Sir Robin Day(1923–2000)

Robin Day was born at Hampstead on 24 October 1923, son of Major William Day (a Bicester GPO engineer who had served in the Royal Engineers) and Florence Davies. The family moved out of London during his early childhood; he was schooled at Brentwood School in Essex, joined the Royal Artillery in 1943 on coming out of school, was commissioned, and served through the closing months of the war and the immediate post-war on East African colonial deployment until his demobilisation in 1947. He went up to St Edmund Hall, Oxford on a returning-officers' scholarship to read law, was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1952, and through the same years made his name as a debating speaker at the Oxford Union, taking the Union's presidency in the Hilary term of 1950. The Union years gave him both the technique of the public cross-examination and the people who would run British public life through the next generation: Tony Benn, Jeremy Thorpe, William Rees-Mogg, Keith Joseph were among the speakers he was on platforms against and across through the same eighteen months.

The bar work paid badly. He went to the British Information Services office in Washington in 1953 for two years, then came home in 1955 just as the Television Act of 1954 was setting up the new commercial television network and the news contractor Independent Television News was hiring its first on-air staff. He joined ITN on the start-up at twenty-pound-a-week as one of the original four newsreaders and went on air on the opening night of ITV, 22 September 1955. The brief from the founding editor Aidan Crawley was that ITN newsreaders would also be ITN reporters, in distinction from the BBC's then-current practice of using newsreaders only as announcers; Day, Christopher Chataway, Robin Day's friend Reginald Bosanquet and Lynne Reid Banks were the four staff working under that brief, and they invented through the next year the on-screen role of newsreader-reporter that has been the default form of television news ever since.

The interview that established him was with Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary, on ITN in June 1957. Day was thirty-three. Lloyd had been Foreign Secretary through the Suez crisis the previous autumn and had defended the government's conduct of the crisis from the front bench; the standard British political interview of the period had been conducted on the principle that the interviewer's role was to assist the minister in laying out the government's position. Day used the principle of the bar cross-examination instead. He asked Lloyd, on air, what specifically the Foreign Secretary had known and when about the Anglo-French collusion with Israel that had been the casus belli of Suez. Lloyd was visibly thrown. The interview ran fifteen minutes and reset the relationship between government and broadcasting in Britain. He stood as a Liberal parliamentary candidate at Hereford at the 1959 general election (lost), moved to the BBC's *Panorama* in 1959, presented it for fifteen years to 1972, and in 1979 took the chair of the new programme *Question Time* on its launch.

*Question Time* was the chairmanship he would be remembered for. The programme format (four panellists from across the political spectrum plus a cultural or journalistic figure, taking questions from a live studio audience in a different British town each week, with a chair whose job was to keep the answers on the question and the panellists from talking over each other) had been Lord Hailsham's idea pitched to the BBC in 1978; Day's role was to make the chair work. He held the chair for ten years to 1989, presided over the BBC's coverage of the second and third Thatcher administrations, the Westland affair, the Falklands War, the Brighton bombing, the year of the miners' strike, and the early Lawson Treasury reforms, and gave the programme its sustained-questioning house style. His sign-off line *That is all we have time for tonight, but we will be back next week* was, by his retirement, the most-quoted television catchphrase of the British 1980s. He was knighted in the 1981 New Year Honours.

He retired from *Question Time* in 1989, presented the BBC's general-election panels through the 1990s, and was the chair of the BBC's election-night coverage in 1992 and 1997. He wrote two volumes of memoirs: *Day by Day* (1975) and *Grand Inquisitor* (1989), the second being the foundational source on the post-war development of British political interviewing. He died of cardiac failure at his home in Westminster on 7 August 2000, seventy-six years old. He had been married to Katherine Ainslie from 1965 to her death in 1999, and is buried beside her at Hambleden in Buckinghamshire. The Day name in its English-side catalogue is the triple-etymology surname of David, the dairy-servant, and the cheerful-as-noon byname; he carries the bow-tied televised cross-examination at the head of post-war British political broadcasting, alongside the cobbler-apprentice screen actor Daniel Day-Lewis as the other twentieth-century head of the name.