Bob Wellings - Local hero to Nationwide star

Regional news presenters: you have to love ‘em. For many it’s the stepping stone to national stardom, be it still in the current affairs sphere or beyond. I also recall attending a Look North discussion group in Yorkshire soon after Sophie Raworth departed for network telly. Although young she was clearly missed, but participants were keen to realise that good presenters deserved the ‘promotion’ to London and they, too, considered it a feather in their region’s cap. This chimed with me as a fellow viewer. I still get a twinge of pride when I find myself watching, say, a Matt Barbet or Nina Hossain, remembering their early stints on the BBC London flagship 6.30 programme. 

Others choose - or perhaps have the decision made for them – to remain a big fish in a small pond. For example, Mike Neville became one of the biggest and most recognisable TV celebrities in the North-East, and there are many more of his ilk worth celebrating, such as Stewart White, Jamie Owen and Sue Beardsmore. They aren’t like film or reality TV stars who live on a claustrophobic planet orbiting our lives, shooting off sprays of tweets or instagram poses for the masses. Instead they are the familiar faces visible every evening you might also spot the next morning in your local branch of Tesco. Quite literally in the case of Wales Today’s Claire Summers who, before the Coronavirus pandemic, I sometimes bumped into in our neighbourhood Culverhouse Cross store. 

When I began my university stint at Exeter, I became rather addicted to the Beeb’s Spotlight South West. I know: not very rock’n’roll. However nothing lends a sense of place like the 25 minutes of news about tourism, fishing rights, Devonport dockyard or the demise of Cornwall’s tin mining, let alone Craig Rich’s weather forecasts complete with sea conditions and tide times. Back in 1979, Chris Denham and Gillian Miles were in the hot seat, the latter replaced by Fern Britton followed by Juliet Morris and Jill Dando, all three eventually becoming household names everywhere.

Growing up in Essex, I was deprived of my own local news presenters because we had the UK-wide Nationwide crew. I was never a fan of Michael Barratt or Sue Lawley, but Bob Wellings stood out for me. Many a TV journalist carries off the awkward skill of floundering yet covering it up with cool professionalism. Bob seemed to do the opposite, which was quite endearing! 

Most regional news presenters of that era would have started out in print journalism and Bob probably did the same. I can’t be certain. I do know his TV career began on About Anglia, before migrating down the A12 to the capital at the end of the Sixties.  He became part of the regular team on Nationwide in 1971, staying there pretty much throughout the decade. 

Wellings could be found in the great outdoors, in 1971 even participating in the then novelty craze of jogging. Occasionally he was allowed a crack at interviewing showbiz royalty and I think I recall his encounter two years later with the notoriously awkward Liza Minnelli. However, the lasting image I have of him is in the studio, somehow getting through a live segment involving fashion models. I don’t know when it was, or whether footage survives, but his old-school demeanour and less-than-forthcoming guests made for painful viewing – but this is what I remember.

For some reason he was considered to be the right fit as one of Esther Rantzen’s sidekicks on the first series of long-running Saturday night show That’s Life in ’73. I think I watched it because it replaced Match of the Day during the summer, and it was a genuine oddity. It was an uneasy marriage of consumer journalism, light entertainment and vox pop interviews with ‘real’ people out on the street, probably somewhere near the Shepherd’s Bush studios. 

I suppose Bob was there as a familiar current affairs face for the more serious stuff, while comedy actor George Layton (It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, etc) provided the fun element along with the decidedly creepy Cyril Fletcher reading his Odd Odes. I really wanted Bob to do well but the heavily-scripted quickfire exchanges really didn’t suit his sober manner and well-modulated voice. Needless to say, he didn’t return for a second series, and it was ‘Esther’s Boys’ like Kieran Prendiville, Glyn Worsnip, Chris Serle and Doc Cox who became associated with the programme for many years. 

In the 1980s and ‘90s Bob Wellings would make the odd random appearance as ‘Newsreader’ or ‘Interviewer’ in drama series but the only programme I remember him actually presenting was the BBC’s Open Air.  This was part of the Beeb’s efforts to be more democratic and inclusive, offering an expanded forum in which to question programme-makers themselves instead of relying on the jokey Points of View format. Bob was one of the hosts and made a decent fist of it, deliberately avoiding any slippery slope towards Light Ent territory. I think he remained in situ from 1986 to its demise in 1989, Of course I worked at the Corporation and I quite liked the programme but it failed to survive the arrival of hated new Director-General John Birt. 

IMDB indicates no further TV or film credits since 1993 when he’d have been nudging 60, but I hope he has enjoyed a lengthy retirement.