It was around lunchtime on Monday, 26th April when news filtered through my BBC office close to Broadcasting House that Jill Dando had been shot dead. We were all stunned. It wasn’t just that she had been the Corporation’s new ‘poster girl’; she was possibly the most popular TV presenter in the country. Her face was on that week’s edition of Radio Times, a new series starting just the day before.
With a cool elegance, a trendy but not showy hair style and commonly photographed in long-legged pose, Jill had often been likened to Princess Diana. Like me, she was born the same year (1961) but that fateful day the list of similarities grew by one: senselessly killed in her prime, less than two years apart. But, just as Diana’s death in Paris should never define her life, so Jill Dando should not be remembered merely as ‘that news presenter who was murdered’.
Jill wasn’t really like Diana. She was the daughter of a local journalist not an earl, and attended an ordinary comprehensive school near her Weston-Super-Mare birthplace before herself studying journalism at a Cardiff college, not flunking all her exams at a swanky all-girl prep school. She trod a well-worn path from print to local radio to regional TV news before being invited up to West London to present news bulletins in the mid-Eighties.
I may well have seen Dando occasionally on afternoon duty, possibly even on the One o’Clock News if I had the day off. As a young, single staffer she also got the holiday shifts and I may well have watched this Christmas week news bulletin in 1990. Her celebrity strengthened that decade and she branched out into light entertainment, guesting on big-ratings shows like Noel’s House Party and This Is Your Life but for me she became closely associated with the Beeb’s Holiday show. Moving away from the old desk-bound format, she was perfect for introducing or actually making film reports from some gorgeous location or other, and presented a New Year special from Australia in 1999.
She also possessed the ideal poise and voice, authoritative yet warm, for introducing royal-related broadcasts such as the 1996 Royal Variety Performance and upmarket awards shows like the BAFTAs, scheduled two weeks after her death. She was also the obvious choice as the BBC face of major charity appeals, such as the one for Kosovo, again in ’99.
By this time she was ubiquitous on the BBC. When not presenting the News or strolling along a sun-drenched foreign shore, she had become, with Nick Ross, the co-host of the live monthly reconstruction and witness appeal show, Crimewatch UK. Indeed just nine days before her murder, she had been on the programme, doing her thing. A month later, she wasn’t the host; she was the main story. That edition was especially harrowing to watch, particularly as the police had precious few witnesses despite Jill being shot on her doorstep in broad daylight. Was it family, was it a professional hit as revenge for her Crimewatch association or just the product of a warped nutter with a gun. The Met plumped for the latter but their conviction was eventually quashed on appeal.
In September 1999, five months after her murder, I returned from lunch to find metal barriers outside Broadcasting House. Inside the entrance hall was a hushed, heavy atmosphere. Unaware of the reason I asked a fellow staff member who informed me the memorial service to Jill Dando was taking place at next-door All Souls Church, and the main participants would soon be heading out of the building. I waited a few minutes to observe the sombre procession: Jill’s fiancé, elderly dad, various BBC execs and her friend and fellow tennis partner Cliff Richard in a very showy ‘look at me!’ blazer.
It was all a sharp reminder of the esteem in which she was held, not only by the broadcasting elite but also by a nation. A Google search for her name inevitably throws up a host of hits relating to ‘shooting’, ‘murder’ and ‘mystery’ and I was unable to resist watching a few twentieth anniversary documentaries last year. Jill was undoubtedly heading towards national treasure status but she had already achieved enough to make this viewer’s list of TV Treasures two decades later.
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