Moira Stuart

Moira Clare Ruby Stuart, (born 2 September 1949) is a British presenter and broadcaster.

Moira Stuart was born at the Royal Free Hospital in London, on 2 September 1949, to Caribbean parents.

She has two sisters, Sandra Simmons and Sharon Davis-Murdoch.

Her maternal grandfather, Edgar Fitzgerald Gordon, met his wife, Clara Christian, when both were studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where she was the first black woman student.

She was educated in London until she was 13, attending Our Lady's Catholic High School, Stamford Hill.

She then moved with her family to Bermuda for a time, returning at the age of 15 to London, where she attended college.

Stuart began working with the BBC in the 1970s and was a production assistant in the Radio Talks and Documentaries department.

She was a continuity announcer and newsreader for both BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 2, reading her first Radio 4 news bulletin in 1978, and in 1980 she played Darong in series one of game show The Adventure Game.

She was the first female newsreader of Caribbean heritage to appear on British national television, having worked on BBC News since 1981.

She moved to television news in 1981, when she co-presented News After Noon.

Stuart is acknowledged as having been the UK's first female African-Caribbean television newsreader.

Since 27 August 1981, she has presented on every news bulletin devised on BBC Television apart from the Ten O'Clock News.

She has also appeared on The News Quiz and presented the news on the BBC's Breakfast with Frost programme each Sunday and its successor programme Sunday AM with Andrew Marr.

She presented the news for BBC Breakfast.

Stuart has received several awards during her career, including being appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2001 for services to broadcasting, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2022 for services to media.

In November 2004, Stuart was the subject of an episode of the BBC genealogy documentary series Who Do You Think You Are? (series 1, episode 6), which helped trace her family history.

However, BBC Breakfast moved to a new studio with a new look on 2 May 2006 and the entire news content was presented by two main presenters.

Stuart retained her slot on BBC's Sunday AM show and continued to present some weekend television bulletins on BBC One.

She also worked on other long-form programmes for other BBC channels, including BBC Four.

A keen music lover, Stuart deputised for Humphrey Lyttelton on his BBC Radio 2 Best of Jazz programme, has participated in the BBC Jazz Awards as compère, and features as a narrator on Soweto Kinch's 2006 jazz-rap album A Life in the Day of B19: Tales of the Tower Block.

With Adam Shaw, she also presented the BBC Two personal finance series Cashing In.

Stuart has served on various boards and judging panels including Amnesty International, the Royal Television Society, BAFTA, United Nations Association, the Orange Prize, the London Fair Play Consortium, the Human Genetics Commission, the Queen's Anniversary Prize, and the Grierson Trust.

In April 2007 it was announced that Stuart would be leaving Sunday AM, resulting in the loss of a regular slot on broadcast TV.

This prompted an angry backlash, accusing the BBC of ageism and sexism.

The BBC initially declined to comment on why she was no longer being used, but rumours circulated within the BBC and commercial newsrooms that Stuart had been removed because she was considered "too old" at 57, although Anna Ford had continued anchoring the BBC One O'Clock News until her retirement at 62.

This was denied by Director-General of the BBC Mark Thompson when he was questioned by a House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee.

Thompson stated: "BBC News, News 24, the radio networks, have changed over the years and the traditional role of the newsreader, as opposed to a correspondent or presenter, has virtually died out over the services.... We tend to use journalists across BBC news programmes ... to read the news headlines."

Stuart's 26-year career with BBC Television News was brought to a close on 3 October 2007, when the BBC announced her departure.

In total, her experience had spanned 34 years of BBC radio and TV.

In April 2009, the departing head of BBC News, Peter Horrocks, was quoted as saying: "I regret the way some viewed her departure. Many people came to believe that Moira left for reasons of ageism, or other -isms. This was never the case."

On 21 November 2009, it was reported in The Guardian that Chris Evans was "lining up" Stuart to read the news bulletins on his new BBC Radio 2 show from January 2010, when he was due to inherit the slot from Terry Wogan.

In a career spanning four decades, she has presented many television news and radio programmes for the BBC and, from 2010 for nine years, was the newsreader for The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2.

Stuart hosted her own music show on the station, which was broadcast every Sunday from 23:00 until midnight.

The show featured "timeless classics”, playing popular songs from the previous 60 years.

On 6 January 2010, it was confirmed that she would return to BBC News, reading the news for The Chris Evans Breakfast Show, starting on 11 January 2010.

She presented her last bulletins for the show on 14 December 2018.

Stuart began as a morning news presenter for Classic FM in February 2019 and, from July 2019, worked as a weekend presenter with her own Saturday show.

It was subsequently announced that she had joined Classic FM, from February 2019, to present the news on weekdays during the breakfast show, and from July 2019 would be presenting her own Saturday afternoon show, Moira Stuart’s Hall of Fame Concert.

Stuart, who described the move as "a wonderful opportunity to take a whole new journey, with people I really like and admire", made her debut on Classic FM on 11 February 2019.

From 9 August 2020 she has hosted a new Sunday evening series, Moira Stuart Meets…, on Classic FM.