page_title: Nick Ross
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Nick Ross / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Nick Ross
context_page_description: Nicholas David Ross is a British radio and television presenter. During the 1980s and 90s he was one of the most ubiquitous of British broadcasters but is best known for hosting of the BBC TV show Crimewatch which he left on 2 July 2007 after 23 years. He has subsequently filmed a major series for BBC One and has made documentaries for Radio 4. He is chairman, president, trustee or patron of a large number of charities.
context_section_description: He began working part-time for the BBC in Northern Ireland while still a student and reported on the violence as the Troubles became acute. He returned to London and presented British radio programmes such as the BBC's The World at One, PM and The World Tonight, and moved to TV in 1979 as a reporter for Man Alive on BBC Two. He made several documentaries in a brief stint as a director and producer. The Biggest Epidemic of Our Times was a powerful polemic on road accidents which was made for Man Alive but transferred to BBC1. It was later described as a broadcast that "would transform road safety," and according to another commentator, by reframing the whole concept of road safety Ross's campaigning changed public attitudes and public policy to such an extent that, "in significant consequence British mortality rates of people under 50 are among the lowest in the world." Ross also produced and directed two programmes on drug addiction, The Fix and The Cure, most famous for following an addict called Gina. He presented a law series Out of Court in this period as well as large-scale studio debates.
  He was on the presenting team of a short-lived early evening news programme Sixty Minutes which began in 1983, and was intended as a replacement for Nationwide, but proved an unwieldy format. In the same period he was a founder presenter of the BBC's Breakfast Time on BBC 1, the first regular such programme in this timeslot, from its launch in early 1983, with Frank Bough and Selina Scott, as well as launching Watchdog as a prime time stand-alone consumer series.
  Crimewatch (based on a German prototype) began in 1984, and made him a household name in the UK and his regular sign-off, "Don't have nightmares, do sleep well", became a well-known catch-phrase. In 1989 he was asked to present BBC Radio 4's Tuesday morning phone-in, the name of which was changed from Tuesday Call to Call Nick Ross. He resigned in 1997 for reasons that have never been made clear, but not before picking up an award as best radio presenter of the year. During the 1991 Gulf War he was a volunteer presenter on the BBC Radio 4 News FM service.
  He was attracted by Channel 4 for a time to present A Week in Politics, and then moved to cover the BBC's live broadcasts of parliament in Westminster with Nick Ross. (At one stage in the 1990s he was often doing three mainstream live programmes a day such as Call Nick Ross, Westminster with Nick Ross and Crimewatch.) As one of the star BBC presenters he was used widely in a variety of formats including chat shows, travel programmes and debates, but he was most at home in live studios, often orchestrating large-scale debates. In 2000 he presented a general knowledge quiz called The Syndicate, aired on BBC 1 which pitted two teams across three rounds on general knowledge, but the show's format could not compete with The Weakest Link.
  His co-presenter, Jill Dando, was murdered in 1999 and Ross started a campaign to commemorate her, culminating in the establishment of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London (see Away from broadcasting, below).
  In late 2007, Ross left Crimewatch, soon followed by his co-presenter Fiona Bruce. The replacement presenter, Kirsty Young, was 21 years younger than Ross and the BBC were accused of ageism over these changes. His 23 years as the main Crimewatch anchor marks him as one of the longest-serving presenters of a continuous series in TV history.
  He spent a year creating a major BBC One series The Truth About Crime which aired in mid-2009 and explained the fall in crime rates and how offending can be reduced further. The show was described by The Times as an "outstanding... sane, insightful and compellingly argued documentary series."
  He has since been making other TV shows, such as Secrets of the Crime Museum and science programmes for BBC Radio 4 including an acclaimed re-examination of the Chernobyl disaster "Fallout: the Legacy of Chernobyl". His written journalism has included a re-examination of the Air France Flight 447 air crash that provoked controvers
caption: Ross in the BBC Crimewatch studio in 2016.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:05:14 11:17:01", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5050", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1708", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2534"}