Martyn Lewis

Martyn Lewis CBE

Martyn Lewis's career is an unusual blend of the media, charitable and business worlds.

During 32 years as a television journalist he anchored every mainstream national news programme on Britain's two main terrestrial TV channels, including ITV's News At Ten and the BBC's Nine O'Clock News, before moving in 1999 into the world of business. He co-founded Teliris Inc., a company which pioneered a new "realtime" communications business space known as Telepresence. Martyn played a major part in building up the company, before retiring as Teliris's European Chairman in April 2012. He is currently advising on the planned upscaling and relaunch of the TS Elite Group, a company specialising in improving productivity in the corporate, educational and sporting arenas - with a key focus on dealing with insomnia, sleep deprivation and burnout. He has also recently returned to broadcasting to present a weekly interview programme called "Agenda" on "The Wireless", a new 24/7 radio station for the "over 50s" created on the Age UK website, and being rolled out across the UK on digital radio over the next 12 - 18 months (http://www.ageuk.org.uk/the-wireless/).

Martyn is the author of six books, ranging from the humorous best-sellers "Dogs In The News", "Cats In The News" and "And Finally" (a compilation of the strange and amusing stories that have ended news bulletins over the years) to "Reflections on Success" (for which he interviewed 67 famous achievers from all walks of life), "Seasons of Our Lives" (powerful poetry and prose to match the many stages of live) and "Tears and Smiles - The Hospice Handbook" (the first layman's guide to the British Hospice movement).

Martyn is the Founder and Chairman of YouthNet, the award-winning charity which, since 1995, has been providing a comprehensive internet site signposting 16-25 year-olds to every conceivable form of help, information or opportunity they might need (www.thesite.org). It is accessed by more than a million young people in the UK each year (over 2.4 million worldwide). YouthNet also provides the UK's national volunteering database - www.do-it.org.uk - listing and regularly updating over a million volunteering opportunities available across the UK, and all accessed by postcode.

He has been active in the UK voluntary sector for 30 years. Other current charitable involvement includes : Chairman of NCVO (the National Council for Voluntary Organisations - the UK's main umbrella organisation representing over 10,000 charities) ; Chairman of the Awards Committee of the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service (the equivalent of an MBE for groups); Chairman & Co-Founder of Families Of The Fallen, raising extra funds for the families of servicemen & women killed in recent conflicts; Permanent Deputy Chair (and longest serving judge) of the Lord Mayor of London's Dragon Awards, honouring companies for the work they and their employees do to help disadvantaged areas of the community ; President of United Response, helping people with learning disabilities ; and Vice-President of Macmillan Cancer Support, Marie Curie Cancer Care and Help the Hospices, for whom he is a regular speaker at individual hospice fund-raising dinners. For nine years up to 2011 he was a Trustee of the Windsor Leadership Trust, bringing together and helping to develop the leaders of tomorrow across all sectors of society, and he still chairs their annual lecture, interviewing leading businessmen and women.

In his broadcasting career, he also presented documentaries, the primetime BBC1 Crimebeat series, the daily BBC news quiz Today's The Day, and special live programmes on major events, including the start of the first Gulf War and the death of the Princess of Wales. He wrote and produced the best-selling 2-hour ITV video on the Falklands War - "Battle for the Falklands". Richard Lindley's book on the history of Independent Television News, describes him as "simply one of the best news story film-makers ITN ever employed".

He has appeared "as himself" in the James Bond movie "The World is Not Enough", the films "The Queen and "Everything or Nothing - the Untold Story of 007", and episodes of "The Bill" and "The Vicar of Dibley".

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In 1993, he made the news himself with two controversial and widely-debated speeches arguing for a shift in the agenda of TV news programmes to achieve a fairer balance between the positive and the negative, and analyse success and achievement as well as failure - a theme to which he recently returned by contributing a chapter on "solutions-driven journalism" in a book, "Media Values" (Published November 2010), and in a speech to the Citizen's Advice Bureau annual conference (2011).

Martyn continues to chair conferences and debates in the corporate, public and charitable arenas - most recently for Havas (on "the Caring Corporation"), for the King's Fund (on Mental Health), for the World Bank (on Leadership in Emerging Nations), for the European Commission (on stem cells), for the European Brain Council (on Parkinson's Disease, and Depression), for the Trading Standards Institute's annual conference, for the UK Department of Health's annual Innovation Forum, for YouGovStone on the Big Society, and the launch of the Dilnot Commission report on the Funding of Care and Support.

He has also chaired global conferences for Astrazenca on prostate cancer and breast cancer.

At the UK 2010 General Election he presented a closed-circuit TV programme at Tate Britain for the Wall Street Journal, interviewing leading political and business figures throughout the evening as the results came in. He regularly conducts interviews and chairs Q+A sessions with business leaders - most recently Cynthia Carroll (CEO of Anglo American) and Sir John Armitt (Chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority) for the Windsor Leadership Trust, and Sir Terry Leahy (former CEO of Tesco) and Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, for The Marketing Society.

Martyn holds an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Ulster and is a Liveryman, a Freeman of the City of London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Member of the Garrick Club and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 1997 he was awarded a CBE for "services to young people and the Hospice movement" in the Prime Minister's Honours List.

Martyn was born in Swansea in 1945. His mother, Jonie, was a State Registered Nurse who had taken part in the Dunkirk evacuation. His father, Dudley, was a Chartered Quantity Surveyor, who had been a Company Sergeant Major in the Royal Engineers during the Second World War. They took Martyn and his sister, Jill, to live in Northern Ireland in 1949. He was educated at Dalriada School, Ballymoney and obtained a BA degree from Trinity College, Dublin. He joined BBC Belfast briefly before working as a reporter/presenter for first HTV, then ITN and later BBC TV News. Martyn has two daughters - Sylvie, a singer/songwriter currently based in Rome, and Kate, who works in the film industry. His first wife, Liz, a fashion model & TV announcer, died early in 2012, after 10 years in a nursing home suffering from an advanced form of dementia. Martyn is now married to Patsy Baker, Group Director of Business Development for the public relations company BPP (Bell Pottinger Private). They live in central London.