The TV journalist John Stapleton, who has died aged 79 of pneumonia after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, had a career that spanned reporting and presenting on both the BBC and ITV, in peak-time, breakfast and daytime slots.
He was a popular, friendly face on breakfast TV for more than three decades. After reporting for the BBC’s Nationwide, Panorama and Newsnight, he experienced a baptism of fire on switching channels to join TV-am on Good Morning Britain in 1983 in the months following its disastrous start.
The ITV breakfast service’s so-called Famous Five presenters, David Frost, Anna Ford, Angela Rippon, Michael Parkinson and Robert Kee, had failed to woo viewers with their up-market approach in competition with Breakfast Time on the BBC.
Despite turning around the ratings war with new presenters, a keep-fit spot with “Mad Lizzie” Webb and the puppet rodent Roland Rat, TV-am had scant resources for news coverage and was ordered by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, then the regulator for commercial television, to tackle the issue after the IRA bombing of the Grand hotel in Brighton during the Conservative party conference in 1984.
With no cameras on the scene and no agreement with ITN, ITV’s news provider, it was left to the reliable Stapleton to phone through reports to the studio while the BBC screened pictures of the carnage.
He also occasionally stood in as a presenter of Good Morning Britain, but returned to the BBC in 1986 to join his wife, Lynn Faulds Wood, as joint presenter of Watchdog. He replaced Nick Ross, who had partnered her since the previous year, when the show championing consumer rights began as a stand-alone programme after proving to be a popular feature on Nationwide and then on Sixty Minutes. The husband-and-wife TV duo tackled red tape, hazardous goods, fraud and many other issues raised by viewers. They also mounted successful campaigns to abolish air fuel surcharges and inoculate babies against Hib meningitis.
During his time on Watchdog (1986 to 1993, when Faulds Wood also left), Stapleton was also a presenter of the BBC’s Breakfast Time (1988-89), often alongside Jeremy Paxman.
In 1990, he started alternating with Mike Scott as host of the ITV morning audience debate show The Time, The Place, moving around the country to discuss topical – sometimes taboo – issues, and was the sole presenter from 1993.
“How would you feel about the sight of two gay people walking down the aisle?” was one question he posed. “He kept the pot boiling without ever seeming to favour either side of the debate,” wrote one critic, “and he skilfully pulled the discussion back to the main point when it was in danger of being sidetracked.”
When The Time, The Place ended in 1998, Stapleton was offered the job of co-presenting the opening News Hour show on TV-am’s replacement, GMTV, alongside Penny Smith. He was given the Royal Television Society’s 2003 news presenter of the year award – a rare distinction for one on breakfast television – for his contribution to coverage of the Iraq war and interviews with Tony Blair and other party leaders.
In 2010, a year after ITV gained full control of the breakfast service and turned News Hour and the flagship show GMTV into Daybreak, Stapleton became a special correspondent covering breaking news stories on location.
“I’m going back to doing what I love best,” he said, “and, after 12 years of getting up at 3.45am, I’m looking forward to having a few lie-ins.” Again, he occasionally stood in as a main presenter.
Another revamp saw Daybreak replaced by Good Morning Britain (borrowing from the original TV-am title) in 2014, but he decided to leave the following year, ending a breakfast television career in which he had demonstrated a professionalism that enabled him to fit into any role.
Stapleton was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to June (nee Dale), a teacher, and Frank Stapleton, secretary of a local co-operative, and educated at Hulme grammar school and St John’s College of Further Education, Manchester.
Aged 17, he became a reporter on the Eccles and Patricroft Journal before moving to the Oldham Evening Chronicle and getting national newspaper experience on the Daily Sketch, first in its Manchester office, then in London.
He joined the ITV London company Thames Television in 1970 as a researcher on This Is Your Life. A stint as a reporter on its regional news programme, Today, followed from 1971 to 1975 before he switched to the BBC’s early evening news magazine Nationwide (1975-80), both reporting and presenting.
A move to the current affairs series Panorama (1980-81), including programmes on neo-fascist terrorism in Italy, the PLO, and unemployment in Britain, was slightly less satisfying for a journalist who preferred the cut and thrust of daily news reporting to spending weeks exploring issues behind the stories. “I was not ideally suited to the long, painstaking inquiry, reflecting on this and that,” he said. “Panorama felt it had to have a pompous air.”
He was happier on the BBC’s Newsnight (1982-83), when he reported from Argentina during the Falklands war.
On leaving TV-am, he presented the BBC regional news programme London Plus (1986-87) as well as Watchdog before joining Breakfast Time, then fronted Newsline (1989-90), a three-nights-a-week current affairs programme on Sky News.
Stapleton met Faulds Wood in a Richmond pub, where she was working part-time behind the bar to supplement her work as a French teacher before entering television. They married in 1977.
In 1991, she was diagnosed with stage-three bowel cancer, but she was given the all-clear five years later and became an avid campaigner for better diagnosis. Ill health returned later and, although she survived skin cancer, Faulds Wood died of a stroke in 2020 after suffering from an auto-immune disease, Hughes syndrome. Stapleton revealed in 2024 that he had Parkinson’s disease.
He is survived by his son, Nick, who followed in his parents’ footsteps by becoming a television journalist specialising in consumer issues, best known as a presenter of Scam Interceptors.
• John Martin Stapleton, television reporter and presenter, born 24 February 1946; died 21 September 2025
