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Janine Thomason came to England from her native New Zealand in 1969, intending to earn a little money as best she could, see Europe and return home to her family after two or three years.
Instead she got a job with Autocue and joined the broadcasting family, where she became a much-loved fixture for the next 40 years.
The “Autocue girls” – they were all female in those days – worked across the whole range of programmes and thus acquired considerable expertise in all things television.
Janine was working on 24 Hours in the early 1970s when she got her first big break and was appointed a researcher.
Soon she got promoted to Assistant Producer and for the best part of 10 years did the rounds of the Lime Grove programmes, including the Money Programme, Nationwide, Panorama and General Election coverage, becoming accomplished in filming, studio work and directing.
Towards the end of the 1970s she met the Guardian’s Labour Correspondent, Keith Harper – one of those rare Fleet Street operatives famed not just for their journalistic talents but also for their decency and kindness. They were married in 1979.
Her BBC career – interrupted by the arrival of Tom and then Alice – took her into various senior jobs in the News division.
She left the Corporation briefly, to work for the Industrial Society, but returned to work in Corporate Affairs and Press and Publicity.
Keith Harper died of cancer in 2002. He had latterly been the Guardian’s Transport Correspondent and Janine and the children proudly attended a ceremony at Euston, where a locomotive was named after him.
A few months later Janine herself was diagnosed with cancer. She put up a determined fight against it – not least in order to see her children through their education and into their working lives.
It was therefore a source of even more than the usual satisfaction when she saw Tom named Young Journalist of the Year in 2009. The judges described him as "a story-setter in the true sense of old fashioned reporting".
Similarly, Janine was immensely proud and gratified to see Alice progress through Cambridge and embark on the rest of her medical training.
Her friend Liz Elton said: “Janine was a good woman, totally dedicated to her family and totally true to her friends. She leaves a huge gap in lots of lives.”
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Janine Thomason (Read 8008 times)
