John Tidmarsh

Who is John Tidmarsh?

John Alan Tidmarsh, O.B.E., born 13 August 1928 in King's College Hospital, Camberwell, is a British broadcaster and journalist who spent 10 years with domestic radio and television and more than 30 with the BBC World Service magazine programme Outlook.

An evacuee during the early years of the Second World War, he went to three different grammar schools before joining his parents in Bristol for his final school years at Cotham Grammar School. He left school at 16 to become a junior reporter with the Western Daily Press. At 18 he left to do two years of National Service and spoke into a microphone for the first time when he became a radio operator in the Royal Air Force, serving one year at RAF Seletar in Singapore.

Back in Bristol with the Western Daily Press in the autumn of 1948 he began to specialise in sport, reporting each week on Bristol Rovers. After doing a "live" commentary one Saturday for the newly created Hospital Radio Service, the BBC Controller in West Region, the former war correspondent Frank Gillard, offered him a job, initially as a resident freelance, reporting and presenting the regional magazine The Week in the West.