Bill Turnbull obituary

When the television journalist Bill Turnbull became a presenter of the BBC’s Breakfast programme in 2001, he had years of experience behind him 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 step out of the studio on major news occasions and to anchor the programme from trouble spots in Britain and abroad – from King’s Cross railway station in London following the 7/7 bombings of 2005 to 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 travelled around the UK during the 2010 general election.

In 2008, after seven years of hosting weekend editions of Breakfast, he became a main weekday presenter, initially with Sian Williams as his principal co-host. “I sit on the sofa with a variety of delightful partners and we try to guide our audience into the day in as friendly and informative a manner as possible,” he once said. His tenure coincided with the programme’s move from the BBC’s London studios to Salford in 2012. He presented the show for the last time 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 who worked in the City of London, and Honor (nee Wicks), a teacher, Turnbull was educated at Eton and, for a term while studying politics at Edinburgh University, shared a flat with the future prime minister Gordon Brown. He abandoned his degree but was determined to go into journalism after editing the student newspaper. So he trained at the Cardiff University Centre 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 reporter and in 1980 he switched to the London commercial stations LBC and Capital Radio before moving to the US as a freelance. This led him to produce a 1985 documentary about problems faced by the New York subway for BBC Radio 4’s Actuality series. A year later Turnbull became a reporter on the network’s Today programme.

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 Washington correspondent for four years (1994-98), he covered the OJ Simpson murder trial, the bombing of Oklahoma City and the Monica Lewinsky scandal – but said that a rain-drenched live report on a Florida hurricane stuck in his mind the most.

He returned to Britain in 1998, becoming a presenter on the BBC’s fledgling News 24 channel and additionally, from 1999 to 2001, Radio 5 Live’s weekend breakfast show. While subsequently presenting Friday to Sunday editions of Breakfast on television, he was a stand-in newsreader on BBC One’s 6pm bulletin between 2003 and 2005.

Breakfast made Turnbull a personality, which led to guest appearances on Children in Need, as a panellist on Through the Keyhole in 2008, and partnering the professional ballroom dancer Karen Hardy in the 2005-06 series 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 the quiz show Think Tank (2016), and narrated the children’s comedy sketch show Class Dismissed (2016). In 2016, two months after leaving Breakfast, he began hosting his own weekend radio show on Classic FM.

In 2017, shortly after recording an appearance on The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer, Turnbull was diagnosed with incurable prostate cancer that had spread to the bones in his legs, hips, pelvis and ribs. He said that 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 was reunited with his former Breakfast co-anchor Susanna Reid to present Good Morning Britain on ITV for three days in 2021 and hosted his last Classic FM show later in the year.

In 2016, two months after leaving BBC Breakfast, Bill Turnbull began hosting his own weekend radio show on Classic FM. Photograph: Classic FM/PA

Away from the TV studios, Turnbull was a fan of Wycombe Wanderers football club, commentating on home games online for many years, and a keen beekeeper who sometimes auctioned honey for charity. “Beekeeping brings me so much pleasure,” he said. “There’s a zen-like calm that you get when you go to a colony, open up a hive and the sun is shining. It puts you in a good mood and takes you out of yourself.”

He dressed in his full beekeeper’s outfit to run the 2005 London Marathon, appeared on Celebrity Mastermind in 2008 with beekeeping as his specialist subject, wrote a book, The Bad Beekeepers Club (2010), and presented a 2013 Horizon documentary titled What’s Killing Our Bees?

Turnbull is survived by his wife, Sesi (Sarah) McCombie, a BBC radio producer and 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 31 August 2022