Games - Jeremy Paxman

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Jeremy Paxman (born 11 May, 1950) is a British BBC journalist, news presenter and author. He is most famous for his abrasive and forthright style of interviewing on the BBC's Newsnight programme. Paxman is a well-known public figure, nicknamed "Paxo", which is both a contraction of his surname and a jocular reference to a popular brand of British stuffing mix. Any kind of tough questioning is routinely described as Paxmanesque in recognition of his style.

Journalistic career

Paxman was born in Leeds, West Yorkshire, and educated at Malvern College. His Father is an Arthur Paxman and served on the North Atlantic Fleet, his mother a house wife Joan. Paxman is the eldest of four children and has two brothers and one sister, Jenny Lawrence, who works with him at the BBC. He lives with his partner Elizabeth Ann Clough in Stonor, Oxfordshire. They have three children; a teenage girl Jessica, and twins Victoria and Jack.

He read English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he edited the student newspaper Varsity. His career began on local radio before he moved to Belfast as an investigative journalist. In 1977 Paxman moved to London with the BBC and two years later he transferred to Panorama. After seven years on that programme, working from locations as diverse as Beirut, Uganda and Central America, he accepted a job presenting the Six O'Clock News. In 1989 he moved to his current job as presenter of Newsnight. Whilst maintaining his spot fronting that show, his career has diversified into the presentation of a number of television programmes, such as the quiz programme University Challenge
and You Decide.

Paxman's line of questioning when interviewing is often criticised as offensive and irrelevant. However, this is exactly what fans find entertaining, particularly if they themselves do not respect the interviewee. Paxman is occasionally characterised as 'anti-establishment' due to the lack of deference that he shows his interviewees.

One of Paxman's most famous Newsnight interviews took place on 13 May 1997, with Michael Howard, who had until 13 days earlier been Home Secretary. Howard was questioned regarding a meeting he had convened with the head of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis, regarding the potential dismissal of the head of Parkhurst Prison. During one continuous sequence Paxman put the same question - "Did you threaten to overrule him?" - twelve times to Howard, who on each occasion gave a qualified or evasive answer.

This was later revealed to be a stalling strategy by Paxman on being told that the studio was having technical trouble with one of the reports which was to follow. In 2004 Paxman broached the subject with Howard — then Conservative leader — again; Howard laughed the question off, but did say he "didn't" threaten to overrule the Head of the Prison Service.

In recognition of Paxman's tough reputation, when in 2003 Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to make the case for the Iraq war directly to the public, he chose Paxman as the presenter of a TV special question-and-answer session with a public studio audience.

In 1998 Denis Halliday, one of the United Nations' humanitarian aid directors, resigned from his post in Iraq in protest at the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq, calling it "genocide." In the subsequent interview with Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman asked Halliday, "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?"

Paxman attracted attention to his robust interviewing of party political leaders during the 2005 United Kingdom general elections. The BBC received complaints from some viewers that in the interviews Paxman was "rude and aggressive". Paxman's role interviewing candidates on the 2005 election night drew some attention, particularly after a 5am interview with winning candidate George Galloway. He began by asking Galloway "are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament" (Oona King), repeating the question four times (), a line of questioning criticised by many including Oona King herself. It has been called a racist and sexist line of questioning.

Author

Paxman is also an author of non-fiction books. His first book arose out of a Panorama programme that he worked on with Robert Harris on biological and chemical warfare. Together they wrote A Higher Form of Killing (1982, ISBN 0099441594) exploring its history; a revised edition completed in late 2001 included a chapter asserting that Iraq possessed both chemical and biological weapons. Working on his own, Paxman wrote Friends in High Places: Who Runs Britain? (1991, ISBN 0140156003) which investigated the labyrinthine connections between those in power in early 1990s Britain. A study of the English nation entitled The English: A Portrait of a People followed in 1998 (ISBN 0140267239) to considerable critical acclaim. His most recent work is The Political Animal (2002, ISBN 0140288473), which discusses the character traits of those that enter politics.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Jeremy Paxman ]

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