'Charming dinosaur' David Dimbleby calls for cultural shift at BBC over age discrimination of women

Veteran television broadcaster David Dimbleby (Getty Images)

TV veteran David Dimbleby has criticised the BBC and other broadcasters for demeaning older women.

The commentator and presenter, 74, was catapulted into the debate about sexism at the BBC when former newsreader Anna Ford branded him a "charming dinosaur".

The former Six O'Clock News presenter said that she wondered how "charming dinosaurs" such as Dimbleby and John Simpson continued to win BBC contracts when "however hard I look, I fail to see any woman of the same age, the same intelligence and the same rather baggy looks" on the small-screen.

Asked about Ford getting angry about the issue of ageism against women in broadcasting, the Question Time presenter told the Radio Times: "Well, I don't know that she does. I think she gets terribly cross about not being on television herself, I think."

But he said that it was time for the BBC and other broadcasters to change their attitude.

"Why should age matter with women? Women mature elegantly and better than men, very often. I don't think age should be a factor for women appearing on television," he said.

"There is a section among television executives who are always being hammered - quite wrongly in my view - to get the biggest possible audience, and [they are told] attractive young women will bring in a bigger audience than less attractive, older women - to say nothing of less attractive older men, like me.

"That's the way the TV - not just the BBC - industry works. And I think it's wrong. If you look at American TV you'll find it keeps women at work. They use their experience in that same way that they would use John Simpson's experience or mine, such as it is. It's just a cultural shift that's needed. And I agree that it is demeaning to women and I also think it's a crazy loss of talent."

The issue hit the headlines when Countryfile presenter Miriam O'Reilly won an age discrimination case against the corporation after she was rejected for a role on a revamped version of the popular rural affairs programme.

Several figures, including Selina Scott and Dame Joan Bakewell, have criticised broadcasters on the issue, accusing them of banishing older women from the small screen.

The controversy has continued despite the BBC's then director general Mark Thompson saying, following criticism of the decision to replace Strictly Come Dancing judge Arlene Phillips with the younger Alesha Dixon, that the corporation had "taken on board" that viewers wanted "much more than just youth on screen".

Dimbleby also told the Radio Times that he does not watch much television when he is at the Sussex home he shares with his second wife, with whom he has a 15-year-old son, and that, despite his own job: "I don't like being interviewed."

He said that, unlike Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson, he was happy to speak about his past as a member of Oxford's exclusive Bullingdon Club.

"I loved being elected to the Bullingdon Club and I'm very proud of the uniform that I can still get into. We never broke windows or got wildly drunk. It was a completely different organisation from what it clearly became when Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne joined, who seem to be ashamed of it, pulling their photographs and so on.

"But we never did these disgusting, disgraceful things that Boris did," he added.

Dimbleby, whose father Richard broke new ground when he commentated on the Queen's Coronation in 1953, said that Margaret Thatcher's funeral was "the most difficult commentary I'd ever done" because of controversy surrounding the event.

Dimbleby, who is set to front the People's Coronation, a BBC1 documentary marking the 60th anniversary of the Queen's Coronation, said that making mistakes in his work was nothing to do with age but "a family trait", adding: "My father described Ted Heath (who was single) and his wife at one ceremony."

Asked whether he was vain, he admitted: "Well, I suppose that anyone who puts themselves out on television, week after week after week, obviously enjoys the limelight."

PA