Lynne Reid Banks

Lynne Reid Banks (31 July 1929 – 4 April 2024) was a British author of books for children and adults, including The Indian in the Cupboard, which has sold more than 15 million copies and was adapted as a film released in 1995. Her first novel, The L-Shaped Room (1960), was also adapted for the cinema.

Quotes

• I must stress, because a lot of people won't credit it, that it was revolutionary in those days for women to be seen onscreen in news programmes, and we "girl reporters" – there were just two of us – became minor celebrities. ... But we did pioneer new techniques of interviewing, including the vox-pop, where we buttonholed people in the street for their opinions (much to their alarm, at first – they thought we were trying to pick them up. Later we'd be mobbed by people avid to be on telly).
• Benny Hill once honoured me with a sketch in which I was sent up as eager-beaver "girl reporter Linseed Cranks". Being naive – another period indicator – I was given to wonderful boo-boos such as innocently asking the wife of the Swedish ambassador if her husband had big balls. ("Give, dear! Or throw!" my hilarious colleagues shouted at me for a week.)
  • "TV news in the 50s was more thrilling than The Hour", The Guardian (14 August 2011)
  • Reid Banks joined ITN in 1955, the year the UK's first commercial television channel ITV began broadcasting. The source article concerns The Hour, a drama series set in the BBC's television newsroom of 1955.