Norman Rees, who has died aged 84, spent three decades travelling the globe as an ITV news reporter. Home and abroad, he was usually in the right place at the right time – through luck or design – and enterprising in getting the story.
In Washington in 1974 during the Watergate hearings, he elicited a response from the disgraced president Richard Nixon that he “screwed it up and paid the price”.
Six years later – by now ITN’s Washington correspondent – Rees drove through the night to New York to report on the murder of John Lennon, arriving just before dawn to compile a report and get the reactions of grieving fans.
Not averse to taking risks, following his time in the US, in 1981 he reported on a massacre by government troops in a village outside Kampala that led to his deportation by the Ugandan president, Milton Obote.
A year later, he covered the Falklands war from Argentina and, in the immediate aftermath of the Belgrano sinking, sought reactions from the public. “It was not the best moment to be a British reporter in Buenos Aires,” he reflected.
ITN, the producer of ITV news programmes, won Bafta’s award for best actuality coverage with his dispatches from Lebanon in 1983, when the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was based there and rival PLO factions were fighting each other – with children caught in the crossfire.
Rees could also find humour in news. Accompanying the new Labour party leader Neil Kinnock on a photo opportunity at the 1983 Brighton conference, he witnessed the politician’s famous fall on the beach and ventured in his report: “Now that sort of thing is just not supposed to happen.”
More seriously, he travelled with Diana, Princess of Wales on her 1989 tour of the far east, where she shook hands with leprosy patients in Indonesia, dispelling myths surrounding the condition. Rees eloquently observed: “She touched the untouchable.”
In 1996 he was deeply affected by covering the shooting of 16 pupils and a teacher at Dunblane primary school, near Stirling. Later, he said: “In scenes of great tragedy and conflict, a reporter has to be touched by what he’s seeing. I don’t think the reports would be as valuable if we didn’t get a feeling of involvement and concern on behalf of the reporter.”
Norman was born in Cardiff to Maisel (nee Fish) and Daniel Rees, a newspaper packer, and attended Canton high school. The future broadcaster John Humphrys was a friend in the Splott area of the city. He joined the Western Mail in Cardiff as a junior reporter in 1956 and displayed another skill, as a singer, on forming the Weavers pop group, who won a national talent show and appeared on the BBC show Six-Five Special in 1958.
He moved to television as a reporter in 1963 with TWW, the ITV company covering Wales and the west of England. He rose to become deputy news editor, then in 1968 joined ITN in London as a news editor. Four years later, he switched to reporting, covering Northern Ireland and also the cod war fishing dispute – from aboard an Icelandic gunboat.
Sometimes, the best laid plans went adrift. In 1975, Rees arrived in Australia for Scotland Yard’s extradition of the “missing” MP John Stonehouse after faking his own death. Rees had an agreement that detectives would not interfere if Stonehouse agreed to talk to him on the flight home, but the politician proceeded to give an interview to the BBC, then refused to speak to Rees because of a previous row with an ITV company boss.
This left him in despair, realising that not only would he be unable to send an interview back to London by satellite during a stopover in Hong Kong, but that he was being scooped by the opposition.
His Australian camera operator came to the rescue, reminding the married Stonehouse that he had provided refuge for his secretary and lover, Sheila Buckley, when she was besieged by the press. The interview was completed just before touchdown in Hong Kong and the film headed to ITN.
After standing in several times for Michael Brunson in the US, Rees became Washington correspondent (1977-81). One of his last assignments was the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. He reported the president broadly quoting Winston Churchill to say: “There’s no more exhilarating feeling than being shot at without result.”
In 1984, he became ITN’s chief assistant editor – and continued to present weekend and early-morning news programmes occasionally – but soon returned to the field and in the 1990s was on News at Ten’s special reports team.
Rees retired from ITN in 1999, the year when News at Ten was axed by ITV (only to be revived later) and he presented a seven-minute “obituary” in what was believed to be the final bulletin.
He is survived by his wife, Andrea (nee Norton), whom he married in 1961, and their children, Nicola and Andrew.
• Norman Charles Rees, television journalist, born 2 March 1939; died 14 June 2023
