2 hours ago
8
Personable looks and an engaging manner made John Stapleton attractive to producers of populist TV shows. He presented 232 episodes of the BBC consumer action show Watchdog – working with his wife, Lynn Faulds Wood, who died in 2020 – and was a stalwart of cornflakes broadcasting for both main networks in the UK: presenting the BBC’s Breakfast Time and four iterations of ITV daybreak shows, including Good Morning Britain.
But Stapleton, who has died aged 79, was at core a serious and brave reporter. He made films for the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight and for ITV’s World in Action, frequently covering international conflicts, including the 1982 Falklands Conflict and the 2003 Iraq War, for which he won a Royal Television Society prize.
Stapleton was a beneficiary of a period – captured in Michael Frayn’s 1967 novel Towards the End of the Morning – when newspaper reporters and television companies were mutually enraptured with each other. With print credentials from the Oldham Evening Chronicle and then The Daily Sketch in London, Stapleton joined Thames Television, first as a researcher on This Is Your Life and then a reporter for the network’s evening magazine show, Tonight.
Like Michael Parkinson, another Northern newspaper reporter who became a TV star, Stapleton never forgot his journalistic instinct, although, in his first high-profile screen appearances, the audience might not have been aware of them.
He fronted a sexist relic, the Miss United Kingdom contest, in 1976 and 77. This beginning soon proved to be atypical of his career and is likely to have happened because the then 30-year-old presenter – with good looks that remained improbably boyish into old age, due to discipline and genetic luck rather than cosmetic intervention – was one of few reporters who could move among so-called “beauty queens” without shades of a slavering sketch on The Benny Hill Show.
A happier early berth was Nationwide, a more journalistic BBC One ancestor of The One Show, where a mix of hard news (Northern Ireland) and consumer investigations and presenting shifts shaped a broadcasting persona that well fitted breakfast television when it began in Britain in the early 1980s. Watchdog grew up from puppy strands of shopper advocacy on Nationwide and Breakfast News so Stapleton was a natural choice to front it, co-hosting with specialist consumer journalist Faulds Wood, who he had married after first meeting her in a pub near Thames, his first employer.
It is a measure of Stapleton’s presentational reliability that he is one of relatively few broadcasters to have moved easily between the BBC and ITV, where journalistic approaches could be very different. Another tribute to his professionalism is that although ITV kept panicking and changing the format of its morning shows – TV-AM, GMTV, Daybreak, Good Morning Britain – he was involved in each iteration. Always trustworthy as a frontman, he also brought employers an adaptability, rooted in his newspaper training, that meant he could double as a reporter in battle zones and at election counts in the UK or US. As well as negotiating international time-zones, he also moved easily around the television clock, comfortable at breakfast, prime-time or mid-morning, where he hosted ITV’s The Time, The Place from 1991-98.
Though eschewing the on-screen cosiness of some other husband-and-wife presenter couples, Stapleton and Faulds Wood were possibly happier together off-screen than those showier duos.
They suffered much medical misfortune – bowel and skin cancer for her, Parkinson’s disease for him – but, first together and then him alone, commendably brought their reporting skill to these traumas, identifying symptoms, treatments and mitigations that might help others in a medicalised form of consumer journalism. He appeared on one of the few morning shows he never presented – GB News’ The Great British Breakfast – as a guest as recently as last month.
John and Lynn’s son, Nick Stapleton, continues the family business of keeping an eye on businesses family and otherwise in BBC One’s Scam Interceptors, one of the many heirs of a genre his parents did so much to create and grace.
