Charles Wheeler was born in 1923, only a year after the BBC itself. For many the veteran reporter, who died on Friday from lung cancer, aged 85, will always personify the corporation at its best — authoritative, with unquestionable integrity and at times inconveniently independent of mind.
Tributes swelled to a man once described as ”the reporter’s reporter”, whose BBC career began in 1947 as a subeditor on the Latin American service and who was still working, on a Radio 4 documentary about the Dalai Lama, almost until the time of his death.
Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, said Wheeler was ”simply a legend … he is utterly irreplaceable”.
John Humphrys called him ”just a brilliant correspondent. We shall never have a better one. It was his huge knowledge, his extraordinary intelligence. He could cut through any complex story in minutes. But he was also the bloke at the back of the theatre chucking bottles at the stage because he distrusted power.”
Over six decades it seemed there was scarcely a big news story that Wheeler was not involved in, covering the cold war from Berlin in the 1950s, the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet after the Chinese invasion in 1959, the Watergate scandal from Washington and the beginnings of the European community in the 1970s.
He was recalled to work on Panorama and later the newly launched Newsnight, but in time returned to reporting, sending memorable dispatches from Kuwait and northern Iraq after the first Gulf war. In 2004 he reported on the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, recalling his own experience as a young marine watching the landings from a ship just offshore.
Martin Bell, the former BBC journalist and MP, said Wheeler ”set the standard to which broadcast journalists of my generation all aspired”.
”He was no swashbuckler — quite unlike like his heirs and successors who tend to put themselves at the centre of the story. TV news was not then a department of show business.”
Wheeler’s opinionated dispatches at times made him an uncomfortable colleague. ”I was told that some of his work drew sharp intakes of breath from the senior managers of the time,” Bell recalled, ”for they had no taste for controversial journalism, but to their credit they let him get on with it.”
In 2000 Wheeler accused the corporation of dumbing down and argued it had ”lost its way in news”. Some years earlier he had forced the then head of news Tony Hall into allocating more resources to news gathering after Wheeler criticised the fledgling News 24 channel. On Friday Hall, now chief executive of the Royal Opera House, described him as ”the great TV reporter of our time”.
”If you are running a TV programme, or if you are watching TV, there are a few people who you know you have just got to watch or listen to because what they have to say is going to be right. That was Charles.” – guardian.co.uk