The first BBC TV newsreaders were actors or announcers: a decision rooted in the fear that journalists might insert their views into bulletins through swoops of voice or eyebrow. When this tradition was abandoned, reporters and correspondents graduated to the anchor desk in the hope that those who came to the studio from the field would bring authority and knowledge to the coverage.
George Alagiah, who has died aged 67, was the exemplar of someone who had seen first-hand events that they latterly recited from an Autocue. His two decades of news reading – across BBC One’s 1pm, 10pm and 6pm slots, before making the teatime show his own since 2003 – were informed by having reported on Rwandan genocide, civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the democratisation of South Africa, the 9/11 attacks on the US and the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. As the practice developed of the home-based host doing live “two-ways” with colleagues on the frontline, Alagiah was unusually able to conduct these conversations on equal terms.
In addition to the broader perspective brought by his reporting, he also had a totally different background from many of his BBC colleagues. Born in Sri Lanka in 1955, he moved with his family to Ghana, aged six, and ultimately to England, where he attended school in Portsmouth and university at Durham. His three formative cultures were explored in two thoughtful memoirs: A Home From Home: Immigrant Boy to English Man (2006) and A Passage to Africa (2001).
After starting in regional print journalism, when he joined the BBC Alagiah was always going to end up in television rather than on radio. Handsome and athletic, he was a rare example of a British newscaster who could have transferred to an American network without lengthy cosmetic and dental work. Looking as if he had stepped out of a drama series’s casting process for a trusted newsreader, he appeared as one in the drama Silent Witness and the foreign correspondent comedy Taking the Flak. No one gets far in broadcasting without ego and ambition, but Alagiah was better at disguising them than most and was always a pleasant, even gentle, presence on screen.
Although he worked for the BBC during a period when even one of its director generals, Greg Dyke, described the organisation as “hideously white”, and no one of his generation could escape some racism, Alagiah was grateful not to be required to be a role model and pioneer in the way demanded of some politicians and sports performers. He was not the first person of colour to become one of the most recognisable faces in TV news. Sir Trevor McDonald was, for a long time, ITN’s leading newsman and, even among the previous actor-announcer generation, Moira Stuart was a star personality. Alagiah, though, was the first BBC journalist of colour to equal the fame and popularity of McDonald.
Having scrupulously followed the news rules of keeping himself out of the story, he made, across the last nine years of his life, a courageous and important exception. Diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer in 2014, Alagiah reported on his progress through revolutionary life-extending treatments, remissions and recurrences – in articles, podcasts and interviews with BBC News colleagues. His illness having been discovered when he was 58 – and therefore too young for an NHS England screening scheme that starts at 60 – he campaigned to introduce the tests earlier.
In addition to the journalistic expertise from his foreign reporting, he also brought to his work intellectual and cultural depth. He was a long-serving governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, giving the theatre the rare benefit, when staging Shakespeare’s many stories of war or political revolution, of a board member who had seen such things for real. During one of his absences from screen for cancer treatment, Alagiah wrote The Burning Land, a thriller set in South Africa, which, in common with all his work, was elegant, clever, informed and engaging.
Alagiah, being the sort of man he was, would have felt uneasy about becoming a headline himself. But such was his illustrious contribution to news, both in the field and studio, that he fully deserves such coverage, and colleagues will be determined to tell his story as vividly and memorably as he told others.
