Stewart Purvis is a double BAFTA winning TV producer and editor who now narrates and contributes to contemporary history programmes about the events of the 50 years he was in the news media. Everything from the Falklands War to the Miners Strike and the SAS’s storming of the Iranian Embassy in London. Most recently he has been interviewed for a new documentary about Diana, Princess of Wales and the year he spent travelling the world with her. He was also the Executive Producer of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcast in 1997 the year the Princess died. Stewart’s media career began as a local radio reporter, a regional television presenter and a Sunday tabloid freelance while still at University. He was then...
Stewart Purvis is a double BAFTA winning TV producer and editor who now narrates and contributes to contemporary history programmes about the events of the 50 years he was in the news media. Everything from the Falklands War to the Miners Strike and the SAS’s storming of the Iranian Embassy in London. Most recently he has been interviewed for a new documentary about Diana, Princess of Wales and the year he spent travelling the world with her. He was also the Executive Producer of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcast in 1997 the year the Princess died.
Stewart’s media career began as a local radio reporter, a regional television presenter and a Sunday tabloid freelance while still at University. He was then chosen as one of the BBC’s first three News Trainees in 1969.
He moved to ITN in 1972 where he went on to win Royal Television Society awards for news and documentaries, two BAFTA awards as Editor of Channel Four News and also collected a TV Times award and even an ‘Office Building of the Year’ award for ITN’s Norman Foster -designed headquarters in Gray’s Inn Road, London.
He became Editor-in-Chief of ITN and Chief Executive, and also President of the international news channel, EuroNews, based in Lyon, France. He helped to launch EuroNews into Russia as the country’s first international news channel in Russian on terrestrial television.
After Stewart retired from ITN in 2003 he became a Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford University and the first Professor of Television Journalism at City University London. He was on the panel set up by the BBC Governors to report on the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Stewart was also a columnist for the Financial Times and the London Evening Standard.
From 2007 to 2010 he was Ofcom’s Partner for Content and Standards, effectively the regulator of UK broadcast content, responsible for the implementation of the Ofcom Broadcast Code and other broadcasting regulation. He also chaired the UK Government’s Media Literacy Working Group and was one of the founders of the online academic resource Newsfilm Online.
Among the honours and awards he has received, in 2000 he was made a CBE for services to broadcast journalism, in 2005 he was made an Honorary Doctor of Law by Exeter University and in 2009 he received the Royal Television Society’s Gold Medal for an outstanding contribution to television. He has also been a Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications. He was also a non-executive director of Channel 4 and Chairman of the Royal Television Society’s TV Journalism Awards.
His first book, co-written with Jeff Hulbert, When Reporters Cross the Line was based on a BBC radio programme of the same name which he presented. The pair then co-wrote Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone, a biography of the Cambridge spy, published in Autumn 2015.
One of Stewart’s specialisms is the British Royal Family. In 1981 he produced the ITN elements of ITV’s coverage of the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales using pioneering digital effects. When the Prince and Princess took Prince William on their first overseas tour to Australia and New Zealand he travelled with a mobile documentary team sending back six weekly half hour programmes for transmission on Sunday afternoons on ITV. The programmes later won an award from TV Times.
In 1985 the royal couple subsequently granted ITN exclusive access which enabled him to produce ’The Prince and Princess of Wales Talking Personally’ on ITV which was one of the top ten most-watched programmes of 1985 and the two-part documentary ‘In Private, In Public’ which was watched by 18.45 million, putting it into the top five programmes of 1986. In December 1992 he broke the story of the separation of the Prince and Princess on the ITV Lunchtime News, before the announcement later that day by Prime Minister John Major.
During his career he has worked in more than 25 countries and has appeared as an expert witness before every media-related committee in the parliaments of the UK, France and the European Parliament.
In 2022 he presented ‘My Secret Falklands War’ a TV documentary about a propaganda radio station which the British operated to try to help defeat the Argentinian invaders.
Stewart conducts a regular London Walk, The Hampstead Spies – the KGB in NW3 based on his extensive research of the area’s connections with espionage.
