VETERAN BROADCASTER ANGELA RIPPON, 79, ON HER CAREER ASCENT, HER TOP BEAUTY BUYS, WHY SHE COULDN’T BE HAPPIER BEING SINGLE, AND HOW STRICTLY CHANGED HER BODY SHAPE.
WORDS: GEMMA CALVERT
I was the first female journalist to read the news. When I started 57 years ago in television, I was the only woman in the regions doing what I was doing, and when I went to London to join the BBC national news [in 1973], I was the only woman in the newsroom. There had been a woman before me; a lady called Nan Winter had read the news back in the 50s and she’d be taken off air after six weeks because the controller apparently told her she didn’t have the gravitas or authority to be a newsreader.
When I started reading the news in 1975, all the press were saying, ‘She’s a woman reading the news!’, and all of that nonsense. It was a novelty, but I proved that a woman could do it and, as a result, many came after. Now I can stand back at this end of my career, seeing behind me all of these women and nobody’s questioning it.
At every stage of broadcasting in front of and behind the cameras, there are women working alongside equal numbers of men. I’m in a profession where I’ve watched that evolve because I’ve been in it for so long.
After my very first broadcast in my first job for BBC Plymouth, my dad said I looked like a rabbit caught in headlights. I’d been working on a newspaper for years; I wasn’t used to doing things in public in that way, and it was terrifying. My father, who was a Royal Marine and an engineer, said to me, “The next time, when you look at the camera, talk to me. Tell me what the story is”. I say to people now, “I’ve been talking to my dad for 50 years”.
The TV-am debacle was really the low point of my career. [Angela was fired two months after launching the breakfast programme in 1983]. One of the controllers at the BBC said, “Angela Rippon will never work for the BBC again” and for a year, the only company that would give me a job was Capital Radio. I sat in for Mike Aspel when he went on holiday. That year, I covered the general election and the budget and I will forever be grateful to Capital because I still had a job. Then, out of the blue came the opportunity to go to America and work for CBS, which I did for a year. I just felt, “I know I can do this”. I went to America and people loved what I d
