Jana Bennett, Former Director of BBC Television, Dies at 66

She went to St. Anne’s Faculty, Oxford College, and graduated in 1977 with a level in philosophy, politics and economics. (An novice singer, she was recruited to affix a band by one other Oxford scholar and a future prime minister, Tony Blair.) She earned her grasp’s diploma in worldwide relations from the London Faculty of Economics in 1978. The next 12 months, she joined the BBC as a information trainee.

Her early journalistic work included information documentaries, together with “The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret Battle,” concerning the repressive army regime in Argentina within the late Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. She and John Simpson, a fellow BBC journalist, additionally wrote a e book, “The Disappeared and the Moms of the Plaza” (1986), which included firsthand accounts by moms to search out the 1000’s of youngsters whom the Argentine regime had “disappeared.”

Whereas engaged on the BBC’s Newsnight program, Ms. Bennett met Mr. Clemmow, an editor and government on the BBC. They married in 1995.

Along with her husband, she is survived by a daughter, Alexandra Bennett-Clemmow; a son, Skomer Bennett-Clemmow; and her sisters Robin King and Kimberly, Candace and Shelley Bennett.

In 1999, she left the BBC and have become head of TLC for Discovery in Washington, D.C. There, she launched actuality dramas and inside design packages, a few of them based mostly on common British codecs, which boosted not solely rankings however revenues.

She returned to the BBC in 2002 when she was named director of tv.

After her analysis in Could 2019, Ms. Bennett initially advised few individuals of her sickness as a result of she wished to keep away from “an prolonged wake,” her longtime buddy and BBC colleague, Lorraine Heggessey, wrote Tuesday in The Guardian.

She threw herself into her work on the boards of the British Library and the Headlong Theater Firm. She went public about her sickness in December 2019, when she joined a nonprofit group, OurBrainBank, an app that enables individuals with glioblastoma to seek the advice of docs around the globe and promotes analysis into the illness.