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Rippon on the BBC Nine O\u2019Clock News in the 1970sBBC<\/p>\nWalking through a recently opened private members\u2019 club in west London with Angela Rippon gives you a flavour of life as a national treasure. Everyone knows her name. All of the twentysomething staff beam as she approaches, call her Angela and rush to help her with her smallest request. Of course, private members\u2019 clubs are professionally nice. But I\u2019ve walked through them with movie stars and rock stars and politicians and not one of them has been greeted as warmly as Angela Rippon.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a first for me. But then, Rippon is all about firsts, including being the first to undercut herself when you remind her of her achievements. She was the first journalist to interview Margaret Thatcher after she became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 \u2014 \u201cWe were in a bunch when she stepped out of the car. They were all bigger and stronger than me, but I had stilettos and sharp elbows.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
She was the first female newsreader to become a regular presenter of the BBC Nine O\u2019Clock News in the same year \u2014 \u201cNan Winton did it in the Sixties when they just had bulletins. I was the first woman journalist on a full news programme. It\u2019s extraordinary that it was odd for me to do the news, but I\u2019m always thrilled when a woman comes up to me and says, \u2018I used to watch you reading the news when I was doing my homework and thought, if she could do that I can do anything.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rippon on the BBC Nine O\u2019Clock News in the 1970sBBC<\/p>\n
And of course, she was the first newsreader to dance on prime-time television \u2014 a moment on the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special that\u2019s passed so deep into national legend you forget how spectacular her high-kicking, hip-swinging routine really was, in the days long before celebrity dance shows. \u201cI went to dance school from about 4 or 5 until I was 17 so I knew how to do it,\u201d she says, swatting away the compliment.<\/p>\n
At 81 and looking immaculate in a black trouser suit with her trademark short silver \u2019do, Rippon shows no sign of slowing down. She\u2019s still working full-time, so weekends are a vague and amorphous concept to her. \u201cFor whatever reason people still quite like working with me,\u201d she says with a shrug. \u201cI don\u2019t have a partner, I don\u2019t have a husband, I don\u2019t have children. I\u2019m a single woman, I\u2019m still fit and I actually love what I do. I can work peculiar hours, peculiar times and have a peculiar work schedule, so while the phone rings and there\u2019s a wonderful challenge on the end of it, why would I not do it?\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year she took her Let\u2019s Dance! initiative \u2014 a campaign to get people of all ages moving, inspired by her time on BBC\u2019s Strictly Come Dancing in 2023 \u2014 to the Eden Project in Cornwall. She was (of course) the first journalist to report on the eco-charity in 1998, when it was still a clay quarry pit. \u201cI was there in wellies and a hard hat trying to explain this incredible vision of domes with climates from at least three different parts of the world.\u201d She shakes her head. \u201cAs a jingoistic West Country woman, what a lovely thing for the West Country to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
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On Strictly Come Dancing in 2023BBC\/Guy Levy<\/p>\n