DESMOND WILCOXUniversally-acclaimed broadcaster Desmond Wilcox died aged 69 on September 6, 2000, after having suffered heart disease for some time.
Married to television personality Esther Rantzen, the pair were renowned as among the most formidable broadcast journalists of their time, Mrs Rantzen concentrating on the popular, Mr Wilcox on ground-breaking documentary and political commentary.
Mr Wilcox was perhaps best known in the later years of his career for the television series The Visit, in which he flew a facially disfigured Peruvian boy to the UK for treatment and eventually adoption to the surgeon who treated him.
Desmond John Wilcox was born in Welwyn Garden City on May 25, 1931, the son of an architect.
His career as a journalist began on a weekly newspaper, the Elstree, Borehamwood and Edgware Local, in 1949, after serving in the merchant navy.
After two years as lieutenant in the Army for National Service he moved straight back into his chosen career, starting work in Fleet Street at the Daily Mirror, operating from its New York bureau.
His move into television came in 1960 on ITV’s This Week, where he stayed until a move to the BBC five years later. Here he researched and presented Man Alive, later taking charge of a newly-formed Man Alive Unit. Prior to that he had also reported for ABC and ITN.
He became head of features at the BBC and between 1972 and 1980 continued to make his name for series such as The Visit (about David Jackson, The Boy David, between 1982 and 1991), A Day in the Life (1993) and Black in Blue.
His last documentary was made in 1999, called Children of the Sewers, featuring the thousands of orphans living rough in Bogota, Colombia.
His acclaimed work won him several Bafta awards.
Away from the small screen he was a campaigner for heart charities, a patron of Wessex Heartbeat and chairman of Defeating Deafness.
When he died, he was survived by his wife of 22 years, Esther Rantzen, and their three children, as well as three children from his previous marriage to Patsy Price.
He had suffered a heart attack in 1998, 12 years after heart bypass surgery, and had 14 operations to save his sight after being attacked early on in his career while reporting on newspapers. He was hit with a car jack and suffered temporary paralysis.
He had also survived three plane crashes.
In 1986 he gave an insight into his way of working, saying: "Real life honestly portrayed is sufficiently dramatic in itself. The idea that might lurk in some people's minds that you somehow have to beef it up, or pump it up or invent the circumstances to make it more colourful, is an idea born of Fleet Street and ignorance."
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