This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Richard Kershaw
5:35PM BST 01 May 2014

Richard Kershaw, who has died aged 80, was a star reporter on BBC Television’s flagship Panorama current affairs programme during its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, and later became one of the regular presenters on the popular early evening magazine show Nationwide.

Magnetically good-looking and telegenic, Kershaw developed a dashing on-screen persona reporting from the world’s troublespots for Panorama, and was described as “the poor man’s Tony Curtis” among some of his less glamorous colleagues.

In The Sunday Times, the critic Cyril Connolly likened him to “an impossibly handsome young prefect striding among the presidents”. But far from being recruited for his looks, Kershaw was hired for his expertise on Africa, a continent which by the early 1960s, when he first worked for the programme, was emerging from colonial rule.

Kershaw had come down from Cambridge in the late 1950s to take a post at the Commonwealth Relations Office and went on to edit the newsletter Africa Confidential, a position that afforded unprecedented access to the new rulers of independent Africa. His first television film was for ITV’s This Week, shot in post-independence Congo in 1960 when the new nation descended into chaos. In his subsequent films for This Week, he covered southern Sudan (his first war), Ethiopia (where he interviewed the Emperor Haile Selassie) and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he reported on UDI.

When he started making films for Panorama, Kershaw continued to add to his impressive roll-call of English-speaking African leaders whom he had interviewed, among them Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda, Ian Smith and Joshua Nkomo. “Panorama was senior, proconsular,” Kershaw recalled. “You travelled around with the country’s leaders, wherever you were.”

Crises and hotspots continued to be Kershaw’s stock-in-trade, including the Middle East wars of 1968 and 1973, a return visit to southern Sudan, and the conflict in the then Southern Rhodesia.

On the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland, he was beaten up by the RUC at a Peace March in Armagh in 1968. In spite of official denials, Kershaw secured a legal judgment which resulted in damages being awarded to the BBC, although not to him personally.

His other area of expertise was the United States where, in 1963, Kershaw had spent a year travelling on a scholastic fellowship. He made a television profile of Bobby Kennedy in 1966 when it was becoming clear that he was planning to succeed his murdered brother as President.

Two years later Kershaw produced another prescient report, on Ronald Reagan, then embarking on a political career as Governor of California, in which he forecast that the former film star would become the new Republican icon, even before the ascendancy of Richard Nixon. He reported on the assassination of Martin Luther King, whom he had interviewed for BBC Radio.

The son of an Australian banker who had won an MC in the Great War, Richard Ruegg Kershaw was born on April 16 1934 at Wargrave, Berkshire.  From Cheltenham College, where he excelled at sport, he did National Service in Germany as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery and won an exhibition to Clare College, Cambridge, to read History.

Although he passed the Foreign Office and Civil Service entry examinations, he was denied permission to take up his graduate fellowships at Yale and Virginia; so in 1957 Kershaw opted to join the less grand Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), which allowed him to spend a year at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Returning to London, he was assigned to the CRO’s South Africa desk, where he prepared briefs for the British delegation to the United Nations. As Resident Clerk, he was given a huge flat at the Foreign Office overlooking St James’s Park, and put in charge of all FO overnight telegraph traffic as well as Cabinet boxes including those of Lord Home, the Foreign Secretary, for whom he performed numerous duties, “some odder than others”.

A year later he was rewarded with a posting to South Africa, but finding himself out of sympathy with British government policy towards that country he resigned, realising that he was not cut out for a bureaucratic career. Instead he joined the Financial Times as a feature writer in Nigel Lawson’s office.

A year later he moved to The Scotsman as Commonwealth Correspondent, subsequently becoming its Diplomatic Correspondent, a post that offered greater opportunities for travel in the Middle East and Africa.

Awarded the first British Eisenhower Fellowship in 1963, Kershaw and his first wife spent a year in the United States, starting with a month in Washington, DC, as guests of the Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter.

Immersing himself in the political and intellectual life of the American capital, Kershaw recalled that on his first day at the Frankfurters, they lunched with the economist Jean Monnet, took tea with President Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Longworth, and dined with President Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson.

On his return to Britain, Kershaw took over as editor of Africa Confidential, a private fortnightly newsletter with a tiny circulation which he transformed into the authoritative, influential and profitable publication which it remains. As almost every African head of state was numbered among his readers, Kershaw enjoyed excellent access, which he exploited to the full.

After 10 years with Panorama, he joined Robin Day and Ludovic Kennedy as a presenter on the daily Newsday programme, which later mutated into Newsnight. Among world leaders he interviewed were Col Gaddafi, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and the Shah of Iran . Kershaw also conducted one of the few interviews with Ayatollah Khomeini just before his return to Tehran.

In 1980 Kershaw was surprised to be invited to join Sue Lawley and Frank Bough as a presenter on the popular nightly Nationwide programme, a miscellany of news, serious current affairs and lighter items about such British eccentricities as the infamous “skateboarding duck”. Kershaw was told that his appointment, insisted on by the BBC’s Board of Management, would change his life, and it did.

It raised his public profile to the extent that he was regularly invited to chair conferences and corporate meetings by banks and similar organisations, a sideline that he developed into a profitable business which ensured financial security.

In 1983 Kershaw left Nationwide to become one of the presenters of The World Tonight on Radio 4. The post left him time to pursue other interests. For 20 years he served on the boards of the Overseas Development Institute and the Minority Rights Group. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Richard Kershaw’s first marriage, in 1962, to Venetia Murray, ended in divorce in 1967. In 1994 he married his long-time partner, Jann Parry, a former dance critic of The Observer, who survives him with a daughter and a stepson of his first marriage.

Richard Kershaw, born April 16 1934, died April 28 2014