Huws at Ten - but for how much longer?

[Steve Williams]

With regards to "THE most senior television presenting role" I was referring to being effectively the BBC's chief presenter for national events (elections, royal events etc.) rather than as the BBC's senior newsreader. I'm not sure when he officially succeeded Dimbleby, but I'd say it would be fairly quick to leave the position after just four or five years - especially given a fair few major events on the horizon. Apologies if I wasn't clear.

Well, that's true enough, although Huw has been very prominent for many years even before Dimbleby retired, he did William and Kate's wedding and that was a decade ago now, and the Festival of Remembrance for even longer. It's actually probably a bigger role than anyone's had before, because in the past there were specific departments for news, current affairs and events, and they would all have their own presenters - so you'd never get the main newsreaders anchoring the election because that was a current affairs production, and the events department would have their own hosts for things like VE Day and so on (John Tusa did them in the nineties, long after he'd stopped reading the news, as a freelance, as the Head of Events liked him, even though when he left BBC News he'd really slagged off John Birt). It's only now Huw happily works across all of them.

You can't ever predict when these events are going to come either, Alastair Burnet was at the Beeb for about eighteen months in the seventies and managed to cover two General Elections, a Royal Wedding and the resignation of the US President. Indeed you can well imagine that quite a lot of news presenters and reporters might be feeling a bit burnt out given they've probably had about a decade's worth of news in the last few years. You're always at the mercy of events, I remember Jeremy Vine talking about when he was a Political Correspondent in the mid-nineties and he said it was the best time ever to be in that job because the government appeared to be completely falling apart and there were so many fascinating stories. Less so a few years later when it was all boringly professional.

Buerk and Sissons both left in January 2003, in time for the revamp with Huw and Fiona taking over.

Yeah, it was quite big news, albeit the emphasis was on Huw and Fiona taking over rather than Beurk and Sissons retiring, I remember Roger Mosey being interviewed in the Radio Times and saying that when people moved on, the aim was to replace them with people with the same kind of experience as they had when they started.

Sissons used to scare me when I was a little kid - proves how much of a good, authoritative newsreader he was.

Well, maybe, though it's worth remembering that BBC News was incredibly unpopular with the public in the mid-nineties, when Birtism was at its height. There were loads of surveys which suggested the audience thought BBC News was remote and irrelevant, with unsmiling presenters like Sissons sitting in giant sets with ridiculously over the top graphics and theme tunes, shouting the news like it was carved on tablets of stone. John Stapleton was doing Breakfast Time in the early days of Birt and he's said he hated it, he thought the news agenda was all wrong as they did too many foreign and economic stories that the audience weren't interested in. The Day Today didn't have to exaggerate the self-importance of the news in that era too much.

What they've done since is not dumb down but take lessons from ITN at their pomp, where the news is still taken seriously, but presented with a bit more warmth and made a bit more relevant. It's nice to look back on the virtual set of the mid-nineties and marvel at how clever it looks and how impressive it all is, which it was, but at the time it also seemed incredibly forbidding and pompous, and it put viewers off.