About Anglia

About Anglia, first broadcast in 1960, is the flagship television news magazine for Anglia Television. Its original presenter was Dick Joice.

The programme was transmitted across the Anglia region which comprised Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Lincolnshire and south and east Yorkshire. From 1 January 1974, Lincolnshire and parts of Yorkshire and North Norfolk were transferred to Yorkshire Television.

About Anglia was given a new modern look in the spring of 1988 when Anglia Television abandoned its original ident, a small silver statue of a knight on horseback.

Two years later, About Anglia was replaced by Anglia News - a dual news service which transmitted two separate programmes, Anglia News East for viewers in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex & parts of Cambridgeshire and Anglia News West for viewers in Northants, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, most of Cambridgeshire & overlap areas of South Lincolnshire.

Both services were produced and broadcast from the main studios at Anglia House in Norwich (long before this practice was rolled out as standard across the ITV regional news services) with reporters based at newsrooms in Cambridge, Ipswich, Chelmsford, Peterborough, Northampton, Milton Keynes and Luton, along with a political base at Westminster. Major cutbacks in 2009 led to the reintroduction of a pan-regional programme (now known as Anglia Tonight) with shorter sub-regional opt outs.

Former presenters

Many About Anglia personalities moved on to make their fame and fortune elsewhere.

• Judy Finnegan came to Anglia in the mid-1970s from Granada Television as a reporter and presenter. She married and settled in Norwich, making her name in 1977 when she gave birth to twin sons and, the following day, proudly showed off the babies on About Anglia. She left to return to Granada as co-host of Granada Reports alongside the late Tony Wilson and later, Richard Madeley. Finnegan and Madeley later became one of the best known husband-and-wife presenting teams in British television from the 1990s.

• Bob Wellings, well known for covering quirky offbeat stories on About Anglia, went on to national TV prominence in 1971 as a presenter of Nationwide, BBC Television’s current affairs series, alongside Michael Barrett, Frank Bough, and Sue Lawley.

• Alastair Yates joined About Anglia in 1987 following a stint with Grampian Television's North Tonight, but left two years later to become the first presenter on Sky News in Britain. In 1995 he joined the BBC to present BBC World and BBC News 24.

Other presenters and journalists who appeared regularly on the programme during its thirty years on air included:

External links

• Final report and end of last About Anglia