JEREMY VINE
Radio 2's Jeremy Vine is an excellent corporate host, very effective at question and answer sessions, chairing debates, seminars and award ceremonies as well as presenting in-house videos.
He is also a wonderful after dinner speaker, both amusing and moving.
Jeremy joined the BBC in 1987 as a News Trainee (coincidentally, on the day John Birt arrived). During the two-year traineeship he worked for TV and radio news programmes, including a stint in Belfast, where he ended up presenting the news some mornings, and later working alongside Joan Bakewell as a researcher on Heart of the Matter.
In 1989 he was given a job as a reporter on R4's Today programme while Brian Redhead was presenter. He went to Tomsk in Siberia to do a piece on an out-of-work ballistics missiles expert, reported from Osijek in Croatia when war broke out in Yugoslavia, around Europe (including a piece on the Mafia scams that were stopping rebuilding after an earthquake in southern Italy) and from the Middle East; covered punishment beatings in Northern Ireland, neo-Nazis in Germany, and sheep racing in Dorset.
Jeremy joined the presenting team of BBC 2's flagship Newsnight in July 1999, working alongside Jeremy Paxman and Kirsty Wark.
He was previously Africa Correspondent based in Johannesburg, where he reported from the border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, from Algiers as the Algerian elections took place, from Mali, Zambia, Zimbabwe (doing a Hard Talk interview for BBC World with Robert Mugabe), Sudan (getting an interview in Khartoum with the leader of the Islamist regime), Angola (the war there), Lesotho (the violence after South African troops went in), Kenya (elections), the Niger Delta (Nigerian villagers' complaints about the work of the oil companies), and Sierra Leone, as well as all over South Africa.
He stood in for Brian Redhead on several occasions. Jeremy also presented PM, and fronted several other daytime programmes on Five Live when needed, including the morning phone-in and the afternoon show.
In 1993 Jeremy was appointed Political Correspondent based at Millbank and worked under Robin Oakley (alongside Huw Edwards, Jon Sopel and Nick Jones - all political correspondents at the time). He covered the Labour transformation and the Tory meltdown. He was the dedicated correspondent for Breakfast News at the party conferences every year and agreed to Jeffrey Archer's challenge to 'race you down the seafront any time' after he broadcast an item on how Tory activists were becoming elderly, but with cameras present for the event Lord Archer sent a message that he was too tired to appear. For the first Labour budget, Jeremy stood in for Peter Snow on the Dimbleby Budget Programme in 1997 - fronting the complicated Snow graphics extravaganza from Stoke. Once a week, Jeremy presented a programme on Five Live called Newstalk, a weekly round-up of accessible politics with guests from all parties. He began standing in on Newsnight in 1996.
The report Jeremy is proudest of was his exclusive for Newsnight in April 1999 on South African police brutality. The fly-on-the-wall film of the Brixton Flying Squad in Johannesburg showed police badly beating up and setting dogs on suspects - including two hijackers injured in a car crash, one of whom died later. The film won the Silver Nymph at Monte Carlo, rocked the police service in South Africa and sparked a fascinating debate, with many South Africans supporting the police's action. Twenty-two officers were suspended, and two convicted as a result of the footage.
Jeremy's From Our Own Correspondent piece on Civilian, a former child soldier he met in Sierra Leone, won the Amnesty International Radio Award in June 2000.
Jeremy was born in Epsom in May 1965. He attended Epsom College and Durham University where he studied English and presented on Metro Radio in the middle of the night. His career in journalism started with a traineeship with the Coventry Evening Telegraph.