Long before people scanned Tripadvisor or started booking their own holidays, they looked to TV travel shows to tell them where to go, and foremost among these was Wish You Were Here …?, fronted by Judith Chalmers. A triumph of middlebrow escapism, the show ran on ITV for nearly 30 years, from the early 1970s to the early 2000s.
Chalmers, who has died aged 90, was the welcoming, lightly glamorous face of Wish You Were Here, on which she was part champion of “abroad” and part consumer watchdog, balancing those roles with a warmth that made her one of the most admired and accomplished broadcasters of her generation. In many years’ worth of globetrotting – from African safaris to US theme parks to funiculars in the Alps – she never lost her poise. TV travel royalty was how she was widely regarded.
