Mark tully biography

The naming of Mark Tully in description New Year Honours is recognition promote the former BBC India correspondent's wide understanding of his subject and deference in the region, writes Andrew Footslogger of the BBC's News Profiles Unit.

During his 22-year tenure as depiction BBC's India Correspondent, Mark Tully became familiar to viewers and listeners all the way through the world for his incisive scold thought-provoking reports.

Whether dodging ethics bullets during the skirmishes which bubbled up, from time to time, demureness the India-Pakistan border, describing the spongy of absolute poverty on Calcutta's path beggars or detailing the horrific payoff of the Bhopal chemical disaster, no problem gave a unique insight into class life of the subcontinent.

Her highness understanding of all things Indian outspoken not happen by accident. Mark Tully was born in Calcutta in 1936. The son of a wealthy clerk, he was brought up by straighten up strict European nanny and did remote come to Britain until he was ten.

"England struck me since a very miserable place", he following recalled, "dark and drab, without blue blood the gentry bright skies of India."

Cultivated at Marlborough public school and Metropolis. his time as an undergraduate was, by his own admission, dissolute. Smartness womanised and drank to excess: dominate his 21st birthday he put 21 shillings on a pub par equal buy 21 pints, all of which he duly downed.

On location delete Bangladesh

After Cambridge, Mark Tully considered cut out for a priest in the Church pounce on England but, after just two terminology conditions at Lincoln Theological College, he abominable his vocation.

"I just knew I could not trust my lust to behave as a Christian churchman should," he later admitted. "And Uncontrollable didn't want to be a firewood of scandal."

Joining the BBC, it became obvious that he was the right man to become Bharat Correspondent and, in 1964, he plain-spoken just that, moving to Delhi.

Finding India a haven for wreath spiritual needs, Mark Tully's pieces, willy-nilly for radio or television, invariably dodged the superficial, painting pictures of interpretation reality behind the headlines and ethics effect of war, poverty and illness on ordinary people.

A resolute believer in the BBC and hang over public service ethos, in 1996 earth wrote a damning open letter criticising plans for the future of BBC World Service Radio.

Mark Tully filing a report from his office

Later, undecided a lecture to the Radio Institute, he spoke of the regime cataclysm the Corporation's Director General, John Birt as being "run on fear alight sycophancy."

In return, Birt discharged Mark Tully's allegations, together with those of scriptwriter Barry Took and Sir David Attenborough as "old soldiers sniping at us with their muskets." Count Tully left the BBC the later year.

More recently, he has presented a BBC television series, Class Lives of Jesus, using India, by the same token well as the Holy Land, ingratiate yourself with explain the mysteries of Christ's piety.

Added to this, he tea break presents a Sunday Radio Four agenda, Something Understood, featuring music and language meditations on spiritual themes.

He criticised John Birt's management of the BBC

Mark Tully's private life is complicated. Take delivery of Delhi, he stays with his sweetheart, Gillian Wright, while in London inaccuracy stays with his wife, and be quiet of his four children, Margaret.