Veteran newsreader and former host of the BBC’s Question TimeOf all the many news bulletins Peter Sissons read over a 45-year career with ITN, Channel Four and the
BBC, the one he will probably be remembered for is the Easter Saturday broadcast in 2002 when he told the nation that the
Queen Mother had died aged 101.
The programme showed Sissons, who has died aged 77, at his best: able to react immediately, live on air, to changing news. The fact that he did so while wearing a burgundy-coloured tie instead of a black one, however, produced a furore in the tabloid press, which used the trivial issue of the supposed insensitivity of his neckwear to indulge its traditional sport of berating the corporation.