World
Oliver Scott obituary
Other lives: Radio presenter who was a natural commander of the microphone
Read full story on theguardian.com →Tim Llewellyn24 Aug 2026, 04:36 pmUpdated 5h ago3 min readMediaMedia
Media — Tim Llewellyn
EBENEZERMy friend and colleague Oliver Scott, who has died aged 81, arrived fresh to broadcasting when he joined the BBC Radio 4 programme Financial World Tonight in the late 1970s, from the Reuters news agency.
The towering, RP-voiced Ollie quickly put at ease those young studio teams who had to familiarise him with razor blades, magnetic tape, and “miniature” tape recorders the size of suitcases: he proved a fast learner and a natural commander of the microphone. He was more fun to be with than was perhaps always good for him, in the post-broadcast decompression chambers of the pubs of Fitzrovia, near Broadcasting House in London.
Ollie straddled with characteristic ease presenters’ and reporters’ roles at such poles of BBC news as Radio 1’s Newsbeat and The World Tonight on Radio 4. He found his lasting home at Bush House at the top of the Strand, headquarters of the BBC World Service from 1941 to 2012, where he became one of the most articulate and searching presenters of the daily current affairs programmes Newshour and Twenty-Four Hours.
He had that knack of making clarity out of fog: my heart would lift when, as a foreign correspondent, the producer would say: “We’re putting you through to the studio … it’s Ollie Scott.” He would ask the right questions and take the story as far forward as it needed to go.
Born in Edinburgh, to John Scott, then a senior civil servant in the wartime Ministry of Aircraft Production, and Helen Whittaker, also a civil servant, Ollie was educated at Westminster school, London, where he became an enthusiast for both church architecture and Chelsea Football Club, the latter a lifelong addiction. He went to Hertford College, Oxford, in 1964, to study French and German, but quit before graduating for a crack at journalism, joining Reuters in 1968.
After foreign postings in Frankfurt and Zurich, and a spell in Washington, where he defected for a while to an American investment bank, Ollie returned to Britain and embarked on his broadcasting career at BBC news, presiding over the microphone and illuminating and enlivening foreign affairs for worldwide audiences until 2005.
Away from London he relished the family house in Tregaron in west Wales and the fishing that went with it. And he learned Welsh.
He married Berit Hanssen, a Norwegian who worked for Nato, in Brussels in 1970. They had a daughter, Millicent, and divorced in the late 1980s. In 1991, he married Sarah Touquet, a journalist and editor, with whom he had a son, Jack, and twin daughters, Eleanor and Isobel. Ollie’s health deteriorated after 2012 when he broke his leg, and later developed a progressive and incurable lung condition.
He is survived by Sarah, his four children, two grandchildren, and his brother, Tim.
The towering, RP-voiced Ollie quickly put at ease those young studio teams who had to familiarise him with razor blades, magnetic tape, and “miniature” tape recorders the size of suitcases: he proved a fast learner and a natural commander of the microphone. He was more fun to be with than was perhaps always good for him, in the post-broadcast decompression chambers of the pubs of Fitzrovia, near Broadcasting House in London.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Tim Llewellyn. Published 24 Aug 2026, 04:36 pm.
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