Bob Friend, MBE (20 January 1938 – 8 October 2008) was one of the original news anchors for the Sky News channel from its launch in 1989 until his retirement in late 2003.
Friend started his career in 1953 aged 15 as a cub reporter on the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser, reporting on the Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation. After he undertook National Service as a corporal clerk with the Brigade of Gurkhas in Hong Kong, Friend served a ten year freelance career in various British newspapers before starting his broadcast career with the BBC in 1969.
Starting out as the Northern Ireland correspondent of the Radio 4's Today programme, Friend served four years in Northern Ireland witnessing sectarian violence at the start of The Troubles. After a short stint in Vietnam he got his first official overseas TV posting as the BBC's first Australia correspondent in 1973, five years as the BBC's Tokyo correspondent, and finally New York city as BBC Breakfast correspondent where the current Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson was his producer.
After 20 years with the BBC, Friend returned to the United Kingdom to work on the start-up Sky News. Friend's first appearance on Sky News was on 23 October 1989 alongside Vivien Creegor, but his best known on-screen partner was Anna Botting, and they became one of channel's most popular news duos.
Friend became the best recognised face of Sky News, and as a result of being spotted by Tom Cruise while he watched Sky News on a short visit to London, Friend had cameos in a number of News Corporation owned Twentieth Century Fox's 1990s films, including Independence Day and Mission Impossible.
In June 2003 he was awarded an MBE for services to broadcasting in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, shortly before his retirement presenting alongside Creegor on 23 October, exactly 14 years after his first appearance.
Friend was a guest presenter on LBC News 1152 during the 2005 United Kingdom general election.
Friend was married with two daughters. He died on 8 October 2008 from a brain tumour.
Chairman and CEO of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch paid personal tribute to Friend:
| “ | Bob was a distinguished journalist and an admired broadcaster. He was quick to understand the power of non-stop programming. He was there at the beginning of that long, hard road we all had to travel to make Sky News what it is today | ” |
Famous quotes containing the word friend:
“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)