ARCHIVE: The TV Room
This Saturday BBC Four will devote its entire evening to celebrating the career of Angela Rippon.
From the original Top Gear to Come Dancing through to Rip-Off Britain, her achievements are huge.
But, of course, her greatest achievement is the one which earned her a place in broadcasting history. Angela was the first woman to become established as a network newsreader.
She was not, as some think, the first woman newsreader.
In the early days of ITV, Barbara Mandell presented a lunchtime bulletin which was dropped after a few months.
Then Nan Winton read the BBC News briefly in 1960 but fell victim to the prevailing attitudes of the time.
By the mid-70s, there had been a number of women newsreaders outside London but for network employing a woman was still seen as a gamble.
Angela initially presented the News on 2 and was tried out on the main BBC One bulletins in 1975.
She succeeded and became a regular BBC One newsreader the following year.
If was not by chance that she presented all three bulletins on the day they were relaunched in March 1976.
All this should be seen in the context of the time.
The Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act both became law in 1975.
Margaret Thatcher was the Leader of the Opposition and a woman Prime Minister was a real possibility.
The idea that a woman could not read the news would simply have looked sexist by then even if, undoubtedly, there would have been dinosaurs in the newsroom who did not like the thought.
It took a long time before a rough gender balance was achieved but other women came through the ranks as reporters and newsreaders in the years that followed.
Women were also making their mark in other areas of factual broadcasting around the same time.
In 1975 Sue Lawley was the main presenter of the Tonight programme (the ancestor of Newsnight) before she returned to Nationwide.
Valerie Singleton also demonstrated that she could leave her Blue Peter image behind on Nationwide and, later, The Money Programme although she still appeared occasionally on BP on special occasions.
Meanwhile Barbara Edwards was also making history even if she was billed in Radio Times as the “weatherman”.
So with all this in mind, it seems surprising in hindsight that it was still unusual to hear women network announcers.
Some were tried out on attachment – but mostly filled the daytime shifts, often on BBC Two where they had little to do apart from read the Service Information bulletin and link into Play School.
Reportedly complaints were received when women were heard on the evening shifts:
It is astounding to think of viewers objecting to a woman announcer yet, by implication, accepting a woman newsreader.
It would be sad to think of Presentation listening to such complaints when, it would seem the news and current affairs departments would have dismissed any suggestions that women were unsuitable for high-profile roles.
Let’s face it – reading the Nine o’Clock News or presenting Nationwide was far more important than continuity announcing.
It’s also strange that network presentation appeared to receive complaints about female voices which weren’t simply filed in the bin given the circumstances of the time.
Between 1976 and 1980, the evening network announcer on BBC One was only heard in London and the South East on weeknights. Many regions though employed women with no apparent knockback.
You would also like to imagine that whenever a woman was heard on BBC Two, its viewers would have been less resistant to change.
It was only in the mid-80s that women announcers seemed to start being heard regularly in the evenings on both networks. So far as we are aware, there was little or no public comment.
Today a huge variety of voices are considered suitable for Presentation – a strong accent or what some would consider bad diction are not necessarily barriers, in the name of diversity.
So it is worth reflecting on the fact that there were few women announcers on the BBC networks for many years even while women like Angela Rippon were smashing glass ceilings in much more prominent and important roles.
Acknowledgements
PICTURED: the Noddy set-up in BBC Presentation. COPYRIGHT: BBC.
I often wonder how some people would have responded to Alma Cadzow when she was on network pres in 1974/5 (and is heard on quite a few surviving recordings despite the earliness of the date within the home video era and the briefness of her stay) – not only female, but Scottish. That would have been two red rags at once to the bull of the more Telegraph-reading BBC viewers of the time, especially considering the abortive attempts to introduce devolution. I’m thinking of some of the complaints Susan Rae received when she was on Radio 4 pres a decade later, but of course in that mid-1970s moment a lot of Telegraph-reading types really did feel themselves to be under a massive threat and that, by the time Thatcher turned out to be in her pomp, Britain would have gone Communist, and they tended to watch the BBC because they had a lot of old-school snobbery about ITV driven at least in part by the “old” sort of antisemitism, which used words like “brash” and “vulgar” rather than “imperialist” or “privileged”.