Newsround, the longest-running children’s news programme in the world, turns 50 today after John Craven presented the first broadcast on April 4, 1972.
For some, Newsround is a distant memory of their childhood that was played during school morning assemblies several years ago.
For others, Newsround’s explainers have become part of our adult daily lives, with bitesize clips of hard and heavy news providing the breakdown of key facts we sometimes need.
Over the last five decades, the means of reaching children may have changed – with and social media having more dominance than traditional television – but the fundamentals are still the same.
Staying ahead of the game in environmental coverage, reaching out to communities who are underrepresented, and providing easy-to-understand elements to new coverage, the Newsround vision is still the same as it was in 1972.
Over that time, Newsround has seen an incredible range of presenting including the likes of Ellie Crisell and Krishnan Guru-Murthy to Julie Etchingham and Sonali Shah.
Taking a nostalgic trip down memory lane, presenters from the past and those on screens now shared some of their favourite memories of being on Newsround with Metro.co.uk.
Lizo Mzimba
For Lizo, Newsround was a ‘huge formative’ experience, where such a variety of stories were covered.
‘Children could one day see you dressing up as a pantomime cow, the next week they would see you at a huge humanitarian disaster somewhere.’
Reflecting on visiting New York and reporting on the aftermath of 9/11, he told Metro.co.uk: ‘That was in a way the biggest story you could ever imagine doing.
‘Seeing how it affected the lives of children, not just in America because the implications reverberated right the way around the world.’
He added that powerful stories like these were ‘something important to get right for children and all audiences.’
At the other end of the spectrum, Lizo recalled reporting on the great cultural impact of Harry Potter.
‘The books coming out became huge events for us on Newsround, we had a great relationship with the Harry Potter people and children are great at spotting when adults are pretending to be something they’re not, and in that case they knew that we were as big fans of Harry Potter as they were and just as invested in how the story was unfolding,’ he said.
‘So being a part of something that was a genuine literary phenomenon felt like a huge privilege although when we started we had no idea how big it would become.’
Krishnan Guru-Murthy
For , although he shared so many incredible memories from his time on Newsround, one moment particularly stood out to him – something that never actually happened, but a recurring nightmare that affected him that he can still ‘picture now’.
‘I developed a recurring dream from my time at Newsround that lasted with me about 15 or 20 years I’d say.
‘And it’s a very common recurring dream for television presenters which is that you don’t get to the studio in time and you miss the countdown and as the programme’s going on air and as the opening titles play you’re just getting into the studio and you’re not plugged in yet and you don’t have your microphone or earpiece.
‘And the stress, or responsibility, of making sure that Newsround was right, created in me this recurring stress nightmare that I had, that I can still picture now in a particular studio in the television centre and it was because our office was four or five floors away from the studio that we were using, so it was always a bit of a journey to get from the office to the studio, and if you mistimed it and were stuck in the lift or got waylaid then you would be cutting it very fine to get on air.
‘So it’s a blunder that never actually happened but it happened many times in my head.’
Ellie Crisell
From interviewing Tony Blair within the walls of 10 Downing Street when he was Prime Minister, to covering the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, Ellie’s time on Newsround left a powerful impact.
Recalling the tragedy in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, she said: ‘That was quite a trip, it was amazing, it felt like an absolute privilege to be able to be there but it was quite – I’m not going to say traumatic for me because I think when you’re at these events as a journalist you are protected in a sense by your job, you’re sort of seeing it through your professional lens – but just seeing the conditions that people were living in and the amount of death and destruction and the effect on children in refugee camps and things like that, and the conditions in which we had to work, you know, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it was really, really tough.
‘You’re talking like no running water, having to take all your food with you, sleeping on a floor, mosquitos, no showers, just working under those conditions, communication was really difficult like getting material back to London and it was just really challenging, but all of that said, what an amazing experience and one that I will never ever forget.
‘And I remember just standing and looking around at the destruction, we were filming every day, and just thinking this is like something out of a Spielberg disaster film.
‘You can’t compute what you’re looking at, the scale of it, it’s so dramatic, you’re talking like houses on top of houses, cars on top of houses, just absolute carnage, and it was a very, very interesting and amazing life-changing experience really, for everybody who went to report on it as well as obviously the people who were directly affected by it.’
She added that now she feels as though it was a real privilege to have had those opportunities, ‘tough as they were,’ and she will never forget giving those children a voice and being ‘so moved’ by how ‘upbeat’ they were able to be.
‘They’ve just coped with whatever they were dealing with, whatever they had to deal with, and they’ve lost everything, and they were still dancing and singing and just so excited to see a camera, and it’s very moving, those situations are really, really moving.’
Sonali Shah
While Newsround reported on humanitarian disasters around the world, some coverage was far lighter.
Sonali recalled a spelling bee she once did with tennis ace Andy Murray and his brother Jamie.
‘That was a real example of where we got him laughing, we got him to be him,’ she said.
‘The Andy you see now, I would say you first saw him on Newsround because we found different ways of interviewing people.
‘They will always have a bit of a front-up with adult news, and we were still adults but asking them different questions and I think they really warmed to us.’
She added that many adults felt more comfortable giving relaxed interviews with Newsround presenters, partly because they wanted to be ‘quite truthful to kids.’
Ricky Boleto
Adding his own light-hearted story to the mix, current Newsround presenter Ricky Boleto shared a memorable experience from around a year into starting his Newsround journey.
‘They asked me to down the [sewers] to do a story about fatbergs because kids love poo, kids love anything to do with what goes down the toilet, and so I had to dress up in this like Hazmat outfit, like head to toe, down the sewers, in the middle of central London on a freezing cold day, cameras misted up it was so cold, and it was just disgusting, wee poo everywhere.
‘But still to this day, it’s one of those stories that when I smell something a bit rough it takes me back to that story straight away.’
Ricky had taken this trip to speak about sewage pollution, ‘something that kids feel quite passionate about, especially environmentally conscious kids today.’
One moment from the footage that didn’t quite make it to the children’s show was the cameraman accidentally taking ‘lots of shots of condoms, because they end up down in the sewers, and obviously, we couldn’t use that on the show because it’s just like not the most appropriate thing.’
He added: ‘The smell, the heat, and the fact that you were in sewers. I could never forget it.’
Hayley Hassall
Ricky’s co-presenter Hayley had a more touching memory, of meeting the former First Lady Michelle Obama.
‘She was absolutely inspirational, to the point where I was watching her talk, she stood up in assembly at school and gave a talk to us, and I was writing notes because she was literally inspiring me right there.
‘And then I got a one on one chat with her, and she was just so calm and so peaceful, and so wise, and I can’t even remember what I asked her, but I remember she opened up the answer to me by saying “Thank you so much for having me, I’m so privileged to be here with you.”’
Meeting such a ‘historically significant’ person, and for the former First Lady to show gratitude towards Hayley made this one of her best moments on Newsround.
Other, harder-hitting reporting incidents have been just as humbling, Hayley added.
‘It’s so hard, there have been so many amazing things, I’ve swum with sharks, I’ve jumped out of a plane, I have rescued a lion, but I think the most memorable stories are always those that hit your heart.
‘I went to America and travelled along the border wall between America and Mexico and met migrants, children who were trying to cross the border, and just their stories and their difficult lives and the places they were fleeing from, is something that will never leave me.
‘I think normally in life you don’t get access to stories like that, so being a presenter, particularly for Newsround where you go and meet children who are victims of this world, I just felt so privileged to be able to be there, and so humble to get to hear those stories, it will never leave me.’
Newsround airs on weekdays on the with a five-minute bulletin at 7.40am and ten-minute bulletins airing at 8.15am and 4.20pm.
