LEGENDARY television presenter and journalist Colin Chapman has died at the age of 87.
The media veteran has worked for BBC TV and has also worked for the Sunday Times, the Financial Times and the Observer.
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Colin Chapman died at the age of 87
Chapman – who has also written several books – has reportedly suffered from ill health for several years.
He passed away over the weekend.
Chapman’s career spanned three continents and saw him as a print journalist as well as a TV presenter.
He previously said: “There won’t be many journalists who have been both writers and executives in print media, as well as on-camera performers and senior managers in radio and television.”
Most recently, he was editor-in-chief of Australian Outlook, where his work included columns on elections around the world this year.
He also enjoyed stints at the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC.
For the latter, he was the founding producer of The World Today network.
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Throughout his distinguished career, Chapman was not only an expert political analyst, but also a respected foreign correspondent, including coverage of the Hong Kong terrorist attacks in the 1960s and international conflicts in Africa and the Suez region.
He stayed in Australia three times – the last time in 2004 – and received citizenship.
Chapman sent the Australian Institute of International Affairs a six-page life history describing the beginnings of his career at the BBC.
He described how in 1974 he became an economic correspondent for that television company.
He wrote that the Beeb “encouraged me to interpret economics very broadly”.
“In my second year, an editor described me as a ‘BBC News success story’.
“In my fourth year I was seconded to the BBC’s Current Affairs group to become the presenter of the BBC’s high-profile weekly The Money Programme, and the three-day presenter of Financial World Tonight on BBC Radio 4.
“For the first time, he gave me the opportunity to shoot long-form documentaries.”
Chapman went on to say that “unforgettable” documentaries from the period included three weeks in Iran during the last days of the Shah, “when the revolutionaries turned off the oil tap”.
He also spent two weeks in the Urals in Brezhnev’s Russia, filming at the Lada car factory in Togliatti “looking at Soviet industry through the conflicted eyes of a left-wing manager and a yuppie manager from British Leyland, whom we took with us”.
He added: “There were also films in India, Greece, South Africa and Japan.”
Chapman was born in Great Britain in 1937 and studied at the University of Leicester.
He spent his last years with his wife Susan Grice in Tavira, Portugal.
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Source: HIS Education