This is taken from a BBC Press Release:

Nick Clarke, presenter of Radio 4's The World at One, has died, aged 58
Date: 23.11.2006


Nick Clarke, presenter of BBC Radio 4's The World at One, has died, aged 58.

Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, said: "I am deeply saddened by this news. Nick was not only a terrific colleague, but also a great friend, whom I worked with over a number of years.

"He was one of the BBC's finest broadcasters and a brilliant political interviewer, who was also a great listener. Nick's interviewing style was penetrating but unfailingly courteous.

"This is a very sad day for the BBC and for Radio 4 listeners. All our thoughts are with Nick's family."

Mark Damazer, Controller, Radio 4, also paid tribute: "Nick Clarke was a Radio 4 colossus. He embodied what Radio 4 stands for and his audience knew and appreciated it.

"He was fearless, superbly informed, scrupulously impartial, and wonderfully charming.

"Every weekday for 13 years on the World at One he probed and challenged his interviewees. Nick combined unremitting intellectual courage with unfailing courtesy. Always.

"We have lost a supreme champion of Radio 4 - and the BBC. We owe him much."

Colin Hancock, Editor of The World at One (WATO), said: "Nick was the most brilliant interviewer I've ever known.

"He had an instinct for exactly the right approach, every time: never hectoring or offending, always probing in precisely the right areas.

"More than that, he absolutely believed that everything we did on The World At One mattered, inspiring all of us to think more rigorously and chase harder.

"Our listeners rightly saw WATO as Nick's programme. They, his colleagues and public service broadcasting have suffered a great loss.

"Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with Barbara and the family."

Simon Elmes, who produced the Nick Clarke audio diary programme Fighting to be Normal, said: "Until making the documentary about his illness, Fighting to be Normal, earlier this year, I had only ever known Nick as a wonderful voice on the radio and a BBC party-acquaintance.

"But working closely with him I felt the searing incisiveness of his journalistic intelligence, his fearsome honesty, not least about himself and his condition and - just as pervasive - his wry, often dark, sense of humour.

"It was a huge privilege to share his story and to be allowed very close to his and Barbara's lives through very difficult moments and it made me understand just why Nick - and Barbara - inspired such love in those who knew them personally, and in Radio 4 listeners."

Mary Hockaday, Deputy Head BBC Radio News, said: "Nick Clarke was for many years one of the most important and instantly recognisable voices of BBC Radio News.

"His civility combined with independence of mind and political acuity made him hugely liked and respected by audiences and colleagues alike.

"He will be greatly missed by the whole Radio News family."

Jenny Abramsky, Director, BBC Radio & Music, said: "Nick was the consummate radio broadcaster – rigorous, fair, polite and tough.

"He had a warmth that made listeners feel he was their champion and their friend. He had breadth and a curiosity to appreciate the wider world beyond politics.

"Listeners loved him and Radio 4 is the poorer for his loss."

Helen Boaden, Director of BBC News, said: "Nick was a superb journalist of enormous integrity.

"He had a brilliantly forensic mind, a wry wit and a deep instinct for the power of language.

"It's hard to imagine Radio 4 or BBC journalism without him."

Mark Byford, Deputy Director-General and head of BBC Journalism, said: "Nick Clarke will be remembered as one of the BBC's greatest ever broadcasters.

"I admired him hugely as an outstanding journalist and as a brilliant interviewer. I will remember him for his great style, intelligence and precision with words, matched by the fantastic focus he brought to the subject matter in hand.

"He was so greatly loved and admired by both his audiences and by his colleagues.

"Today my deepest sympathies go to his wife and family."

Michael Grade, Chairman of the BBC, said: "Nick Clarke was one of the outstanding broadcast journalists of his generation, and held in great respect by his Radio 4 audience.

"His series of audio diaries, in which he chronicled events both emotional and physical during the course of his illness, provided one of the most moving and courageous broadcasts in memory.

"He will be greatly missed by his family, his audiences and by all of his friends, colleagues and admirers within the BBC. This is a very sad day."

Nick Clarke had presented The World At One since March 1994, after five years on The World This Weekend.

He was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2005, which resulted in the amputation of his left leg.

His highly personal audio diary, Fighting to be Normal, which charted his and his wife Barbara's experience with his illness, was broadcast on Radio 4 on 23 June 2006.

After chemotherapy treatment he returned to presenting in June 2006 - chairing Radio 4's Any Questions? and lunchtime news programme The World at One.

He had recently been undergoing further medical treatment.

Nick began his career as a journalist with the Yorkshire Evening Post where he spent three years as a trainee reporter.

In 1973 he joined the BBC as a reporter in Manchester and in 1976 became Industrial Correspondent which involved reporting for what was then the Nine O'clock News on BBC One.

Three years later, Nick moved to The Money Programme on BBC Two where he stayed for five years before joining the Newsnight team as a reporter, presenter and political correspondent.

Nick also chaired Radio 4's Round Britain Quiz, regularly presided over Radio 4's Any Questions, and had also presented Business Breakfast on BBC One.

Nick had been involved in a wide range of other BBC ventures – from TV documentary programmes like The Risk Business to the prestigious Radio 4 series Legacy of Empire.

He won the Voice of the Listener and Viewer award for Best Individual Contributor to Radio (1999) and was voted Broadcaster of the Year (2000) by the Broadcasting Press Guild.

Nick's best-selling biography of the veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke was published in October 1999.

His book The Shadow of a Nation was published in May 2003.

Nick was born in Godalming, Surrey in 1948, and educated at Bradfield College, Berkshire and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge where he studied modern languages.

This is taken from The Guardian:

A gentleman of the airwaves
by Maggie Brown
Thursday November 23, 2006

There was an endearing quality to Nick Clarke - he was someone you always wanted to hear more of on air. Fearless though he could be as a presenter and journalist, he was courteous, almost old school, and never without a twinkle in his eye.

When you were interviewed by him on The World at One, you expected to be tested, but not beaten up. If he had any questions on areas which had not been previously discussed when you were booked, he'd ask you if it was all right to raise them. He was a gentleman of the airwaves. Radio 4 personified.

When I heard of his death today I immediately remembered the miniscule Christmas card he had sent me the year Mark Thompson rejoined the BBC as director general in 2004, with a fierce cost cutting agenda. The message Nick penned inside, in tiny handwriting, said it all: "This card is 15% smaller."

He was also full of smiles and courage the last time I saw him, at a public event, Jenny Abramsky's summer party in June. He had lost all his hair, was thin, pale, and was forced to sit in an armchair by the exit rather than circulate, but he didn't let that stop him from a good media gossip.

I also thought about the occasional late lunches after the show he'd invited me to at the Groucho Club, Soho, washed down with a nice bottle of claret.

He was perennially disappointed that The World at One was not allowed to stray beyond 1.30pm but also proud of presenting Round Britain Quiz and standing in on Any Questions. And, knowing my love of children, he quickly shared the latest photo of his twin boys: he adored them.

But I think there was a yearning, even mournful side to Nick.

His father had been on the London Evening Standard in the 1950s, creating John Clarke's Casebook from the law courts using material about petty crimes that had a Dickensian ring to them.

Nick's quasi autobiography, The Shadow of a Nation - the Changing Face of Britain, published in 2003, looked back across 50 years and pondered what had happened to the solid Britain of the 1950s - he was brought up in Haslemere, then Bishop's Stortford.

It was a period, he wrote, when "everyone knew where they were and who they were", phone calls were an extravagance, cars had starting handles and Sundays, including morning church, were quite different from the rest of the week.

Nick Clarke was a fixture of the modern media and political world, but he remained his own man, thoughtful, a trifle ironic, detached. A very distinctive broadcaster.

This is taken from The Times, November 24, 2006:

Nick Clarke
June 9, 1948 - November 23, 2006
Broadcaster who brought his own thoughtful style to presenting the BBC radio news programme The World at One

A thoughtful and sensitive man, Nick Clarke brought to the lunchtime BBC radio news programme, The World at One, which he fronted for 12 years from 1994, a quality of impartiality that is not always associated with television and radio presenters. He notably eschewed the confrontational style of such distinguished predecessors as the late Robin Day, whose “Chuck it Roy!” (to Roy Hattersley) set a benchmark for interviewer intolerance in the 1980s.

It was Clarke’s belief that listening to what interviewees had to say before assailing their logic was more likely to benefit the listener — for whom, after all, the exercise was being conducted. He hated hectoring, and even interrupting. “I believe it’s always possible to find a pause, however microscopic, into which a question can be inserted,” was his watchword.

These qualities made him a particularly good, because unobtrusive, presenter of Round Britain Quiz and Any Questions, on those occasions when he stood in for their regular presenters.

Clarke had come to radio from newspapers and television, where he had been a reporter for the BBC’s Money Programme, and a correspondent and presenter for Newsnight. The move from television was not merely a rueful acceptance of necessity. Radio proved to be his metier.

For one thing, it was a good medium for a rich speaking voice nurtured by acting at school and at Cambridge. And he found that the greater length of time that could be devoted to each topic was far more conducive to teasing out a coherent examination of whatever issue might be under discussion. At the time, he was aware of the danger of allowing any interview to “drown in a brown broth of words, delivered by experts”. As he daily considered the content of the forthcoming broadcast he liked to rehearse the programme’s credo: “What is the object here?”

Nicholas Campbell Clarke was born at Godalming in Surrey, in 1948. Though acting attracted him, journalism was always likely to beckon most strongly. His father, John Clarke, who was to die of cancer when Nick was 18, was cricket correspondent for the Evening Standard. His mother Ruth died 16 years ago, also of cancer.

Clarke went to the Barn School, Much Hadham, Essex, where he was learning French and Latin from the age of 6. From there he went away to prep school at Westbourne House, near Chichester, where his acting career began as the dragon’s head in The Dragon Who Liked Peppermints.

From Westbourne House he won a scholarship to Bradfield College, Berkshire, then under the rule of the redoubtable Anthony Chenevix-Trench, later to go to Eton. At Bradfield, with its stone amphitheatre, drama soon had Clarke in thrall. He played the lead in Euripides’ Hippolytus — “400-and-something lines in Greek which I did not understand a word of” — and Macduff in a notable Macbeth in which he and the protagonist elected to extend the final fight to ten minutes in pouring rain, while the long-suffering audience longed for their misery to be put to an end.

At Fitzwilliam College, Camridge, he read French and German, threw himself into drama, and resuscitated the almost moribund magazine Broadsheet.

Like his father he began in journalism on the Yorkshire Evening Post. In 1973 he joined BBC NorthWest in Manchester where for the next six years he was a reporter and then industrial correspondent.

In 1980 he joined the BBC’s Money Programme, from where he joined the Newsnight team in 1986. His introduction to radio came with The World This Weekend, which he presented from 1989.

The crowning appointment of his career came with his translation to The World at One. The mantle of its dynamic founder-presenter William Hardcastle had been borne by some equally charismatic figures over the years, but Clarke was content to conduct the programme’s affairs in his own style, making himself no less formidable an inquisitor in the process.

In 1999 he was voted the Voice of the Listener and Viewer’s Radio Broadcaster of the Year, and in 2000 he was voted Broadcaster of the Year by the Broadcasting Press Guild.

Clarke was the author of two books. Alistair Cooke: The Biography (1999) was regarded as a magisterial account of the career of the veteran broadcaster known for decades throughout the English-speaking world as the author of the weekly radio Letter from America. The Shadow of a Nation, published in 2003, was a survey of the postwar British political scene, focusing on the major political figures of the period.

In November last year Clarke discovered a lump on his left buttock which was diagnosed as being cancerous. To prevent the sarcoma spreading, his left leg was amputated, and he was able to return to work part time on The World at One in August. With his wife, Barbara, he had recorded the experience of coping with cancer in an audio diary, Fighting to be Normal, broadcast in June.

In his spare time Clarke was a fanatically keen cricketer. He was also a good cook and a devotee of fine wine.

He was twice married, first, in 1973, to Sue Armstrong. There were two sons and one daughter (one son and the daughter being twins) of the marriage, which was dissolved in 1990. In 1991 he married the BBC television producer and writer Barbara Want. His wife and children survive him.

Nick Clarke, journalist, was born on June 9, 1948. He died of cancer on November 23, 2006, aged 58

This is taken from The Independent:

Nick Clarke
Biographer of Alistair Cooke who impressed his own calm personality on BBC Radio's 'The World at One'
Published: 24 November 2006

Nicholas Campbell Clarke, journalist and broadcaster: born Godalming, Surrey 9 June 1948; reporter, Yorkshire Evening Post 1970-72; reporter and Industrial Correspondent, BBC North-West 1973-79; reporter, Money Programme 1980-85; Political Correspondent and Presenter, Newsnight 1986-89; Presenter, The World This Weekend 1989-94; Presenter, The World at One 1994-2006; Chairman, Round Britain Quiz 1997-2005; married 1973 Sue Armstrong (two sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1990), 1991 Barbara Want (two sons); died 22 November 2006.

In his 2003 book The Shadow of a Nation, Nick Clarke lamented what he saw as Britain's decline from a nation with concrete values into one obsessed by the airy phenomena of celebrity and personality. In his own career in journalism Clarke exemplified the values whose loss he mourned: modesty, decency, a persistent determination to get to grips with substantial issues, a reluctance to thrust his own ego into the limelight.

Perversely, in his long tenure as anchor of The World at One on Radio 4 these qualities made him a star and a much-loved personality - the affection he inspired in listeners was evidenced last year by the torrent of correspondence he received when it was announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer and faced amputation of his left leg.

In his long career on Radio 4, and particularly the 12 years he spent at The World at One (Wato), Clarke unassumingly carved out for himself a position as one of the most trusted and admired political interviewers of the day. But he did this without ever resorting to the rottweiler or terrier tactics of a Jeremy Paxman or a John Humphrys. In an article setting out his philosophy of interviewing in 1995, he recalled an occasion on which he used a story about a court decision to award custody of a child to a woman living in a lesbian relationship as the peg to question Virginia Bottomley, then Minister for the Family, about her own underlying principles:

Her replies, shorn of statistics, were heartfelt and impressive. I hope she was as pleased with the outcome as I was.

Though he was never an easy mark for politicians, his conviction that sometimes an interviewer ought to help his subject to put their case goes a long way towards showing what set him apart.

Nick Clarke was born in 1948 into a journalistic family - his father, John, was cricket correspondent of the London Evening Standard, and passed his sporting enthusiasm on to his son; in The Shadow of a Nation, John, who died when his son was 18, is presented as the yardstick against which our decadent modern Britain falls short.

Clarke was educated at Bradfield College - then under the headmastership of the notorious disciplinarian Anthony Chenevix-Trench - and at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he read French and German, in between acting and student journalism. On graduation he went to the Yorkshire Post, where one of his fellow trainees was Mark Knopfler (Clarke later recalled the news editor telling Knopfler: "You'd better hope you make a living out of music because you're never going to make it as a crappity smacking journalist").

From there he went to the BBC in Manchester, spending several years as reporter and industrial correspondent, before moving down to London in 1980 to work on The Money Programme, and later on Newsnight. The move from television to radio came in 1989, when he took over as presenter of The World This Weekend. The change evidently suited him; he said that radio was a better medium because you can do it in the dark. He might also have said that radio is more tolerant of depth and complexity and less vulnerable to soundbites: certainly, this was the case when Clarke was in the studio.

When he took over at Wato in 1994, the programme's reputation for hard news and tough interviewing was already long established. Over the next decade, Clarke enhanced that reputation. Reading articles written about him over the years, it is striking how often two words recur: one is "courteous"; the other is "forensic". Clarke was always impeccably polite - the overall sense of calm was helped by his marvellous voice, quiet, gentle and authoritative: "like honey rolling over his tonsils" was one description. And yet he was too well briefed and quick on his feet to let politicians get away with a glib answer, a non sequitur or evasion.

Other newsrooms, at newspapers or rival broadcasters, regarded Wato as essential listening; the Labour spin-doctor Charlie Whelan reportedly referred to the programme as "Wankers at One", while Alastair Campbell reportedly loathed it: as Matthew Parris said yesterday, paying tribute on a special edition of Wato, "What higher recommendation could there be?"

Clarke's combination of intelligence with warmth and good-humour also made him the automatic choice as stand-in for Jonathan Dimbleby chairing Any Questions? He also presented the summer replacement programme, Straw Poll, and a number of radio current affairs series. From 1997 he was chairman of the revived Round Britain Quiz. His understated astonishment at the obscurity of the cryptic questions, and the brilliance the panellists displayed in answering them, were in pleasant contrast to the mild pomposity that had formerly characterised the programme.

He was rewarded with the titles of Best Individual Contributor to Radio, by the Voice of the Listener and Viewer in 1999, and Radio Broadcaster of the Year, by the Broadcasting Press Guild in 2000.

Clarke took up writing relatively late in his career, publishing his exhaustively researched biography of Alistair Cooke in 1999, to much praise. The Shadow of a Nation, the follow-up, made less of a splash.

In late 2005, Clarke consulted a doctor about stiffness he had been suffering for some months in his left buttock - and which he had put down to the effort of carrying his three-year-old twin sons up and down stairs. The source of the discomfort turned out to be an epithelioid sarcoma, and the only possible course was the amputation of much of the buttock, along with Clarke's left leg. He took this news with characteristic grace.

The spontaneous outpourings of affection from listeners were a source of solace - one, he noted with pleasure, compared his absence from radio to the loss of the Routemaster bus; so was the good-humour of his family, who greeted him on his return from hospital with a sign reading "Welcome home, Peg-leg". The inconveniences of life as a "monopod" gave him material for a number of entertaining pieces, all remarkable for the utter absence of fear or self-pity.

Clarke returned to present Wato for two days a week from August this year; but the amputation had not been enough to eliminate all the cancerous cells.

He was married twice, first to Sue Armstrong, by whom he had three children; and then to the television producer Barbara Want, who lately achieved some personal notoriety by campaigning against David Cameron's personal wind turbine, near their home in North Kensington. She and their young sons survive him.

Robert Hanks

Nick Clarke treated his second career as an author with enormous seriousness, writes Ion Trewin. The written word inculcated into him by his journalist father had always given him pleasure as his precise scripting of introductions to The World at One demonstrated. But in the early 1990s it was suggested to him that he might write a book, and in particular the biography of Alistair Cooke.

At the first contact with Cooke he was rebuffed, but Clarke persevered and returned to his subject having made a number of discoveries about Cooke's early life and family. Cooke, realising that Clarke would not so easily be brushed off, eventually consented to his continuing and gradually began to open up.

It was not an easy ride. Clarke's first publisher went out of business. There were elements of Cooke's marriage which Clarke felt couldn't be published during his subject's lifetime. He knew he was, as he said, "ploughing up the smooth surface of Cooke's life". Clarke was, though, ever the diplomat, coping with the increasing intransigence of his ageing, often crotchety subject.

When he finished the first draft it was over 800 pages in length. Clarke quickly demonstrated his professionalism, asking a number of people, young and old, to read and tell him where they ceased to be gripped, where it could be cut. Nearly 300 pages ended up being deleted. Cooke declined to read the finished result. Asked by Clarke if he had enjoyed the experience of being a biographer's subject, Cooke snapped back with "patent sincerity", as Nick recounted - "Not for a moment."

But reviews were favourable, sales were well ahead of expectations. Nick found himself in the unusual - for him - position of being the interviewee. At the Cheltenham Literature Festival he faced an audience of 450 in conversation with another great BBC figure, John Cole, who had worked with Cooke on the Manchester Guardian several decades before. "With no BBC mantle to cover my authorial nakedness, it feels like sitting an oral exam in a language I barely understand," he wrote of the experience.

About his second book, The Shadow of a Nation, subtitled "The Changing Face of Britain", he was never entirely happy. Then, when cancer struck, as well as compiling an audio diary with Barbara his wife (broadcast as Fighting to be Normal in June), he also decided to write about it. He wrote several chapters in a period of remission.

One of his final public appearances was at this year's Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he had regularly been an interviewer, often of politicians who strutted its stages to promote their memoirs. Last month, obviously fighting pain as he thrust aside his sticks, he chaired three events, including a memorable hour with Robert Fisk. Here, as ever, he showed his mastery of current events. The applause at the end was as much for Clarke as it was for Fisk.