Stephen Phillips

Stephen Phillips is a writer, broadcaster, producer and arts consultant who has worked all over the world as a cultural reporter and commentator. He has appeared on all the UK’s terrestrial TV channels - for seven years as Arts Correspondent for Channel Four News - and was a regular presenter of the BBC’s premier radio arts programme Kaleidoscope.

Despite stints as a newspaper or TV news correspondent, the arts have always been a passion. As a founder member of Channel Four he made about 800 film reports on arts, history and archaeology. He was later Head of Arts at Meridian Broadcasting.

The thousands of interviews (some 4,000 broadcast and not many fewer in print) he has conducted have included many of the legends of the arts and entertainment world; Olivier, Gielgud, Burton, O’Toole, Hopkins, Peter Hall, Peter Brook, Trevor Nunn, Jacobi, McKellen, Sharif, Quinn, Kurosawa, Huston, Scorsese, Lumet, Attenborough, Luc-Godard, Deneuve, Moreau, Mitchum, Streisand, Curtis, Moore, Fonteyn, Nureyev, Ulanova, Baryshnikov, Makarova, Assylmuratova, Domingo, Pavarotti, Carreras, Te Kanawa, Bernstein, Rostropovich, Isserlis, Menuhin, Lloyd Webber, The Beatles, Stones, Dire Straits (old friend and colleague of Mark Knopfler), Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Tom Jones, Little Richard, Everly Brothers, (Stephen still has a special fondness for early rock’n’roll!) Louis Armstrong, Basie, Brubeck, Bennett, Mathis, etc.

In politics he has interviewed four British prime ministers several heads of state, a President of Europe and a Secretary General of the UN.

Having worked as a theatre producer, running the Old Vic and Prospect Theatre Company which toured around the world, he has an instinct for spaces and audiences. As a lecturer he is as happy enthusing people about art, architecture and archaeology as diverting them with anecdotes of his travels with camera crews or a company of 50 thespians. He lectures on history and art on several specialist cruise ships, especially in the Mediterranean, Red and Black Seas.

Stephen is an Hon. Fellow of The Royal Institute of British Architects and Vice Chair of its Trust. He teaches an MA in screen and theatre writing at Sussex University. He chairs the Isaac Newton Arts Trust, seeking to convert Britain's largest optical telescope observatory building on the Herstmonceux Castle estate in Sussex, into a French style creation centre.

In recent years, needing time to write and travel, Stephen uprooted his family (wife and 2 teenage daughters) to seek old stones in France where they live in a 17th century former convent school next to an 11th century church on the Dordogne/Charente borders.

Stephen has degrees in History and Classical Archaeology from London and Cambridge and has lectured at universities in the UK, USA and China.

Stephen also chairs conferences and seminars and is a highly skilled conference facilitator and after dinner speaker. He has a wealth of experience hosting events and award ceremonies, both at home and abroad.

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