Lorraine Heggessey

Lorraine Heggessey Biography

Lorraine Heggessey, trailblazing media executive with unparalleled experience of broadcasting and production, is the former Chief Executive of the production company Talkback Thames. She was the first ever female BBC One controller and is now a motivational speaker and media consultant.

Background and career

By the early 1980s Lorraine had become a producer on the BBC's flagship current affairs series Panorama, and then worked with director Ken Loach on an edition of Hard News which investigated the treatment of trade unionist leader Arthur Scargill by The Daily Mirror newspaper and investigative journalist Roger Cook. When Cook declined to be interviewed for the programme, Heggessey employed one of his own tactics from his television series The Cook Report, "doorstepping" him outside his hotel…

At talkbackThames, Lorraine used her creativity and talent management skills to drive commercial success.  She took over the leadership of the company at a critical period, just as its founder and several key executives were leaving. She brought in a new team, revitalized the programming portfolio and increased profits by over 50 percent in her first two years. She was responsible for around 800 hours of television a year, including the UK’s two most popular shows X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent and other hits such as The Apprentice, Grand Designs and QI. Under Lorraine’s leadership, the company trebled its entertainment output, set up a digital division, launched dozens of new titles and won numerous Bafta and Royal Television Society awards.  It was named Best Independent Production Company at the Broadcast Awards in 2009 and was chosen by freelancers as the place they would most like to work.

No stranger to controversy, Lorraine sacked Richard Bacon for taking cocaine when she was Head of Children’s BBC.  In the early 90s, she produced a series on the history of crime in Britain since the second world that featured interviews with many notorious criminals, including the first ever interview with ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser. She also turned the tables on Roger Cook by door-stepping him for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme. Whilst working in the BBC’s Science Department, she was executive producer of the Bafta award winning series ‘The Human Body’ presented by Robert Winston, which filmed a man dying and came up with the idea of using Rolf Harris to present Animal Hospital.

Lorraine has always thrived on new challenges.  Her early career was as a current affairs producer on ‘Panorama’ and ‘This Week’ where she filmed undercover in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, went to the Falklands straight after the war and was held under house arrest in Zaire.

Lorraine was Woman of the Year at the Women in Film and Television Awards 2005. She has won the Media Award at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) First Woman Awards and the Bertelsmann Entrepreneur Award.

She is a member of Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Corporate Board, and mentors underprivileged teenagers.

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