Last updated August 2008
Category: Radio 2; News
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Jeremy Vine presents The Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 and Panorama, the BBC's award-winning current affairs series on BBC One.
He also hosts Points Of View, the BBC One show that allows the audience to air their complaints.
Jeremy was born in Epsom in May 1965.
He attended Epsom College and Durham University, where he studied English and presented on Newcastle's Metro Radio in the middle of the night.
A career in journalism started with a traineeship with the Coventry Evening Telegraph.
Jeremy joined the BBC in 1987 and his two-year traineeship included news reporting in Belfast and researching for Joan Bakewell on Heart Of The Matter.
In 1989 he was given a job as a reporter on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
His reports took him across Europe, the United States and the Middle East and covered punishment beatings in Northern Ireland, neo-Nazis in Germany, sheep racing in Dorset and saw him ambushed in a field in Croatia when war broke out in Yugoslavia.
He stood in for Brian Redhead as a Today presenter on several occasions, as well as deputising on Radio 4's PM, The Moral Maze and daytime programmes on BBC Radio 5 Live.
From 1993 to 1997 he was a lobby correspondent based at Westminster, working under John Sergeant and alongside Huw Edwards, Jon Sopel, Nick Robinson and John Pienaar – all political correspondents at the time.
Then he moved to Johannesburg as the BBC's Africa correspondent where he reported on the border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, elections in Algeria, Aids in Mali and events in Zimbabwe, as well as Sudan, Angola and 15 other African nations.
Jeremy's distinguished period as a BBC News correspondent in South Africa included his April 1999 exclusive report on South African police brutality. The fly-on-the-wall film of the Brixton Flying Squad in Johannesburg showed police badly beating up and setting dogs on suspects – including two hijackers injured in a car crash, one of whom died later.
The film won the Silver Nymph at Monte Carlo, rocked the police service in South Africa and sparked uproar across the country. Twenty-two officers were suspended and two convicted as a result of the footage.
Jeremy's From Our Own Correspondent piece on Civilian, a former child soldier he met in Sierra Leone, won an Amnesty International Radio Award in June 1999.
Jeremy then worked as a full-time presenter with BBC Two's flagship Newsnight programme between 1999 and 2002.
During the 2001 General Election campaign, Jeremy travelled the length of Britain in a 1976 Volkswagen camper van.
This journey was declared one of the highlights of the election by The Sun and Peter Mandelson famously stormed out of the van in Hartlepool after being asked whether Chancellor Gordon Brown was having a perfect election campaign.
Jeremy left Newsnight to join Radio 2.
He was the launch presenter of BBC One's Sunday lunchtime Politics Show in 2003, then took over the election graphics when Peter Snow retired after 26 years operating the famous Swingometer.
Since 2008 Jeremy has been co-hosting the quiz show Eggheads with Dermot Murnaghan. Now in its fifth year, Eggheads is established as one of the most popular game shows on British television.
Jeremy won Speech Broadcaster of the Year at the 2005 Sony Radio Academy Awards.
