Cherry Farrow, who has died aged 81, had a long and successful international media career – but then, in the middle of it all, she suddenly quit to join the voluntary and charity sector.
She was every inch the media professional – journalist, feature writer, press officer, current affairs TV researcher, scriptwriter, director and programme producer – and she had an agile mind to go with it.
Cherry was born in Northampton, to Harold Farrow, an estate agent and auctioneer, and Gladys (nee Cox). In the late 1950s, after attending school in Shepperton, Surrey, she went to Kingston Polytechnic to study journalism.
In the late 1960s and early 70s Cherry was a London-based researcher for the CBS programme 60 Minutes, setting up stories in Africa and the Middle East for Dan Rather and Morley Safer. She then joined the BBC, working first on Whicker’s World, then One Pair of Eyes with the journalist James Cameron.
Cherry’s career was high-octane and varied; she thrived on deadlines, pressure and swearing (troopers came nowhere near her output). But in the early 80s she gave it all up, took a nutrition course and joined VSO, where she became a field officer in Papua New Guinea.
In the two years she was there, Cherry travelled throughout the Pacific islands, writing a book, Pacific Odyssey, along the way. But this was no ordinary travel narrative. For example: “If there was an earthly paradise, and some of the islands certainly came near it, then it was for white men – not for the islanders who had been robbed, exploited and brutalised over many years. The realities were, and are, gold before coconuts, oil before fishing rights, and nuclear weapons before human rights.”
Back in the UK, Cherry returned to television and became associate producer on David Munro’s Central Television anti-war trilogy The Four Horsemen (1986), which exposed the imbalance between arms and aid, war and famine. In his book of the series, Munro wrote: “[She] put up with my single-mindedness and impulsiveness … was always there over three sometimes difficult years, throughout which she managed against great odds to talk some sense into me.”
In a further career move she turned to the environment, joining WWF-UK and, later, the RSPB, as a media and policy adviser. She worked on meaty subjects such as the Kyoto protocol, EU common fisheries policy, Cop processes and the Doha climate change agreement, and was in her element.
In retirement, Cherry found online university courses in language, art and history, and, once immersed, she would head to the local library to pick up an armful of relevant books. She also loved cinema, theatre, friends, restaurants and gardening.
She is survived by her older sister, Joy Jelffs.
