the times | Wednesday June 8 2022 51
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There was nothing David Nicholas
liked more than live news events. “I was
the producer for all the Apollo moon
landing missions, oversaw six general
elections with my dear friend, Sir Ala-
stair Burnet, and the Falklands war
stands out for being a huge logistical
nightmare,” he recalled recently.
“Buckingham Palace once asked me to
organise a secret tour around the ITN
studios for a then little-known woman,
who at that time was called Lady Diana
Spencer.”
While he never had to deliver the
news under enemy fire nor became a
celebrity newscaster — such as Anna
Ford, who became News at Ten’s first
female presenter in 1978 — he was one
of the key figures behind the rise of ITN.
Indeed, this amiable Welshman with
his owl-like round face and big glasses
did as much as anyone else to stamp his
personality, authority and values on the
organisation.
Although he was at ITN for 31 years,
having arrived in the days when the
company put out fewer than ten min-
utes of news a day, Nicholas considered
that on his watch there had been only
two stories that truly changed the
world: the Cuban missile crisis of Octo-
ber 1962 and the toppling of the Berlin
wall in November 1989. He was not in
the newsroom on September 11, 2001,
but as a working newsman he identified
a thread that joined all three.
The charismatic Nicholas was always
on the lookout for ideas to help televi-
sion news in what he saw as its mission
to explain. In one early innovation he
adapted a computer program for knit-
ting patterns into the bands of colour
that helped to illustrate the state of the
parties in Peter Snow’s election broad-
casts. He was also responsible for the
“And finally.. .”, segment, a light-heart-
ed, quirky piece that was intended to
leave viewers smiling after their nightly
half-hour barrage of sombre inter-
national news, including on one occa-
sion water-skiing squirrels.
Despite the popularity of News at
Ten, ITN was often leaned on by the
ITV companies wanting space for
longer, peak-time entertainment. Yet
Nicholas was proprietorial about the
10pm slot and gleefully instructed his
reporters to change their pay-off lines
from, for example “Michael Brunson,
ITN” to “Michael Brunson, News at
Ten”, and increasingly the brand be-
came etched in viewers’ minds. Years
later, when the companies prevailed
and the show flitted around the clock, it
became derided by critics as “News at
When” and has since reverted to 10pm.
The ITV companies also put up re-
sistance on other occasions, including
at Christmas 1968 when Nasa’s Apollo 8
was due to return to Earth after orbiting
the moon ten times. “ITN offered to the
ITV network live coverage of the first
splashdown in the Pacific after a trans-
lunar flight,” Nicholas told The Times.
“The network was reluctant to inter-
rupt children’s shows. They suggested a
one-minute newsflash between Pinky
and Perky and Skippy.” Seven months
later his coverage of the moon landing,
which involved hiring David Frost to
add spice to the presentation and
arranging the use of Trafalgar Square
for a celebratory party, turned into a
16-hour broadcast, winning the Royal
Television Society’s silver medal.
There were other triumphs: Home is
the Sailor, about the return of Sir Fran-
cis Chichester’s round-the-world voy-
age on Gypsy Moth in 1967, won a Guild
of Television Producers and Directors
award after Nicholas chartered a yacht
to escort the triumphant sailor home;
the successful battle to televise parlia-
ment in 1989 was won in no small part
because of Nicholas’s persistence; and
his acquisition of a mobile £500,000
satellite dish, the first by any big news
organisation, transformed televisioncoverage of major events in the
mid-1980s.
Nicholas made a point of keeping on
top of the day’s news, chairing meetings
for each of the daily bulletins, quizzing
editors about the lines to be taken and
suggesting a new angle on one story
or a higher priority for another. Most
of all, he hated to miss a story. “I’ll
never bawl you out for a mistake you
make,” he told one newcomer. “It’s the
stories you don’t get that will make
me annoyed.”
David Nicholas was born in Tregar-
on, south Wales, in 1930, the son of
Daniel Nicholas, chief cashier at the
local Barclays Bank, and his wife Eliza-
beth (née Williams); he had two broth-
ers, Windsor and Barry. From his
youngest days he was enthralled byHe lauded 24-hour news,
believing MPs should be
pounced on at any hour
Nicholas always made a point of keeping on top of the day’s news.
Anna Ford, right, became News at Ten’s first female presenter in 1978broadcast news. “I remem-
ber the sombre voice [in
1936] of the BBC announcer
saying ‘The King’s life is
moving peacefully towards
its close’,” he said.
He was raised in Glyn-
neath, educated at Neath
Grammar School and read
English at University Col-
lege of Wales at Aberyst-
wyth, recalling that his
friends found his interest in
journalism “a bit odd”.
His National Service was with the
Royal Army Education Corps in Wake-
field, West Yorkshire, and in 1952, while
still in uniform, he married Juliet
Davies. They had first met at a child-
ren’s birthday party when they were
eight and thereafter sat together on the
school bus. Juliet died in 2013 and he is
survived by their son, James, who for a
time was a television cameraman in
Australia, and their daughter Helen, a
commodities broker in New York.
Nicholas started his journalism
career at the relatively late age of 23 as
an “inkie” on the local Wakefield paper,
a “real one-man band of a newspaper”
which sold largely on the eight columns
a week it carried on Wakefield Trinity’s
rugby league matches. Unfortunately,
the editor had been banned from the
team’s ground after making one tren-
chant comment too many and Nicholas
stepped into the breach. “When I feel
depressed, I thank God I don’t still have
to write eight columns a week on Wake-
field Trinity,” he told The Sunday Times
in 1984, adding that the experienceITN’s editor-in-chief and eventually
chief executive. In the mid-1970s he
also oversaw the start of ITN’s
lunchtime news bulletin, as well as the
launch of Channel 4 News in 1982 and
an increasing number of ITN specials
covering major events including the
budget.
The early 1980s were a somewhat dif-
ficult period for Nicholas, not least
when ITN lost out to TV-am on the
breakfast television franchise, a dis-
appointment compounded by ITN’s
Anna Ford joining the winning con-
sortium. However, he welcomed the
arrival of 24-hour news, believing that
politicians and others in the public eye
should expect to be pounced on night
and day.
No flincher from the glass, after a
successful news bulletin Nicholas could
often be found in the ITN Club. One
colleague remembered fondly that on
such occasions “he was the most con-
vivial of men”. However, he disap-
proved of his reporters getting involved
in the black art of media training or
coaching politicians and others in how
to deflect awkward questions.
Nicholas became chairman of ITN in
1989 but retired in 1991, the same year
as his colleague Sir Alastair Burnet. The
reason for this short spell was clear: his
zest for news went hand-in-hand with
an attitude towards budgets that one
colleague described as “shoot first and
ask questions afterwards”.
A failure properly to monitor the
costs of covering the fall of communism
and an expensive venture
into the London property
market led to significant
redundancies. Further-
more, the ITV companies
preferred greater economy
and even though by then
ITN had a greater turnover
than many of its ultimate
owners, Nicholas now
lacked the appetite, as
another friend put it, “to
tickle up the suits”.
For many years he lived in
Blackheath, southeast
London, spending his week-
ends sailing a small boat or
exploring the North Downs
with a metal detector.
Latterly he lived in Cheshire and
before the first Covid-19 lockdown
would jump in the co-pilot seat to go
flying with his son, sometimes to Hav-
erford West to see his brother, “flying
via my old university at Aberystwyth
and circling over Tregaron”.
For Nicholas the importance of im-
partiality was paramount, even while
maintaining ITN’s “cheeky chappy”
contrast with the BBC’s news pro-
grammes. “It was absolutely essential,
especially in a commercial service,”
he told Alastair Stewart in 2015 in an in-
terview to mark ITN’s 60th anniversary.
“I used to think that impartiality was
a box-office attraction. It wasn’t just a
legal obligation, it was actually a positive
asset to the way we presented the news.
I used to say, if we ever had the chance to
do a one-to-one with God, then we’d
seek a reaction from Satan as well.”Sir David Nicholas, television news
executive, was born on January 25, 1930.
He died on June 4, 2022, aged 92withthein
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was especially grating for a rugby union Latterly
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Moving on, he became a sub-editor
on the Wakefield Express and The York-
shire Post followed by The Daily Tele-
graph and a short stint on The Observer.
He recalled one tyrannical chief-sub
who had missed his calling as a prison
guard on death row: “He used to shout
at the perpetrator of a soft or fuzzy
headline, ‘Boy, there’s nothing like news
for selling a newspaper’.”
In 1960 Nicholas joined ITN, where
since the mid-1950s Geoffrey Cox, the
editor, had built a news operation more
than able to hold its own against the
BBC. He was the producer of the first
News at Ten in July 1967, which was
intended as a 12-week trial. “The first
week was not an awfully good news
week... Most people felt we wouldn’t
last,” he recalled. “By the second week
we began to feel our muscles. And then
we had some fantastic news breaks.”
He succeeded Nigel Ryan as the
show’s editor in 1977, later becomingObituaries
Sir David Nicholas
Charismatic and innovative ITN executive who brought us the moon landings, Anna Ford and the News at Ten’s ‘And finally.. .’ spot
UPPA.CO.UK/AVALONInfantry commander with
a tarnished reputation
Brigadier Tony Wilson
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