Lorraine Heggessey

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Lorraine Heggessey (born November 16, 1956) is a British television executive, formerly the Controller of BBC One, the UK's oldest and most-watched television channel. She became the first woman to hold this position when she succeeded Peter Salmon in 2000. In this role, she was responsible for co-commissioning (with the various Heads of Department, i.e. News, Drama etc) and scheduling all programmes on the channel, controlling its overall direction and content. This made her one of the most powerful figures in the British television industry.

Heggessey earned an Upper Second Class BA Honours degree in English Language & Literature from Durham University (Collingwood College), before beginning her career in local newspaper journalism. In 1979 she transferred to broadcast journalism, joining BBC News as a trainee. She quickly worked her way up the ladder, becoming Producer of the BBC's flagship current affairs series Panorama. She then jumped ship to the rival ITV network to work on their current affairs series This Week, before joining the independent company Clark Productions and working on the show Hard News for Channel 4.

Returning to the BBC in the early 1990s, she founded the viewers' 'right to reply' programme Biteback and worked extensively in documentaries, becoming Editor of the famous QED series and later Executive Producer of programmes such as Animal Hospital and The Human Body.

In 1997 she became a BBC Head of Department for the first time when she was made Head of Children's Programmes. It was in this role that she first came to greater public attention when she went on-air during the Children's BBC slot to explain to viewers why Richard Bacon, a presenter of the hugely popular long-running magazine show Blue Peter had been sacked for taking drugs. Heggessey was generally praised for both her handling of this incident in particular and the department in general, overseeing something of a resurgence in BBC children's programmes.

In 1999 she was promoted to Director of Programmes and Deputy Chief Executive, responsible for supervising in-house output across all the various genres. She was in this role for little over a year however before she was promoted to Controller of BBC One, a job she occupied until April 2005.

She was criticised in some quarters for changing the identity of the channel, removing the BBC One Clock and the Globe idents which had been used since 1963 (although the Globe theme had already been considerably weakened by the introduction of the previous Balloon idents in 1997, and on-air clocks are now inherently inaccurate because of the variable amount of time taken to encode and transmit digital television to the viewers via terrestrial and satellite transmissions), and replacing them with the much-derided "Rhythm & Movement" ident set intended to promote the BBC's multiculturalism. She also faced criticism for moving the station's flagship current affairs programme Panorama to a late-night slot. However, her controllership also attracted praise, particularly for the channel's portfolio of accessible arts programming, such as Rolf on Art, Imagine... (presented by one of Heggessey's predecessors, Alan Yentob) and the docu-drama Michaelangelo. Heggessey was also responsible for commissioning the revival of the science-fiction series Doctor Who in September 2003. The programme returned in March 2005, shortly before her departure, and immediately became one of the most successful shows of her time at the channel with a debut audience of over ten million viewers.

On 14 February 2005 it was announced that Lorraine Heggessey was to leave the BBC, which she did on April 15. She left to take up the post of Chief Executive at production company talkbackTHAMES.