Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, a familiar face on our TV screens has been the BBC's Nicholas Witchell. He has been the corporation's royal correspondent since 1998, having first joined the BBC in the mid-1970s.
Nicholas, 68, was born in Shropshire and educated at Epsom College. He started his career as a BBC graduate news trainee in 1976 after studying law at Leeds University. From 1979 to 1982, Nicholas was a BBC reporter in Northern Ireland. He worked on major stories such as the assassination of Earl Mountbatten and the IRA hunger strikes.
In 1982, Nicholas became a news reporter for television news and covered the Falklands conflict. The following year, he reported on Margaret Thatcher's General Election campaign before returning to Belfast to become the BBC's Ireland Correspondent.
In 1984, Nicolas was, with Sue Lawley, one of the founding presenters of BBC's Six O'Clock News. He made headlines in 1988, including a Daily Mirror headline which read 'Beeb Man Sits on Lesbian', when he 'sat' on a protestor who had burst into the news studio demonstrating against Clause 28.
From 1989 to 1994, Nicolas was the main presenter of the relaunched Breakfast News and often presented the show live from the scene of major stories in Moscow, Berlin and South Africa. In 1994, he returned to frontline reporting for the BBC, for Panorama and then as a diplomatic correspondent.
Nicholas was the first journalist to confirm the death of Princess Diana on air in the early morning of August 31, 1997. He later covered her funeral at Westminster Abbey for the BBC.
Nicolas hasn't always been in favour with the royal family. On a Swiss skiing trip in Klosters in 2005, a microphone caught the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, remarking about the journalist: "I can't bear that man. I mean, he's so awful, he really is."
Recounting the incident in 2014, Nicholas said: "There has never been an apology, and why should there be? He was probably quite right. You know, awful man. You could take the view it was the best thing that happened to me, because it showed that it is our job as BBC journalists to report fairly and accurately, but not to seek approval. We're not there to be liked."
Nicholas reportedly lives in London with his wife Maria Staples, a former army officer. He is said to have two daughters from a previous relationship with jewellery designer Carolyn Stephenson.
