Lorraine Heggessey

Lorraine Sylvia Heggessey (born 16 November 1956) is a British television producer and executive. She is notable as having been, from 2000 until 2005, the first ever woman to be Controller of BBC One, the primary television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation. She has also served as the Chief Executive of the production company Talkback Thames.

Heggessey was educated at Vyners Grammar School in Ickenham, Hillingdon and later earned an Upper Second Class BA Honours degree in English Language & Literature from Durham University (Collingwood College), before beginning her career in local newspaper journalism. She worked initially for the Westminster Press Group, where her first job was as a trainee reporter on the Acton Gazette local newspaper.

In 1978 she applied for a BBC News traineeship, but was rejected without an interview. She then worked voluntarily in hospital radio and gained a paid job on a local newspaper, before re-applying for the BBC traineeship the following year, this time successfully. She spent the next fifteen years working in current affairs programming in television.

By the early 1980s she had become a producer on the BBC's flagship current affairs series Panorama, before she left the staff of the BBC to join Thames Television's This Week, broadcast on the rival ITV network. She then moved on again, this time to the small independent production company Clark Productions, for whom she worked on Channel 4's current affairs programme Hard News. In the early 1990s, she and the film director Ken Loach collaborated on an edition of Hard News which investigated the treatment of trade unionist leader Arthur Scargill by The Daily Mirror newspaper and investigative journalist Roger Cook.

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