Sully

Michael Sullivan, a radio and tv reporter/presenter for the BBC, and then Sky News, has died after a long illness. I remember him first as a reporter during my first year at Cambridge, covering a 1970 student sit-in at the Law Schools - lead by Charles Clarke.

In BBC tv news he was a contemporary of Keith Graves and Martin Bell, all taken from radio by Peter Woon with the opening of the tv newsroom at Television Centre. He covered the fall of Saigon, but over the years got fewer and fewer foreign trips, and exercised his particular brand of humour on the management above him, sometimes in the form of cartoons that would mysteriously appear and disappear on a noticeboard near the Stage 5 tea bar (Onlie Begetter of The Killing Station). Tony Hall, then running TV News, was characterised as The Head Prefect. Current BBC Trustee Richard Ayre, Tony's fixer, may well have removed some of them.

Michael was also a witness to Mark Thompson, then editor of the Nine O'Clock News, sinking his teeth into the arms of Antony Massey.