Mark Lawson | |
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 Lawson in 2013 | |
| Born | Mark Gerard Lawson Hendon, London, England |
| Occupation | Journalist, broadcaster, author |
| Nationality | British |
Mark Gerard Lawson [1] is an English journalist, broadcaster and author. Specialising in culture and the arts, he is best known for presenting the flagship BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row between 1998 and 2014. [2] He is also a Guardian columnist, and presented Mark Lawson Talks To... on BBC Four from 2006 to 2015.
Born in Hendon, north London, [3] Lawson was raised in Leeds, where his father was a marketing director for the Civil Service and British Telecom. [3] Both of his parents originated from the northeast of England. [4]
He was brought up a Catholic, [5] and was educated at the independent Catholic school St Columba's College in St Albans. He then took a degree in English at University College London, where his lecturers included John Sutherland and A. S. Byatt.
Lawson became a freelance contributor to numerous publications in 1984, beginning on The Universe in that year, and for The Times from 1984 to 1986. He has written a column for The Guardian since 1995, having previously written for The Independent (1986–95), and has twice been TV Critic of the Year, as well as winning many other journalism awards. However, Richard Gott, a former colleague, commented in 2002 that the "prevalence of the bland and the obsequious" on The Guardian is typified by Lawson's "embedded presence". [6]
Lawson presented The Late Show on BBC2 in the 1990s and presented its offshoot The Late Review (later Sunday Review and from 2000 Newsnight Review) until the 2005 "review of the year" edition of Newsnight Review, broadcast on 16 December, which marked the end of his association with the format. In 2004, Lawson made a documentary for BBC Four called The Truth About Sixties TV, criticising what he called "golden ageists" who, he said, have a rose-tinted view of television's past.
Lawson became the main presenter of BBC Radio 4's daily arts programme, Front Row , in 1998. [3] He has written several radio plays for the network, including St Graham and St Evelyn (2003) on the friendship between the Catholic novelists Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and The Third Soldier Holds His Thighs (2005) on Mary Whitehouse's unsuccessful litigation against the National Theatre production of Howard Brenton's play The Romans in Britain . He has also written episodes of the television version of the BBC sitcom Absolute Power appearing as himself in the series 1 episode 2, "Pope Idol", and is one of many celebrities impersonated by the Dead Ringers team, referred to as "Britain's brainiest potato" and "the thinking woman's potato" because of his baldness.[ citation needed ] In 2002, Viz ran a spoof of his Newsnight Review programme, featuring Lawson engaged in a desperate search for hard-core pornography, entitled "The Artful Podger".[ citation needed ] His in-depth, one-to-one interviews for BBC Four, entitled Mark Lawson Talks to …, ran from 2006 to 2015.
In addition to his work in print journalism and the broadcast media, Lawson has written five books, both fiction and non-fiction. His first, Bloody Margaret (1991), is a collection of novellas on late 20th-century politics in the UK, including an eponymous satire concerning Margaret Thatcher. This was followed by The Battle for Room Service (1993), a travelogue of people, politics and culture encountered by Lawson as a journalist. His 1995 book Idlewild is an alternative history novel in which both John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe survived the 1960s. Going Out Live (2001) focused on contemporary celebrity culture and the media, and Enough is Enough (2005) is a satire set in the government of Harold Wilson during the late 1960s. Lawson chaired the judges for the 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.
In 2006, Lawson witnessed, and reported to the BBC, a sexual assault on a BBC staff member by Jimmy Savile, later found to have been a prolific sex offender. This was recorded in the Dame Janet Smith Review report of 2016. [7] In 2022, Lawson wrote about this encounter and his personal experience of Savile in British society. [8]
Lawson's connection with Front Row ended in March 2014 for "personal reasons" in a joint agreement with the BBC. [2] An internal report completed in January investigated claims of bullying within the BBC Radio Arts, which produces Front Row, and identified one producer and presenter as responsible. [9] The Daily Telegraph reported on 5 March that Lawson was the presenter involved and he had been accused of "browbeating junior staff" who are often young freelancers. [10] Lawson denied bullying. In his 2016 novel The Allegations, [11] a lecturer at a fictional English university faces disciplinary action and dismissal for "B&H" (bullying and harassment). Dr Tom Pimm is accused of sighing during departmental meetings, "divisive social invitations" and "visual Insubordination (sic) towards senior management". Pimm attends a hearing during which he is told that "if someone felt you were being insensitive then, to all intents and purposes, you were". In the book's afterword, Lawson writes
It is the case that during a long, generally privileged and happy career in the media, I suffered one devastating experience of institutional group-think, baffling and contradictory management, false accusation and surreally sub-legal process; and have personal knowledge of the damage to reputation, employability and health that can result from such an ordeal.
Lawson supports Northampton Town FC and frequently goes to games, both at Sixfields Stadium and away. He lives near Towcester in Northamptonshire. [12]
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Clive James was an Australian critic, journalist, broadcaster, writer and lyricist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1962 until his death in 2019. He began his career specialising in literary criticism before becoming television critic for The Observer in 1972, where he made his name for his wry, deadpan humour.
Sir Mark John Thompson is a British media executive who is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ancestry, the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, and Chief Executive Officer of the Cable News Network (CNN). He is the former president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Company. From 2004 to 2012, he served as Director-General of the BBC, and before that was the Chief Executive of Channel 4. In 2009 Thompson was ranked as the 65th most powerful person in the world by Forbes magazine. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017.
Mark Kermode is an English film critic, musician, radio presenter, television presenter and podcaster. He presents a weekly Scala Radio film music show and the BBC Four documentary series Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema, and is co-presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme Screenshot with Ellen E. Jones, and the film-review podcast Kermode & Mayo's Take alongside long-time collaborator Simon Mayo. He has contributed to the BFI's film magazine Sight & Sound and between September 2013 and September 2023 he served as chief film critic for The Observer. Since January 2016 he has presented a monthly live show, MK3D, at the BFI South Bank. It is the BFI's longest running live show.
This article outlines, in chronological order, the various controversies surrounding or involving the BBC.
Emily Maitlis is a British journalist, documentary filmmaker, and former newsreader for the BBC. She was the lead anchor of the BBC Two news and current affairs programme Newsnight until the end of 2021. She is currently a presenter of the daily podcast The News Agents on LBC Radio.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) took its present form on 1 January 1927 when John Reith became its first Director-General. Reith stated that impartiality and objectivity were the essence of professionalism in broadcasting.
Front Row is a radio programme on BBC Radio 4 that has been broadcast regularly since 1998. The BBC describes the programme as a "live magazine programme on the world of arts, literature, film, media and music". It is broadcast each weekday between 7:15 p.m. and 7:45 p.m., and has a podcast available for download. Podcasts consisted of weekly highlights until September 2011, but have been full daily episodes since. Shows usually include a mix of interviews, reviews, previews, discussions, reports and columns. Some episodes however, particularly on bank holidays, include a single interview with prominent figures in the arts or a half-hour-long feature on a single subject.
Robin Robertson is a Scottish poet.
Paul Farley, FRSL is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.
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Meirion Jones is a Welsh journalist. He worked for the BBC until 2015. He is now the Editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman described Jones as "a dogged journalist with that obsessional, slightly nutty commitment that marks out all successful investigative reporters".
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It emerged in late 2012 that Jimmy Savile, an English media personality who had died the previous year, sexually abused hundreds of people throughout his life, most of them children but some as old as 75, and most of them female. He had been well known in the United Kingdom for his eccentric image and was generally respected for his charitable work, which associated him with the British monarchy and other individuals of personal power.
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Elizabeth Mary MacKean was a British television reporter and presenter. She worked on the BBC's Newsnight programme and was the reporter on an exposé of Sir Jimmy Savile as a paedophile which was controversially cancelled by the BBC in December 2011. The decision to axe the Newsnight investigation became the subject of the Pollard Inquiry. She and colleague Meirion Jones later won a London Press Club Scoop of the Year award for their work on the story. She also won the 2010 Daniel Pearl Award for her investigation of the Trafigura toxic dumping scandal.
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