When TV journalist Bill Turnbull became the presenter of the BBC’s Breakfast program in 2001, he had years of experience as a reporter covering news from more than 30 countries.
That background gave Turnbull, who has died aged 66 after suffering from prostate cancer, the authority to come out of the studio on prime news occasions and to anchor the show from trouble spots in Britain and the ‘foreign, from King’s Cross train station in London after the 7/7/2005 attacks in New Orleans and Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in the same year. He was also in Washington for the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections and traveled around the UK during the 2010 general election.
In 2008, after seven years hosting weekend editions of Breakfast, he became a main weekday presenter, initially with Sian Williams as co-main presenter. “I sit on the couch with a variety of lovely partners and we try to guide our audience through the day in the most friendly and informative way possible,” he once said. His tenure coincided with the program moving from the BBC’s London studios to Salford in 2012. He last presented the program four years later.
Bill Turnbull and his co-presenter Susanna Reid on the BBC Breakfast sofa in 2012, the year the show moved to Salford. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA
Born in Guildford, Surrey, to William, a barrister of Scottish descent working in the City of London, and Honor (nee Wicks), a teacher, Turnbull was educated at Eton and, for a period while studying politics at the University of ‘Edinburgh, shared a flat with future Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He dropped out of college but was determined to pursue journalism after editing the student newspaper. So he trained at Cardiff University Center for Journalism Studies, where he “discovered the joys of radio” and graduated in 1978.
That year Turnbull joined Radio Clyde in Glasgow as a trainee journalist and in 1980 switched to commercial London stations LBC and Capital Radio before moving to the US as a freelancer. This led him to produce a 1985 documentary about the problems facing the New York Underground for BBC Radio 4’s Actuality series. A year later, Turnbull became a reporter for the Today program on Chain.
Bill Turnbull at the 2011 Conservative Party conference in Manchester. His years of reporting experience gave him the authority to step out of the BBC Breakfast studio and broadcast live. Photograph: Mark Makela/Corbis/Getty Images
In 1988 he moved to BBC television on Breakfast Time (later renamed Breakfast News, then Breakfast) and two years later began contributing to its main national news programmes. During this time he reported on the Lockerbie disaster in 1988 and the Romanian revolution the following year.
As a Washington correspondent for four years (1994-98), he covered the OJ Simpson murder trial, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but said live reporting on a hurricane of Florida stuck in his mind. .
He returned to Britain in 1998, becoming a presenter on BBC News Channel 24 and, from 1999 to 2001, on Radio 5 Live’s weekend breakfast show. Although he later presented the Friday to Sunday editions of Breakfast on television, he was a stand-in newsreader on BBC One’s 6pm bulletin from 2003 to 2005.
The breakfast turned Turnbull into a personality, leading to guest appearances on Children in Need, as a panellist on Through the Keyhole in 2008 and partnering professional ballroom dancer Karen Hardy on the series 2005-06 of Strictly Come Dancing. In 2011, he and Williams were seen interviewing Charles Dickens (played by Simon Callow) in the Doctor Who story The Wedding of River Song.
He presented Songs of Praise (2012-14) and quiz show Think Tank (2016), and narrated the children’s comedy show Class Dismissed (2016). In 2016, two months after leaving Breakfast, he started presenting his own weekend radio show on Classic FM.
In 2017, shortly after taping an appearance on The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer, Turnbull was diagnosed with incurable prostate cancer that had spread to his leg bones, hips, pelvis and ribs. He said he had experienced aches and pains for about a year, but had put them down to “old age.” He subsequently campaigned for men to seek early diagnosis of prostate cancer.
He reunited with his former Breakfast co-presenter Susanna Reid to present Good Morning Britain on ITV for three days in 2021 and hosted his final Classic FM show at the end of the year.
In 2016, two months after leaving BBC Breakfast, Bill Turnbull began presenting his own weekend radio show on Classic FM. Photo: Classic FM/PA
Away from the TV studios, Turnbull was a fan of Wycombe Wanderers football club, commentating home games online for many years, and a keen beekeeper who sometimes auctioned honey for charity. “Beekeeping gives me a lot of pleasure,” he said. “There’s a Zen-like calm you get when you go to a colony, open a beehive and the sun is shining. It puts you in a good mood and takes you out of yourself.”
Dressed in his full beekeeper outfit to run the 2005 London Marathon, appeared on Celebrity Mastermind in 2008 with beekeeping as his specialty topic, wrote a book, The Bad Beekeepers Club (2010) and hosted a 2013 Horizon documentary titled What’s Killing Our Bees. ?
Turnbull is survived by his wife, Sesi (Sarah) McCombie, a producer and BBC radio presenter, whom he married in 1988, and their three children, Henry, Will and Flora.
William Robert Jolyon Turnbull, journalist and television presenter, born 25 January 1956; died on August 31, 2022