Sir Robin Day(1923–2000)
Sir Robin Day, journalist
The Oxford Union president who became one of ITN's first newsreaders in 1955, chaired Question Time for its first decade, and built the modern British televised political interview.
Robin Day was born at Hampstead on 24 October 1923. He served in the Royal Artillery from 1943, was commissioned, and after the war read law at St Edmund Hall, Oxford on a returning-officers' scholarship. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1952 and made his name as a debater at the Oxford Union, taking its presidency in 1950 against the contemporaries who would run British public life for a generation.
He came home from a posting in Washington in 1955 just as commercial television was being set up, and joined Independent Television News as one of its original four newsreaders, on air on the opening night of ITV on 22 September 1955. The founding brief that ITN newsreaders would also be reporters was new, and the four staff working under it invented the on-screen newsreader-reporter role that has been the default form of television news ever since.
The interview that established him was with the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd on ITN in June 1957. Day, thirty-three, used the principle of the bar cross-examination where the convention had been deference, pressing the minister on what he had known and when over Suez. The fifteen-minute interview reset the relationship between government and broadcasting in Britain. He moved to the BBC's Panorama in 1959 and presented it for fifteen years.
In 1979 he took the chair of the new programme Question Time on its launch and held it for ten years, giving the format its sustained-questioning house style across a decade of British political life. His sign-off, that is all we have time for tonight, but we will be back next week, was the most-quoted television line of the British 1980s. He was knighted in 1981.
He continued to chair the BBC's election-night coverage through the 1990s and wrote two volumes of memoirs, Day by Day (1975) and Grand Inquisitor (1989), the second a foundational source on the development of British political interviewing. He died in Westminster on 7 August 2000, seventy-six years old. The Day name, the triple-rooted surname of David, the dairy-servant and the cheerful byname, carries the bow-tied televised cross-examination at the head of post-war British political broadcasting, alongside the screen actor Daniel Day-Lewis as the other twentieth-century head of the name.
Achievements
- ·President of the Oxford Union, 1950
- ·One of the original four ITN newsreaders on the launch of ITV, 22 September 1955
- ·ITN interview with Selwyn Lloyd on Suez, June 1957, the foundational event of modern British political interviewing
- ·Presented Panorama on the BBC, 1959 to 1972
- ·Knight Bachelor, 1981
- ·Inaugural chair of BBC Question Time, 1979 to 1989
- ·Grand Inquisitor memoirs published, 1989
Step Into History
Walk the streets and halls Sir Robin Day knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.