Mike Scott

Jun 4 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HE BELONGED to the noble line of TV presenters who had the charm and style to turn a speech impediment into an advantage.

His dark hair flopped endearingly over his well- sculpted brow, the weave of his tweed jackets was rugged and the brown of his eyes reached women on the other side of the screen, but his Rs rarely rolled.

Yet he never quailed even when presented with a sentence like, “Rory Reardon writes about rural rainforests”.

Mike Scott was a pathfinder for the far brasher Jonathan Ross, with whom he also shared a passion for cinema.

And his face became one of the most familiar on Granada. Less well-known was his part in securing the TV station one of the great scoops of the 20th century.

It was November 22, 1963, and Scott was anchorman on Scene at 6.30, the regional news magazine.

CBS in New York phoned with the tip that President Kennedy had been shot. Scott told Denis Forman, the most senior executive available. The normal practice then was for a regional programme to allow the national ITN to break major stories.

ITN decided to await confirmation from its own reporter in America before running the story.

Forman decided that it could not be held. Scott broadcast it to viewers in the North West half an hour before it reached the rest of the country.

Scott was educated in London and Dorset. After his National Service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, he became a stagehand with the Festival Ballet. There were brief spells as a film extra, before his career was set on course by the Rank Organisation, which hired him as TV production trainee.

Scott joined Granada as a floor manager for its launch in 1956.

In his appearances, he could switch seamlessly from authority to humour, raising an eyebrow to good effect when the occasion demanded.

Success on Scene at 6.30 led to him presenting Cinema 534 times between 1964 and 1975, unexpectedly being granted an interview by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the wake of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1967). Such was his surprise that he lost some of his customary aplomb.

From 1979 to ’84, Scott, married with a daughter, was Granada’s programme controller, responsible for Brideshead Revisited (1981) and Jewel in the Crown (1984).

Michael Scott, broadcaster; born December 8, 1932, died May 30, 2008.