Stewart Purvis is a double BAFTA winning TV producer and editor, who now narrates and contributes to contemporary radio and television programmes, for all major corporations, about the events of the 50+ years he has worked in news media. Subjects range from Falklands War to the Miners’ Strike and the SAS’s storming of the Iranian Embassy in London. He was also the Executive Producer of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcast in 1997, the year Princess Diana died. Stewart’s media career began as a local radio reporter, a regional television presenter and a Sunday tabloid freelancer 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...
Stewart Purvis is a double BAFTA winning TV producer and editor, who now narrates and contributes to contemporary radio and television programmes, for all major corporations, about the events of the 50+ years he has worked in news media. Subjects range from Falklands War to the Miners’ Strike and the SAS’s storming of the Iranian Embassy in London. He was also the Executive Producer of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcast in 1997, the year Princess Diana died.
Stewart’s media career began as a local radio reporter, a regional television presenter and a Sunday tabloid freelancer 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 collected a TV Times award. He even picked up 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 President of the international news channel, EuroNews, based in Lyon, France. He helped to launch EuroNews in Russia, as the country’s first international news channel on terrestrial television.
After retiring from ITN in 2003, he became a visiting professor of broadcast media at The University of Oxford, and the first professor of television journalism at City University London. He was part of the panel established by 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 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. 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. And, he was made 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 (of which he also presented). The pair then co-wrote Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone, a biography of the Cambridge spy, published in 2015.
One of Stewart’s specialisms is the British Royal Family – he spent a year travelling the world with Princess Diana. 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 couple took Prince William on their first overseas tour to Australia and New Zealand, Stewart travelled with a mobile documentary team sending back six weekly half hour programmes for transmission on Sunday afternoons on ITV. The programmes later won a TV Times award.
In 1985 the royal couple subsequently granted ITN exclusive access, enabling Stewart to produce The Prince and Princess of Wales Talking Personally on ITV, which became one of the top ten most-watched programmes of 1985, and the two-part documentary In Private, In Public, which was watched by 18 million, reaching the top five 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.
Throughout his career, Stewart has worked in more than 25 countries and 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 that the British operated to try to help defeat the Argentinian invaders.
Today, beyond his work in broadcast, Stewart guides regular London walking tours. ‘The Hampstead Spies – the KGB in NW3’ is based on his extensive research of the area’s connections with espionage, and ‘Diana’s Kensington – “the Princess I knew and the places she loved”’ is a more personal journey through the Royal Borough and the Princess’s old haunts.
