Profile of Vincent Hanna on Famous Like Me

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Vincent Leo Martin Hanna (August 9, 1939 – July 22, 1997) was a Northern Irish television journalist famed for his coverage of United Kingdom byelections.

Background

Hanna was from a Northern Ireland catholic background and was born in Belfast, where his father Frank was a prominent solicitor and a member of the Stormont Parliament. He married the daughter of Gerry Fitt. Hanna had a distinguished education which included Trinity College, Dublin, Queen's University, Belfast, Harvard and the London School of Economics. He was admitted as a Solicitor in 1964 and worked briefly for the family legal practice in industrial injuries and civil rights cases before becoming an industrial relations correspondent for The Sunday Times in 1970.

Work for the BBC

In 1973 he was recruited by the BBC Current Affairs department to work on Panorama. According to those who worked with him, he was extremely nervous when starting out, but he turned out to master the medium. His greatest fame came when he presented BBC Newsnight coverage of byelections from 1980. Hanna spent the entirety of the campaign doggedly pursuing candidates to ask difficult questions. Very few candidates escaped unscathed. At Darlington in March 1983, Hanna helped to destroy the campaign of SDP candidate Tony Cook who had been the early favourite to win.

His impartiality came to be questioned by some. His support for tactical voting went undisguised in some reports on the Chesterfield byelection of 1984, which caused Labour candidate Tony Benn to accuse him of acting as the SDP candidate. He publicly accused Angela Rumbold, a Conservative Minister, of being a liar. On the day of the 1987 general election, he told Neil Kinnock of the early results of the BBC exit poll which showed Labour doing surprisingly well, hinting that he might find himself in government. The poll turned out to have been wrong.

Later career

Such was Hanna's identification with byelections that in 1987 he was a guest star in Blackadder the Third, reporting on S. Baldrick's victory at Dunny-on-the-Wold. By this time, however, Hanna had left the BBC to set up his own freelance production company which specialised in trade union issues and mainly worked for Channel 4. He also co-presented The Week in Politics for the channel from 1989 until his death. He was an active Radio broadcaster on BBC Radio Five Live from 1994 where he managed to achieve an audience despite his show going out from midnight to 2 AM. From 1996 he presented Medium Wave on BBC Radio 4. His media company gave public relations advice to several local authorities on presentation. Hanna also made a successful appearance on Have I Got News For You.

Hanna was an active Trade Unionist in the National Union of Journalists. He led a strike at the BBC in 1985 when the Governors, bowing to Government pressure, suppressed a documentary called Real Lives: At the Edge of the Union which covered the home life of Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein and Gregory Campbell of the Democratic Unionist Party.

Hanna died in 1997 of a heart attack.

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