Biographies

Home Affairs Correspondent, BBC Scotland

Reevel Alderson, Home Affairs Correspondent, is one of BBC Scotland's longest-serving journalists, having joined the station in June 1980 as a reporter.

But his BBC service began even earlier – he had previously worked for three years at BBC Radio Blackburn, now Radio Lancashire.

Reevel was awarded an Honours degree in History at University College, London in 1974 and immediately began working as a journalist with The Journal, the morning newspaper in Newcastle upon Tyne.

During the past 28 years, Reevel has worked for both TV and radio, and has reported for and presented almost every programme in the news and current affairs output.

Much of that time he was employed as a freelance journalist, and worked for a variety of other media outlets, including TV-AM, Channel 4 and the Sunday Times.

At the BBC he has undertaken a variety of specialist jobs including acting as Scotland Correspondent, filing stories from and about Scotland to network TV and radio programmes.

He speaks Spanish and Portuguese and, in 1991, he spent eight months based in Brazil as the BBC's Latin American correspondent.

Back home in Scotland, in 1992, he was appointed Radio Scotland's Home Affairs Correspondent, a wide-ranging brief including coverage of police, prisons, the criminal justice system and social affairs.

Reevel has also had responsibility for training new journalists and helping established staff take on new technology and new skills in the integrated bi-media department.