Sir Charles Wheeler R.I.P.

BBC Director-General Mark Thompson led the tributes to Sir Charles Wheeler, one of the BBC’s most renowned correspondents, who died today aged 85. Mark Thompson said: “To audiences and to his colleagues alike Charles Wheeler was simply a legend. His integrity, his authority and his humanity graced the BBC’s airwaves over many decades. He is utterly irreplaceable but like everyone else, I am privileged to have worked with him.”

Deputy DG and Head of BBC Journalism Mark Byford said: “Charles was, in my view, the greatest broadcast journalist of his generation. Courageous, insightful and always curious, he had the truly outstanding gift for vivid, beautiful writing matched by a quite extraordinary skill for using pictures and sound to convey the power of his own eye witness reportage. As a journalist you saw him as the pinnacle of our profession. His death is a huge loss but his legacy will last forever.”

Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer said: “Charles Wheeler embodied all that is best in the BBC’s journalism. ”He had a brilliant eye and an unequalled ability to convey what he saw and what he knew. His work for Radio 4 over the last decade demonstrated his astonishing range – dealing with central and eastern Europe  - but also, and superbly, with the legacy at home of World War Two. The documentary series Coming Home in 2005 was the Radio 4 highlight that year.

“He was working for Radio 4 almost until he died, on a programme about the Dalai Lama. Everything he did was shot through with his compassion and wisdom. He was magnificent.”

Charles Wheeler was also well-known to listeners to the BBC World Service, where earlier in his career he had spent 11 years as a writer and reporter.

(Source: BBC Press Office)

• Read the obituary from BBC News