Nick Ross

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Nick Ross (born in London on 7 August 1947) is a presenter of the BBC TV show Crimewatch UK.

1 Early life
2 Career
3 Away from broadcasting
4 External links

[edit] Early life

Raised in Surrey, south of London, Ross went to Wallington County Grammar School, and then read psychology at Queen's University Belfast. The Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney was one of his lecturers. He graduated with a BA (Hons), later became a Doctor of the University (honoris causa) and he was deputy president of the Student Union and a leader of the student civil rights movement in 1968 and 1969. He started in journalism by reporting on the violence in Belfast for BBC Northern Ireland.

[edit] Career

Nick Ross presented British radio programmes such as the BBC's World at One, PM and The World Tonight, and moved to TV in 1979 as a reporter for Man Alive on BBC2. He made three classic documentaries in a brief stint as a producer: The Biggest Epidemic of Our Times was a powerful polemic on road accidents which was made for Man Alive but transferred to BBC1 and was repeated for many years, and two programmes on drug addiction, The Fix and The Cure, most famous for following an addict called Gina. He presented a law series Out of Court, from which Crimewatch developed (based on a German prototype) in 1984.

Crimewatch made him a household name in the UK and around the same time his celebrity status was enlarged when he presented Britain's first daily breakfast TV programme, Breakfast Time on BBC1, with Frank Bough and Selina Scott. He was poached to start a new 6 p.m. news programme, which proved an unwieldy format but was the BBC's first attempt to unite its news division with current affairs programmers.

In 1989 he was asked to start a phone-in for BBC Radio 4, Call Nick Ross, and he transformed the genre by attracting politicians and others at the centre of news events as well as ordinary listeners so that the programme put callers directly in touch with the people who mattered. He resigned in 1997 for reasons that have never been made clear, but not before picking up an award as best radio presenter of the year.

He was poached to Channel 4 for a time to present A Week in Politics, and then moved to cover the BBC's live broadcasts of parliament in Westminster with Nick Ross. (At one stage in the 1990s he was often doing three mainstream live programmes a day such as Call Nick Ross, Westminster with Nick Ross and Crimewatch.) As one of the star BBC presenters he was used widely in a variety of formats including quizzes, chat shows, travel programmes and debates, but he was most at home in live studios, often orchestrating large-scale debates.

His co-presenter, Jill Dando, was murdered in 1999 and Nick Ross started a campaign to commemorate her, culminating in the establishment of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London. Crimewatch remains the programme for which he is best known.

[edit] Away from broadcasting

He has a large range of outside interests mostly centered on ethics (notably medical ethics), promoting science and evidence-led healthcare, crime prevention, road safety and fire safety, and he has had a role on several government committees and the UK's main bioethics think-tank (the Nuffield Council on Bioethics). Ross is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Society of Medicine, and an Honorary Fellow of University College London. He is president of several charities, a member of the UK Stem Cell Foundation and an Ambassador for the WWF.

He is considered to be in the top rank of chairmen and moderators for corporate and government meetings. His wife, Sarah Caplin is a senior executive with ITV, the British commercial broadcaster. They have three sons.