Sixty Minutes

Sixty Minutes is a news and current affairs programme which ran each weekday at 5:40 pm from 24 October 1983 to 27 July 1984 on BBC1. It replaced Nationwide, and integrated the BBC's main regional news magazines into a single programme, as per its predecessor. However, the BBC's News department stoutly maintained its independence from their colleagues in Current Affairs, and the first 15 minutes of news was almost a separate entity, followed by around 20 minutes of regional news before the final 25 minutes of national current affairs. Accordingly, the format was unwieldy, with neither the conciseness of a bulletin nor the soft approach of the show's predecessor, Nationwide. The editor, David Lloyd, poached Nick Ross from the highly popular Breakfast Time to front the show, along with Desmond Wilcox, Sarah Kennedy, and Sally Magnusson. Kennedy was unable to join the team at the programme's launch, but eventually began to present Sixty Minutes after Wilcox was dismissed, just seven weeks into the show's run. The news bulletins were usually broadcast from a separate studio at BBC Television Centre and presented by either Jan Leeming, Moira Stuart or Richard Whitmore. The opening titles were designed by Terry Hylton and produced by the Computer Film Company.