Mike's funeral will be at 1pm on Friday December 14th at Mortlake Crematorium.
For those wishing to attend, best advice is to be there by 12.45.

This is taken from The Guardian:

Mike Donkin
A consummate BBC news professional, he shunned celebrity status for himself
by John Mair
Thursday December 13, 2007

The BBC television and radio reporter Mike Donkin, who has died from cancer aged 56, was unusually almost entirely devoid of ego. I was his friend and producer, and normally you have to fight to keep the reporter off the screen. With Mike, it was the opposite. He had to be cajoled and persuaded to do stand-ups and pieces to camera to show he had actually been on location.

What mattered to Mike in the many pieces we made together for London Plus and Nationwide, the BBC's early evening ratings juggernaut 30 years ago, was the story and the people in it, not his reporting of it. Subject and object never got confused in his work. Every interview was well planned and executed, every shot well chosen and every word of commentary written and delivered carefully. His craft was all, and it showed on screen.

He was born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, educated at Northern grammar school, Portsmouth, and learned his trade on the East Anglian Daily Times, Ipswich, before joining the BBC in 1975 as a freelance. Soon, good work on the Today programme on Radio 4 as a reporter led to television, and in 1980 Nationwide. There, Mike discovered the joy of making short and meaningful five to six-minute films. In that short time in television terms, flesh and bones could be put on a new story or a different angle on an old one. It proved to be his metier.

My favourite Donkin film (of the ones we made together) was in 1984 about a Mr Popat, who ran a huge bed and breakfast "hotel" for social service "clients" from all over London in the former British Airways staff quarters near Heathrow. It was simply a farm, making money out of misery. Mike (mainly) and I used our silver tongues to get Popat's permission to film the tsunami of human distress within. Once. But that was not enough. Our film turned out to be overexposed through careless camerawork. We had to go back and do it a second time. The final product was well worth it. It takes some chutzpah (plus journalistic and diplomatic skills) to persuade an individual to put himself to the celluloid sword not once but twice. Mike pulled it off. He was that sort of person; absolutely impossible to dislike.

The stories Mike reported during the quarter of a century he worked for the BBC reflected the man. They were human, inquisitive and very approachable. Mike wanted to show how the large movements of history affected ordinary people.

In 1982, after Nationwide, Mike carved out various niches for himself at BBC News. He wanted to make films, not news reports, and make films he did - first specials on the relaunched Six O'clock News from 1993, and then embracing director-general John Birt's multiskilling and bi-media regimen to his own (and the audience's) ends.

Not for Mike idle time on the taxi rank of the TV news correspondents at Television Centre, where you wait to be called to firefight the latest story. He simply made his own luck. He would beaver away at creating mini foreign tours for himself - a very economical trip to Zimbabwe, Brazil, Malta, Holland, Russia, wherever the stories were, for just him and a single cameraman plus the then new lightweight digital video gear. Out of that trip came two or three pieces for domestic and world TV, two or three for domestic and world radio and some print for BBC News Online and others. This was trimedia epitomised.

Later, Mike's multi-skilling as world affairs correspondent became even more acute. The BBC crew comprised Mike alone, researching, shooting and reporting, with maybe just a local fixer to help. A Donkin tour always proved a great investment for news editors, journalistically too. Not many reporters would go into Mugabe's Zimbabwe posing as a tourist when your organisation is banned and risk imprisonment. In the last two decades he travelled the world producing these "Donkinsobes" for BBC audiences far and wide. Viewers and listeners would know the name, the voice and most importantly appreciate the carefully crafted journalism.

He is survived by his wife Catriona, whom he married 31 years ago, daughters Laura, Sophie and Chloe and son Hugo.

· Michael Charles Donkin, journalist, born August 29 1951; died December 6 2007