Michael Aspel

Michael Terence Aspel OBE is an English retired television presenter. Aspel was born on 12 January 1933 in Battersea in London. He served as a conscript of the National Service, in the ranks of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, from 1951 to 1953.

About Michael Aspel in brief

Summary Michael AspelMichael Terence Aspel OBE is an English retired television presenter. Aspel was born on 12 January 1933 in Battersea in London. He served as a conscript of the National Service, in the ranks of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, from 1951 to 1953. He worked as a teaboy at William Collins publishers in London and then entered National Service. He took up a job at the David Morgan department store in Cardiff until 1955, before working as newsreader for the BBC in Cardiff in 1957. By the early sixties, he had become one of four regular newsreaders on BBC national television, along with Richard Baker, Robert Dougall and Corbet Woodall. In both 1969 and 1976 Aspel hosted the BBC’s A Song for Europe contest to choose Britain’s Eurovision entry. He provided the UK TV commentary twice at the Eurovision Song Contest in the same years, 1969 and1976, in which year he also presented the contest previews.

In the 1970s and 1980s he presented popular ITV programmes such as Give Us a Clue, Child’s Play and The 6 O’Clock Show. He also presented weekend shows on BBC Radio 2 in the late 1980s and again in the 1990s. In 1989, he hosted a televised interactive murder mystery set at a wedding called Murder Weekend, devised and written by Joy Swift, which invited viewers to solve a whunnit to win a prize. During the early 1990s, Aspel presented two documentaries on BBC 2, on subjects of which he and Bob Pettigrew had personal knowledge. Both times, at different times, the documentaries were a nostalgic look back at compulsory national service.