Jill Dando murder

Jill Dando

Broadcaster with feel-good factor

Tue 27 Apr 1999 12.56 EDT

The BBC television presenter Jill Dando, who has died aged 38, had a far more than average flair for making other people feel good. To her friends and public alike, she was not pushy, rather more the girl next door. She was an habitual winner of opinion polls on the person you would most like to go on holiday with, or dine with, or live next door to. What compromises she made with vacuous populism were of a quiet, almost self-effacing kind.

Last Sunday she presented the first in what was planned as a series of The Antiques Inspectors for BBC-1. It is a programme in which the camera accompanies a team of antiques experts around in a people-carrier from town to town - as they call on householders who may or may not have interesting antiques to discuss - and Dando was a good choice, sensible and gracious enough to avoid the merely emetic.

She was the female lead on Crimewatch UK, replacing Sue Cook alongside Nick Ross on a programme which went to the core of an audience anxious to help in the fight against crime. She turned the lack of any powerful individuality or oddity - in a medium often insistent on either the pretty or the grotesque - into a positive quality. On the BBC's Holiday programme, she succeeded in transcending a role which some might have turned into that of a gaudy, unofficial public relations officer.

Recently she moved towards a racier image, exemplified in her appearance in black leather on the current Radio Times cover. Last December, after being touted as a possible replacement for Martyn Lewis on the revamped Six O'Clock News, she pulled out of negotiations. There had apparently been divisions in the BBC about whether, in news terms, she was too lightweight.

The news and current affairs department thought she was; discussions were prolonged and Dando realised that serving under conflicting bosses was to risk a very brief career indeed. She concluded that discharging her £500,000 contract with the corporation through other outlets might be more attractive.

Jill Dando was born and grew up in Weston-super-Mare, and in early childhood was the subject of a successful hole-in-the-heart operation. Educated at Worle comprehensive school, her uniform, it was said, was always immaculate. At another school, Broadoak, a sixth-form college, studying for A-levels, she became head girl. Clogs and jeans were the new 'uniform' and Dando adapted just as easily to that, although she recalled that her jeans were always pressed with vertical creases.

As a teenager in the late 1970s, she was even Weston's temporary mayoress. She abandoned her thick spectacles, had her hair waved and joined Western-super-Mare Amateur Dramatic Society. One of her earliest appearances was as a stripper in a farce, Pardon Me, Prime Minister.

Her first contact with the media came through her family. Her father was a compositor on the local paper, the Western Mercury, and her elder brother, Nigel, a reporter on the same paper. She was so keen to get on television that she wrote to Jimmy Savile, then running the Jim'll Fix It children's show.

Aged 17, she applied for a job on the same paper as her father and brother. She was asked to write a 500-word essay, My thoughts on the year 2000. Twenty years later, she recalled thinking at the time that it had been quite well written; but she admitted that the 17-year-old had thought that she would have had a husband and two children by the millennium. The essay got her a job as a reporter, which she held for five years.

It was the start of Dando's route into television. Next came a job on Radio Devon, then with southwest news show Spotlight. Eleven years ago, she moved to London and the BBC's Breakfast News. A cascade of work followed. In the early 1990s, she replaced Anneka Rice on the Holiday programme, and it was four years ago that she joined Nick Ross on Crimewatch. Her future plans included a Panorama two-parter on organ transplants - a reminder of her own operation 35 years ago - and a two-parter on the police.

She and consultant gynaecologist Alan Farthing announced their engagement at the beginning of this year after knowing each other for 15 months. Both had been brought up as Baptists. Dando had just ended a seven-year relationship with the television executive Bob Wheaton. Her mother died in 1986; she is survived by her father.

• Jill Dando, television presenter, born November 9, 1961; died April 26, 1999

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