John Stapleton obituary: The BBC and ITV stalwart who reported from war zones
The veteran broadcaster John Stapleton, who has died at 79, was a stalwart at the BBC and ITV where he presented current affairs and topical discussion shows across a lengthy career.
Born in Oldham in 1946, Stapleton began his career in newspapers, including shifts on The Daily Sketch in Manchester, before script writing on the BBC’s This Is Your Life.
He also worked on BBC current affairs show Nationwide in 1975, where he went on to become one of the show’s main presenters, working on the show until 1980.
During his time on Nationwide he carried out major investigations into council corruption in South Wales and protection rackets in Northern Ireland.
In the early 1980s he became a correspondent on the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight, reporting from trouble spots in the Middle East, El Salvador and Argentina during the Falklands War.
He also presented ITV’s TV-am, before returning to the BBC in 1986 to anchor the BBC’s consumer show Watchdog alongside his wife Lynn Faulds Wood until 1993.
Also in 1993, Stapleton returned to ITV to host live morning talk show The Time, The Place, and also featured on Sunday morning religious programme My Favourite Hymns.
He began co-hosting GMTV’s The News Hour with Penny Smith in 1998 shortly after hosting the monarchy debate for the channel in 1997, which took place in front of 3,000 people at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre.
ITV’s Monarchy debate led to 85 viewers’ complaints and “could not be regarded as a programme of high quality”, the television watchdog declared.
Stapleton continued on GMTV into the 2000s, where he won the Royal Television Society’s news presenter of the year for his work covering the war in Iraq in 2003, conducting interviews with leaders including then-prime minister Tony Blair.
In 2010, he joined ITV’s Daybreak as its special correspondent, and also served as a presenter at times. He continued on Good Morning Britain when it replaced Daybreak, before leaving the show in 2015.
Stapleton also worked in radio, standing in for presenters on LBC and has also appeared as a pundit for BBC News.
He met his then-teacher wife Faulds Wood in 1971 and the pair lived in St Margarets in London, and were married for 43 years before she died in 2020, following a stroke at the age of 72.
The couple met in a pub where she was a barmaid pulling pints, to supplement her income as a French teacher, and Stapleton asked her out to a restaurant in Richmond, which is where they had their wedding reception in 1977.
In 2024, Stapleton revealed he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease after discovering a tremor, prompting him to see a specialist who initially thought it was a benign essential tremor, before later diagnosing him with the disease.
He is survived by his son, Nick, who appears on BBC One’s Scam Interceptors.