Sixty Minutes 1983 – 1984

Sixty Minutes was a news and current affairs programme which ran each weekday at 5:40pm between 24 October 1983 to 27 July 1984 on BBC1. It replaced the Nationwide programme, and like Nationwide, it also integrated the BBC regional news programmes into a single magazine programme. The main presenters were Moira Stuart, Beverly Anderson, Desmond Wilcox, Sally Magnusson and Nick Ross.

However, the BBC’s News department stoutly maintained its independence from colleagues in Current Affairs, and the first 15 minutes of news was almost a separate programme, followed by 20 minutes from BBC 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 softness of the show’s predecessor, Nationwide.