About Jeremy Vine

Jeremy loves music. But he’s also a journalist. There aren’t that many shows that do music and news. In fact there’s only one. Happily he presents it...

Previously Jeremy had been, at various times, presenter on Newsnight, political correspondent at Westminster, reporter on the Today programme and Africa correspondent based in Johannesburg. That job put him on the road and gave him some of his sharpest memories.

Early Days

He was born in Epsom in May 1965, went to Epsom College and Durham University where he studied English and presented on Metro Radio in the middle of the night. His career in journalism started with a traineeship with the Coventry Evening Telegraph.

The BBC Beckons

Jeremy joined the BBC in 1987 as a News Trainee — coincidentally, on the day John Birt arrived. The two-year traineeship included a stint in Belfast, where he ended up presenting the news some mornings, and later working alongside Joan Bakewell as a researcher on Heart of the Matter.

In 1989 he was given a job as a reporter on R4’s Today programme while Brian Redhead was presenter. He went to Tomsk in Siberia to do a piece on an out-of-work ballistics missiles expert, was ambushed in a field outside Osijek in Croatia when war broke out in Yugoslavia, filed reports from all over Europe (including a piece on the Mafia scams that were stopping rebuilding after an earthquake in southern Italy) and from the Middle East, inside Israel and on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

He covered punishment beatings in Northern Ireland, neo-Nazis in Germany, and even sheep racing in Dorset.

African Experience

Beginning his African placement in 1997, he reported from the border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, from Algiers as the Algerian elections took place, from Mali, Zambia, Zimbabwe (doing a Hard Talk interview for BBC World with Robert Mugabe) and from Sudan (getting an interview in Khartoum with the leader of the America-hating Islamist regime).

He has also presented from as far flung reaches as Angola (the war there), Lesotho (violence after South African troops went in), Kenya (elections), the Niger Delta (Nigerian villagers’ unrest over the work of the oil companies), and Sierra Leone, as well as all over South Africa.

But the report he is proudest of was his exclusive for Newsnight in April 1999 on South African police brutality. The film won the Silver Nymph at Monte Carlo, and resulted in the suspension of 22 police officers. After it Jeremy joined Newsnight full-time as a presenter.

Newsnight Calls

During the 2001 election, he travelled the length of Britain in a 1976 Volkswagen camper van sprayed with the programme logo. Newsnight won ‘Best News Programme’ from the Royal Television Society for 2001/2002. These days he is also presenter of Panorama and Points of View.

However, back to Radio 2. On January 6, 2003 Jeremy took over the news and music slot Jimmy Young had occupied illustriously for 29 years, playing ‘Thunder Road’ by Bruce Springsteen.

In 2005 he was named Speech Broadcaster Of The Year in the prestigious Sony Awards. He loves the show because it’s how he finds out what’s going on — the listeners tell him.

If you listen to it he would like to say thankyou.