The BBC journalist Vivian White, who has died aged 76, was for two decades until his retirement in 2012 one of the most prominent and popular reporters on Panorama, the current affairs flagship created in 1953.
He was widely respected for his skill in making engaging current affairs programmes on issues ranging from rising train fares and the treatment of the elderly to flooding. His range expanded after 9/11 into significant films on British Muslims, Guantánamo Bay and Afghanistan, as well as programmes on Rupert Murdoch, and frequent fast turnaround news specials, as channel controllers exercised more power over current affairs coverage.
For the programme Inside Guantánamo, in 2003, the US military allowed Panorama a supervised visit to the military prison in Cuba, but White and his crew were thrown out after he tried to speak to one of the detainees about their treatment. It was “too much for our hosts”, he said.
His Panorama colleague John Ware described White as “a trouper. There was no side to him, no game playing.” A succession of six Panorama editors came to appreciate how valuable and dependable he was. In the flesh and on screen White was an imposing man – which masked a diffident, shy personality and laconic sense of humour. Standing 6ft 7½in tall, in size 13 shoes, he had a naturally booming voice which worked better on air than at work in an open-plan office. One Panorama editor solved the problem by giving him an office with a door that he could keep shut.
When he was making a programme about the failings of Yorkshire Water, one furious customer he tried to interview started hitting him because she thought he was so posh he must run the company. Early in his broadcasting career, he perfected a stance of standing with legs wide apart and knees together to modify his image of a very tall man clutching a microphone.
“He specialised in domestic politics, that was the heartland of his work, and in social issues,” said George Carey, one of his editors. Carey first spotted White’s potential when he joined the BBC as a trainee in 1971 and was working on a Robin Day nightly interview programme. “I was impressed by his seriousness, his persistence. He clearly had Robin Day’s ear.”
Born in Sutton, Surrey, Vivian was the son of Judith and Henry White, and educated at Highgate school in London and Aiglon college, Switzerland. His father was a War Office civil servant who after the second world war was deployed to Düsseldorf and Paris. Vivian studied economics at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and after graduating worked as a teacher before joining the BBC as a production assistant in 1971. When he left in 1976 the BBC records noted that he was “recommended for re-employment”.
He joined LBC, the first licenced commercial radio station, launched in 1973, signalling the start of Independent Radio News and the expansion of broadcasting. There his talent as an industrial correspondent, scriptwriter and live broadcaster came to the fore.
Simon Albury, then a producer at World in Action, was impressed by his diligent reporting of the 1979 ACTT strike by television staffers that blacked out the nation’s screens for three months. Albury recruited him to join Granada’s thriving hubs of news and current affairs, where he also worked on Granada Tonight and Report Politics during the era of Margaret Thatcher.
In 1986 he was back at the BBC under an expansive contract covering radio and TV, engaged as “reporter, presenter, commentator, interviewer and speaker. Making appearances in studio, on location, written contributions, filmed stories to current affairs programmes, television” just before the rigorous agenda of the BBC deputy director-general John Birt, recruited from LWT, swept in.
By 1989 he was contracted as a Panorama reporter-presenter, covered live political conferences in 1990 and then, after a further contract extension in 1992, was part of the 35-strong Panorama team. It was set a more testing brief of firmly deciding the scope of a programme story before going into production.
White became active in the National Union of Journalists between 2006 and 2009, representing BBC current affairs and documentary staffers, to contest cutbacks, changes to the BBC pension fund, pressure on staffers to go freelance and the growing inequalities in pay. He opted for voluntary redundancy in 2012, telling Ware he would spend the pay-off on fast cars.
He and his second wife, Sue Freestone, a publisher, moved from west London to Wheddon Cross, a village at the highest point of Exmoor, which she loved because it reminded her of the wildness of her native Canada. He became a parish councillor and member of the Exmoor National Park Trust. White had a lifelong love of steam trains and dogs, and it amused his neighbours when this very tall man took his very-close-to-the-ground basset hound Archie for walks.
He is survived by Sue, whom he married in 1989, and her daughter, Sophie, and son, James; and by a daughter, Alice, from his first marriage, in 1981, to Jan Collie, which ended in divorce.
• Vivian White, broadcaster, born 15 October 1946; died 7 March 2023
