Lorraine Heggessey

Lorraine Heggessey (born November 16 1956) is the Controller of BBC One, the UK's oldest and frequently most-watched television channel. She became the first woman to hold this position when she succeeded Peter Salmon in 2000. In this role, she is responsible for co-commissioning (with the various Heads of Department, i.e. News, Drama etc) and scheduling all programmes on the channel, controlling its overall direction and content. This makes her one of the most powerful figures in the British television industry.

Heggessey earned an Upper Second Class BA Honours degree in English Language & Literature from Durham University, before beginning her career in local newspaper journalism. In 1979 she transferred to broadcast journalism, joining BBC News as a trainee. She quickly worked her way up the ladder, becoming Producer of the BBC's flagship current affairs series Panorama. She then jumped ship to the rival ITV network to work on their current affairs series This Week, before joining the independent company Clark Productions and working on the show Hard News for Channel 4.

Returning to the BBC in the early 1990s, she founded the viewers' 'right to reply' programme Biteback and worked extensively in documentaries, becoming Editor of the famous QED series and later Executive Producer of programmes such as Animal Hospital and The Human Body.

In 1997 she became a BBC Head of Department for the first time when she was made Head of Children's Programmes. It was in this role that she first came to greater public attention when she went on-air during the Children's BBC slot to explain to viewers why Richard Bacon, a presenter of the hugely popular long-running magazine show Blue Peter had been sacked for taking drugs. Heggessey was generally praised for both her handling of this incident in particular and the department in general, overseeing something of a resurgence in BBC children's programmes.

In 1999 she was promoted to Director of Programmes and Deputy Chief Executive, responsible for supervising in-house output across all the various genres. She was in this role for little over a year however before she was promoted to Controller of BBC One, a job she still occupies as of May 2004.

She has been criticised in some quarters for changing the identity of the channel, removing the BBC One Clock and the Globe idents which had been used since 1963, and replacing them with idents that promote the BBC's multiculturalism.

Preceded by: Peter Salmon 1997-2000

Controller of BBC One 2000-?

Followed by: Current Incumbent