David Jessel
Encyclopedia
David Jessel is a former British TV and radio news presenter
; author; and campaigner against miscarriages of justice. From 2000 to 2010 he was also a commissioner of the Criminal Cases Review Commission
.
(London), and Penelope Blackwell
.
He is a direct descendant of the English jurist Sir George Jessel, the first Jewish Master of the Rolls
.
, an independent school
in Oxford
, and at Eton College
, to which he won a scholarship in 1959. He won an Exhibition
to Merton College, Oxford
, where he read Modern History
. He was also secretary of the University's Dramatic Society, OUDS
.
in 1967 on a trainee placement at BBC Birmingham
, rising to become a presenter of the regional news programmes on television and radio. Early in 1968, Jessel moved to London to join the national radio news programme The World at One
as one of the so-called "golden generation" of young British journalists, which included
Roger Cook
and Jonathan Dimbleby
. Jessel's big break came with his reporting of the 1968 Paris riots. These reports pioneered the technique of actuality recordings for radio news, with Jessel recording his reports from the centre of the action. This new approach contrasted strongly with the dispassionate, detached style of reporting that predominated at the time.
Jessel resigned from The World at One in 1972 to join BBC 1's nightly TV current affairs programme, 24 Hours
. On this and its successor programmes, he reported on stories from around the world including successive United States presidential elections in the 1970s, exposing atrocities in Honduras and Nicaragua in the 1980s and natural disasters such as the Friuli earthquake in Italy
. In 1973 he and his BBC film crew were able to film one of the first areas openly controlled by Vietnamese communist forces following the 1973 truce with the United States.
(London Broadcasting Company), Britain's first all-news radio
station.
, the BBC's long-running investigative TV series which re-examined the cases of a dozen people convicted of serious crimes, usually murder, and led to the eventual quashing of most of the convictions. Among his successful cases were the brothers Paul and Wayne Darvell, who typified the unglamorous and forgotten cases that Jessel and his team championed.
In 1990, the Rough Justice team decamped to Channel 4
and set up a production company, Just Television, dedicated exclusively to the investigation and publicising of miscarriages of justice. Jessel had been angered by the BBC's threats to drop the programme due to financial constraints and said: "I couldn't stand being cut back when programmes glorifying the police were expanding like a giant fungus." The chairman of Just Television's advisory board was Jessel's friend, hero and mentor Sir Ludovic Kennedy, the doyen of investigators into wrongful convictions. The new programme, Trial and Error, continued to expose wrongful convictions, including the cases of Peter Fell, Mary Druhan Sheila Bowler and Danny McNamee
- all of which led to the convictions being quashed by the Court of Appeal
.
, an independent public body set up to investigate possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The Commission assesses whether convictions or sentences should be referred to a court of appeal. Jessel had been a prominent supporter and advocate of such an independent public body for many years prior to its creation.
On his retirement as senior commissioner, The Times described Jessel as "a tireless champion of the wrongfully convicted".
.
He has served on the Advertising Standards Authority's
advisory council, and is a member of the Code Compliance Tribunal of PhonePay+ regulating telephone premium-rate services.
News presenter
A news presenter is a person who presents news during a news program in the format of a television show, on the radio or the Internet.News presenters can work in a radio studio, television studio and from remote broadcasts in the field especially weather...
; author; and campaigner against miscarriages of justice. From 2000 to 2010 he was also a commissioner of the Criminal Cases Review Commission
Criminal Cases Review Commission
The Criminal Cases Review Commission is an non-departmental public body set up following the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice itself a continuation of the May Inquiry. It aims to investigate possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland...
.
Background
David Jessel is the son of Robert Jessel, defence correspondent of The TimesThe Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
(London), and Penelope Blackwell
Blackwell's
Blackwell UK Ltd is a national chain of bookshops, online retail, mail order and library supply services in the United Kingdom, which has an annual turnover of £74 million...
.
He is a direct descendant of the English jurist Sir George Jessel, the first Jewish Master of the Rolls
Master of the Rolls
The Keeper or Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England, known as the Master of the Rolls, is the second most senior judge in England and Wales, after the Lord Chief Justice. The Master of the Rolls is the presiding officer of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal...
.
Education
David Jessel was educated at the Dragon SchoolDragon School
The Dragon School is a British coeducational, preparatory school in the city of Oxford, founded in 1877 as the Oxford Preparatory School, or OPS. It is primarily known as a boarding school, although it also takes day pupils...
, an independent school
Independent school
An independent school is a school that is independent in its finances and governance; it is not dependent upon national or local government for financing its operations, nor reliant on taxpayer contributions, and is instead funded by a combination of tuition charges, gifts, and in some cases the...
in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, and at Eton College
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
, to which he won a scholarship in 1959. He won an Exhibition
Exhibition (scholarship)
-United Kingdom and Ireland:At the universities of Dublin, Oxford and Cambridge, and at Westminster School, Eton College and Winchester College, and various other UK educational establishments, an exhibition is a financial award or grant to an individual student, normally on grounds of merit. The...
to Merton College, Oxford
Merton College, Oxford
Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to...
, where he read Modern History
Modern history
Modern history, or the modern era, describes the historical timeline after the Middle Ages. Modern history can be further broken down into the early modern period and the late modern period after the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution...
. He was also secretary of the University's Dramatic Society, OUDS
Oxford University Dramatic Society
The Oxford University Dramatic Society is the principal funding body and provider of theatrical services to the many independent student productions put on by students in Oxford, England...
.
Career at the BBC
He joined the BBCBBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
in 1967 on a trainee placement at BBC Birmingham
BBC Birmingham
BBC Birmingham is one of the oldest regional arms of the BBC, located in Birmingham, West Midlands. It was the first region outside of London to start broadcasting both the corporation's radio and television transmissions, the latter from the Sutton Coldfield television transmitter...
, rising to become a presenter of the regional news programmes on television and radio. Early in 1968, Jessel moved to London to join the national radio news programme The World at One
The World At One
The World at One, or WATO for short, is BBC Radio 4's long-running lunchtime news and current affairs programme, which is broadcast from 1pm to 1:30pm from Monday to Friday. The programme describes itself as "Britain's leading political programme. With a reputation for rigorous and original...
as one of the so-called "golden generation" of young British journalists, which included
Roger Cook
Roger Cook
Roger Cook may refer to:* Roger Cook , British* Roger Cook , New Zealand investigative journalist, best known in the UK* Roger Cook Roger Cook may refer to:* Roger Cook (songwriter) (born 1940), British* Roger Cook (journalist) (born 1943), New Zealand investigative journalist, best known in...
and Jonathan Dimbleby
Jonathan Dimbleby
Jonathan Dimbleby is a British presenter of current affairs and political radio and television programmes, a political commentator and a writer. He is the son of Richard Dimbleby and younger brother of British TV presenter David Dimbleby.-Education:Dimbleby was educated at Charterhouse School, a...
. Jessel's big break came with his reporting of the 1968 Paris riots. These reports pioneered the technique of actuality recordings for radio news, with Jessel recording his reports from the centre of the action. This new approach contrasted strongly with the dispassionate, detached style of reporting that predominated at the time.
Jessel resigned from The World at One in 1972 to join BBC 1's nightly TV current affairs programme, 24 Hours
24 Hours (TV series)
Twenty-Four Hours is a long-running, late evening, daily news magazine programme that aired on BBC 1. It focused on analysis and criticism of current affairs and featured in-depth short documentary films that set the style for current affairs magazine programmes. Twenty-Four Hours launched in 1965...
. On this and its successor programmes, he reported on stories from around the world including successive United States presidential elections in the 1970s, exposing atrocities in Honduras and Nicaragua in the 1980s and natural disasters such as the Friuli earthquake in Italy
1976 Friuli earthquake
The 1976 Friuli earthquake took place in the Friuli region in northeast Italy on Thursday, May 6, 1976. Measuring 6.4 on the Richter Scale, the quake, centered on the town of Gemona del Friuli, killed 989 people, 2400 injured and left 157,000 homeless. It is known in Italy as Terremoto del Friuli...
. In 1973 he and his BBC film crew were able to film one of the first areas openly controlled by Vietnamese communist forces following the 1973 truce with the United States.
LBC
In October 1973, David Jessel temporarily left the BBC to join commercial radio, becoming the opening presenter on LBCLBC
LBC Radio operates two London-based radio stations, with news and talk formats. LBC was Britain's first legal commercial Independent Local Radio station, providing a service of news and information to London. It began broadcasting on 8 October 1973, a week ahead of Capital Radio...
(London Broadcasting Company), Britain's first all-news radio
All-news radio
All-news radio is a radio format devoted entirely to discussion and broadcast of news.All-news radio is available in both local and syndicated forms, and is carried in some form on both major US satellite radio networks...
station.
Investigating injustice
On rejoining the BBC, Jessel moved to documentary-making, with a particular emphasis on miscarriages of justice. From 1985 he led the team at Rough JusticeRough Justice (TV series)
Rough Justice was a BBC television series which investigated alleged miscarriages of justice. It was broadcast between 1982 and 2007, and played a role in securing the release of 18 people involved in 13 cases involving miscarriages of justice. The programme was similar in aim and approach to The...
, the BBC's long-running investigative TV series which re-examined the cases of a dozen people convicted of serious crimes, usually murder, and led to the eventual quashing of most of the convictions. Among his successful cases were the brothers Paul and Wayne Darvell, who typified the unglamorous and forgotten cases that Jessel and his team championed.
In 1990, the Rough Justice team decamped to Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
and set up a production company, Just Television, dedicated exclusively to the investigation and publicising of miscarriages of justice. Jessel had been angered by the BBC's threats to drop the programme due to financial constraints and said: "I couldn't stand being cut back when programmes glorifying the police were expanding like a giant fungus." The chairman of Just Television's advisory board was Jessel's friend, hero and mentor Sir Ludovic Kennedy, the doyen of investigators into wrongful convictions. The new programme, Trial and Error, continued to expose wrongful convictions, including the cases of Peter Fell, Mary Druhan Sheila Bowler and Danny McNamee
Danny McNamee
Gilbert "Danny" McNamee is a former electronic engineer from Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland, who was wrongly convicted in 1987 of conspiracy to cause explosions, including the Provisional Irish Republican Army's Hyde Park bombing in 1982.McNamee was arrested on 16 August 1986 at his home in...
- all of which led to the convictions being quashed by the Court of Appeal
Court of Appeal of England and Wales
The Court of Appeal of England and Wales is the second most senior court in the English legal system, with only the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom above it...
.
Criminal Cases Review Commission
From 2000 to 2010 Jessel was a commissioner of the Criminal Cases Review CommissionCriminal Cases Review Commission
The Criminal Cases Review Commission is an non-departmental public body set up following the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice itself a continuation of the May Inquiry. It aims to investigate possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland...
, an independent public body set up to investigate possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The Commission assesses whether convictions or sentences should be referred to a court of appeal. Jessel had been a prominent supporter and advocate of such an independent public body for many years prior to its creation.
On his retirement as senior commissioner, The Times described Jessel as "a tireless champion of the wrongfully convicted".
Other broadcasting and public positions
Since 2004, Jessel has been a regular anchor on BBC World News, as well as a guest presenter on the channel's flagship interview programme HARDtalkHARDtalk
Hardtalk is a flagship BBC television programme, consisting of in-depth half-hour one-on-one interviews.It is broadcast four days a week on BBC World News and the BBC News channel. Launched in 1997, much of its worldwide fame is due to its global reach via BBC World...
.
He has served on the Advertising Standards Authority's
Advertising Standards Authority (United Kingdom)
The Advertising Standards Authority is the self-regulatory organisation of the advertising industry in the United Kingdom. The ASA is a non-statutory organisation and so cannot interpret or enforce legislation. However, its code of advertising practice broadly reflects legislation in many instances...
advisory council, and is a member of the Code Compliance Tribunal of PhonePay+ regulating telephone premium-rate services.
Publications
In 1989, Jessel co-authored the international bestseller Brain Sex with scientist Anne Moir, the first scientific analysis of the differences between the male and female mind. In 1995 the same partnership produced A Mind to Crime, which looked at the biological influences on criminality. Jessel also wrote Trial and Error, a book to accompany the eponymous Channel 4 television series.Awards and recognition
- Bar Council Special Award for Journalism (1994), only the second such award (after Sir Ludovic Kennedy)
- Three Royal Television Society awards
- Honorary Doctorate from the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University)