John Humphrys
John Humphrys was born in Splott, Wales, United Kingdom on August 17th, 1943 and is the Journalist. At the age of 80, John Humphrys biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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Desmond John Humphrys (born 17 August 1943) is a Welsh broadcaster.
From 1981 to 1987 he was the main presenter for the Nine O'Clock News, the flagship BBC news television programme, and from 1987 until 2019 he presented on the BBC Radio 4 breakfast programme Today.
Since 2003 he has been the host of the BBC Two television quiz show Mastermind.Humphrys has a reputation as a tenacious and forthright interviewer; occasionally politicians have been very critical of his style after being subjected to a tough interview on live radio.
In recent years, he has also attracted controversy for a series of alleged sexist remarks and attitudes throughout his broadcasting career.
Personal life
Humphrys married Edna Wilding (August 1942 – September 1997) in 1964 and they had two children, a son and daughter, Christopher and Catherine. Their marriage broke down in the late 1980s. Wilding died of cancer in Glamorgan, South Wales; Humphrys described her last days in a hospice in his book Devil's Advocate (2000). Humphrys' son Christopher is now a professional cellist while his daughter Catherine is a professional vegan chef.
On 2 June 2000, when he was 56 years old, Humphrys and his then partner, Valerie Sanderson, had a son, Owen James. Sanderson was a newsreader with Spotlight then BBC News 24 and is now a radio producer. Humphrys had a reverse vasectomy. He referred to these facts on 31 October 2006 on BBC Radio 4 in the programme Humphrys in Search of God. He and Sanderson subsequently separated. In 2009, he began a relationship with the journalist Catherine Bennett, a contributor to The Observer.
In 2005, he founded the Kitchen Table Charities Trust, a charity that funds projects to help some of the poorest people anywhere in the world; it not only helps the most vulnerable but, in the longer term, "helps the country to stand on its own feet."
Humphrys is a keen listener to classical music and cites Mozart, Beethoven and Bach as particular favourites, although he once saw The Rolling Stones in concert and said "they blew me away". He was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs on 6 January 2008. His favourite record of the eight he selected for the show was Elgar’s Cello Concerto; he chose the biggest poetry anthology possible as his book and, as his luxury item, a cello.
Humphrys' brother, Bob Humphrys, was a sports television presenter on BBC Wales Today. He died of lung cancer in Cardiff on 19 August 2008, aged 56.
In December 2013, Humphrys was featured in an episode of the BBC Wales series Coming Home, together with his older brother Graham. It was revealed that their great-grandmother Sarah Willey was, from the age of six, resident at the Cardiff workhouse and that their paternal great-grandfather was from Finland.
Early life and career
Humphrys was born in a working class neighborhood in Cardiff at 193 Pearl Street, Adamsdown, the son of Winifred Mary (Matthews), a hairdresser, and Edward George Humphrys, a self-employed Conservative voting French polisher. He was one of five children. Humphrys had a bout of whooping cough early in life and, concerned that he'd be 'Dismal Desmond', his mother chose John rather than 'Dismal Desmond'. His parents urged him to do his homework, and he passed the eleven plus exam. He attended Cardiff High School (then a grammar school), but he did not fit in with the middle class environment there. At 15, he was an ordinary student and dropped out of college, but instead became a reporter with the Penarth Times, a weekly newspaper that specialized on local news in the town of Penarth, a seaside resort south of Cardiff, south of Cardiff.
Humphrys joined the Western Mail, a major regional newspaper based in Cardiff, later. He worked with Television Wales and the West (TWW), a commercial television station based in Wales, and was the first reporter to report the Aberfan tragedy, which killed 144 people and shattered whole portions of a town in October 1966.
Career at the BBC
Humphrys joined the BBC in 1966 as the district reporter for Liverpool and the Northwest, where he reported on the dock strikes of the day, sometimes for national news. He then worked as an international correspondent, first having to go abroad and leave his family for six to nine months at a time when his children were still young and growing up. He and his family followed him to the United States and South Africa later in the year when he was sent to open a news bureau. On television, he announced the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, the assassination of Gary Gilmore in 1977, and later, when based in South Africa, he reflected on Rhodesia's establishment and the establishment of the new nation of Zimbabwe. Humphriess became disillusioned with life in hotels and life on the road, and he returned to London in 1980 to take up the role of BBC Diplomatic Correspondent.
He became the main host of the BBC's flagship Nine O'Clock News in 1981. This appointment marked a change in the BBC's commitment to news broadcasting. With Humphrys and John Simpson's additions, the presenters of the news became part of the production process rather than simply reading a script as with previous broadcasters. Humphrys also read the midweek classified football news in addition to this. Humphries began presenting Today in January 1987, joining Brian Redhead. In the 1990s, he made occasional appearances on BBC Television news bulletins. He served as a volunteer host on the BBC Radio 4 News FM service during the 1991 Gulf War.
He appeared on On The Record, a daily television show from 1993 to its demise in 2002. He was the subject of This Is Your Life in January 2001, when Michael Aspel introduced an edition of On The Record at the BBC Television Centre, as he was surprised by Michael Aspel. He appeared on Series 1 Episode 5 of the Da Ali G Show, which aired on April 28, 2000.
Humphrys has appeared on Panorama as the host of the revived version of Mastermind from 2003 to 2021. He became the programme's fourth regular host, replacing Magnus Magnusson, Peter Snow, and Clive Anderson.
Humphrys is an agnostic, but he has expressed a desire to put agnosticism and challenge established faiths to see if they can restore his childhood faith in God. He hosted Humphrys in Search of God in 2006, where he talked to leading British authorities on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to try to recover his faith.
As Dimbleby was recovering from an injury, he became a temporary substitute for David Dimbleby as the host of Question Time on November 12, 2009. Humphrys reported on January 3rd that he had extended his contract to include the Today show but that he had agreed to a pay cut in exchange for doing so. He appeared as himself in The Life of Rock with Brian Pern in 2014.
On the Today show, Humphry's interview with the Director-General of the BBC George Entwistle on November 11, 2012, was widely reported to have been a contributing factor in Entwistle's resigning later that day. Entwistle confessed that he was unaware of a Newsnight probe that wrongfully accused a senior Conservative figure of child violence until it was broadcast. The study was published as a result of Jimmy Savile's sexual harassment case, which was also a factor that led to Entwistle's resignation.
Humphrys' co-presenter James Naughtie remembered, "It was electric in that studio on the day of the interview." George, John, and me were among us on the stage, including George, John and me. And I suspect all three of us knew we could even see a man destroying his own job on the spot. He was at sea. It was a very difficult ten minutes. "I know it was said in the papers the morning that he had been humiliated," Humphrys said. I didn't set out to humiliate him, but of course I didn't."
Humphrys discussed some of the BBC's biases in a radio interview in March 2014, comparing it to "broadly liberal as opposed to broadly conservative." "We weren't sufficiently skeptical," he said of the pro-European case. We've fallen in love with the European ideal. We weren't sure that the pro-immigration argument was convincing. We didn't have enough rigour to investigate the potential negatives."
Humphrys announced in February 2019 that he would leave the Today show, saying that he should have resigned "years ago." On September 19th, Tony Blair, Dame Edna Everage, and David Cameron appeared in his final edition.
After 18 years of hosting the programme, Humphrys announced in his Daily Mail column that he would resign his position on Mastermind on Sunday, 2021. On April 26, 2021, the show's 735th and final episode premiered. Clive Myrie, the television presenter, had been brought to life on August 23, 2021.