“Among the prizes television has been tediously awarding itself recently, there really should be one for best listener,” opined a television critic back in 1987. And by broad consent, the person deserving of that accolade was Mavis Nicholson, a quick-witted Welsh broadcaster, who by dint of natural talent had forged a prominent career in television that began when she was 40 and would last for more than 25 years.
Nicholson, who has died aged 91, became for a time the favourite interviewer of both critics and stars, and can arguably claim a place in television history as the first solo female interviewer with a regular show on British TV.
Nicholson was spotted in 1971 when she appeared on Thames Television’s news magazine programme Today, hosted by Eamonn Andrews, defending – in the face of criticism – children of immigrants due to be bussed across London to a school attended by her sons. “You ought to be on television,” Andrews told her, and she replied, “I think I ought.” Shortly afterwards, the Thames executive Jeremy Isaacs asked her to come on air provided she promised not to change.
She joined an afternoon weekly programme, Tea Break, along with Jill Tweedie, Judith Chalmers, Mary Parkinson and Rita Dando. She stayed on with its successor shows Good Afternoon and Afternoon Plus. She loved the fact three million people watched: the Sunday Telegraph once called her (to her amusement) an “able veteran”. She was never a die-hard feminist in the Tweedie tradition, but she was a chief signatory to a 1980 letter opposing a tightening amendment to the 1967 Abortion Act. Ever practical, she said women cannot get very far if men are not prepared to change their lives too.
She was selected by the new Channel 4, run by Isaacs, as a co-presenter on its expansion into afternoon television in 1984, for a twice weekly topical magazine show A Plus 4. This quickly led to her daytime interview show, Mavis on 4, which began with a half-hour slot on Mondays and Wednesdays, then earned three editions by 1987. “Nobody can interview people on TV better than Nicholson” said Good Housekeeping in that year.
Her skill lay in drawing secrets out of the interviewees. Her 1979 session with David Bowie on Afternoon Plus, about why he chose to live in (then) challenging places including Berlin and Japan, and his creation of a persona, lives on via YouTube. She interviewed a wide range of people, including Elizabeth Taylor, Oliver Tambo, Glenys Kinnock, Billy Bragg, Kenneth Williams, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and Mary Wesley.
In 1988 when Michael Grade axed Mavis on 4, it caused an outcry: a thousand or so letters poured in, and Grade was accused of mistreating an older woman on television. The BBC snapped Nicholson up and Grade wrote to the Times denying ageism: “It was the format that was showing its age.” She returned in 1991 to Channel 4 to present further series including Third Wave, In With Mavis and Moment of Crisis.
She was born in Briton Ferry near Swansea, in the hardscrabble of the 1930s. Her father, Dick Mainwaring, drove a crane in the Port Talbot steelworks, and Mavis shared a bed with her grandmother in a cramped home after her mother, Olive, had twins. She had a happy childhood, with love and affection from an extended Welsh family. Her mother wanted her to be a teacher. She once said: “I’ll tell you what I did have, a great instinct about people.”
At Swansea University, she managed to flunk her final exams in English, forfeiting a degree, but met her future husband, Geoffrey Nicholson: they married in 1952. There, too, they both met the writer Kingsley Amis, then a lecturer in the English Department, and his first wife, Hilly. Amis, who moved to the right politically, remained a great friend of the Nicholsons, and was said to have coined the term “lefties” to describe discussions at their dinner table. When he later won the Booker prize for his 1986 novel The Old Devils, he invited Mavis along to the celebration dinner.
Mavis and Geoffrey both won Edward Hulton scholarships to train as advertising copywriters in London after Swansea University. They moved to north London, and Geoff became a sports journalist and writer: his last Fleet Street post was at the Independent newspaper as rugby correspondent in 1986.
They were part of a lively set of friends that included the actor Maureen Lipman and the journalist Valerie Grove. Mavis had worked from home while raising three sons, Steve, Lewis and Harry, writing for magazines including the stylish Nova, for which she was home editor. She went in once a week to hand in her copy, in those pre-internet days, before television suddenly beckoned.
By the late 80s, she and Geoff had made their home in the Welsh village of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, in the foothills of the Berwyn mountains, close to the Shropshire border, in a charming farmhouse and converted barn.
Though she continued to front TV series and several radio shows, including a look back at her childhood, in the 90s she returned to writing. She published an autobiography, Martha Jane and Me: A Girlhood in Wales (1992), and wrote an agony aunt column at the Oldie magazine at which she, as the ultimate “people person”, naturally excelled. When the Oldie’s editor Richard Ingrams resigned in 2014 in a dispute with the magazine’s publisher, she followed.
In 2016 BBC Wales ran a documentary tribute about Nicholson’s life. In June 2018, perky as ever, a veteran of literary festivals, she was a speaker at the launch of the Montgomeryshire literary festival in Llanfyllin, Powys, handily close to home.
Geoff died in 1999. She is survived by their sons and five grandchildren.
• Mavis Nicholson, writer and broadcaster, born 19 October 1930; died 8 September 2022
