing population; not everyone wants to see nubile young women. Anna Ford, Angela Rippon and I have had 50 years or more of TV experience. Why aren’t we reading the news?’
After five failed marriages and losing a fiance in a car crash, Miss Leeming has been single for 12 years. ‘I never thought I’d end up on my own,’ she said. ‘Sometimes [I do get lonely]. I’ve done internet dating, I make no bones about it. But as soon as men look me up on Wikipedia, they’re off. Well, look at my track record.’
Miss Leeming will next week appear in a threepart reality-style BBC2 show, The Real Marigold Hotel, which sees eight celebrity pensioners spend three weeks in India to see if they could retire there.
She told the Sunday Telegraph that producers tried to set her up with comedian Roy Walker but insisted that ‘it was never going to happen’. The show starts on January 26 on BBC2.