Robert Orchard

Robert Orchard is a freelance British journalist and presenter.

Robert Orchard is one of three children born to a Devon farmer and a Welsh nurse. Educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Crediton, he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1972–75, followed by a year's PGCE teacher training.

Orchard began his journalistic career in 1976 at the Thomson Regional Newspapers training centre run by John Brownlee in Newcastle, before joining the Western Mail newspaper in Cardiff. He moved to BBC Wales in 1979 and worked in broadcasting for the BBC for more than 30 years, covering mainly politics and parliament for TV and radio from 1984 — including the Brighton Bomb and the fall of Margaret Thatcher. He worked in Brussels and Strasbourg in 1985, setting up a new EU reporter post for BBC regions and reporting on the Heyzel Stadium disaster, before becoming Political Correspondent for BBC Wales and then, in 1988, a network Political Correspondent in a team led by the distinguished journalist John Cole, and including his former BBC Wales colleague, Huw Edwards, Mark Mardell, and Jon Sopel. He opted to focus on Parliament from 1992, mainly on Radio 4,[1] becoming a BBC Parliamentary Correspondent and presenting Yesterday in Parliament — with a brief to entertain as well as inform, and later the more measured, nightly Today in Parliament, along with other specialist parliamentary programmes.

Orchard edited BBC News Online's General Election coverage in 2001; and later compiled the BBC College of Journalism's first online Guide to Parliament, to help other BBC journalists understand how Westminster works and how to report it.[2]

He has written numerou8s articles for Parliament's The House Magazine, the BBC News website, the Hansard Society, and lectures on politics and the media. He has lent his voice to create historical character cameos for a range of political programmes. Documentaries made for Radio 4 include Fool's Gold, on the 19th century Welsh Goldrush; a series for You & Yours assessing the privatisation of water, nuclear power and the Royal Mail; The Age of Ming, on ageism in politics; Hung, Drawn and Thwarted, on the prospects and perils of a hung parliament; and, most recently, a 70th anniversary tribute to "Today in Parliament"; and "A Very Welsh Coup" for Radio Wales, 25 years after the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Robert left the BBC staff in 2013 and is now a freelance political journalist and lecturer, and was recently a very mature student - achieving an MA in Politics and Contemporary History at King's College London 40 years after his first degree.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Robert Orchard, BBC Radio 4, UK.
  2. ↑ Robert Orchard, http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/blog/robert-orchard/ BBC College of Journalism — Discussion on CoJo], BBC, UK.
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