BBC star and TV presenter Michael Charlton, who worked on Panorama, has died at home at the age of 98
Michael Charlton hosted a current affairs show in Australia and commentated on cricket for the BBC and worked on Panorama.
BBC star and TV host Michael Charlton has died at 98. The Telegraph reported that “Michael, died at home aged 98 on 24th August 2025. He was a journalist with the BBC and before that a cricket commentator and journalist with the ABC in Australia.”
Gold Logie Award winner Michael Charlton was the first host of the affairs show Four Corners for ABC in 1961. He will be remembered for his broadcast from the States following President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and also covered the Apollo moon landing and the Vietnam War.
Michael Charlton was born in Sydney Australia in 1927 and after working as a sports journalist, he landed a job on the BbC cricket commentary team for the England V Australia Test Series in 1956. He then helped co-found the Australia ABC show Four Corners in 1961 but left for the UK the following year.
After moving to the UK, Michael Charlton worked on Panorama for 15 years and then moved back to Australia in 1976 where he joined forces again with his former Four Corners colleague Bob Raymond on a documentary for ABC. When Michael Charlton worked on Panorama, he interviewed politicians such as the then French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing and also spoke to a Nazi politician who was said to have been close to Hitler.
In an interview with BBC Science Focus, Michael Charlton recalled the Apollo moon landing and said: “I was at Cape Kennedy and Houston during the Apollo 11 mission coverage. It was my job to convey what it was like to be there, the context in which the mission was happening and the atmosphere of mission control.
“At the launch, I was in the grandstand. I used to commentate on test cricket and it was rather like that. But I was quite unprepared for the noise the Saturn V made – it shook your insides. The microphone couldn’t handle noise like that and we had to turn the volume down. It was an absolutely colossal sound.”
He also recalled that “They were very brave, those boys, sitting on top of what amounted to a huge bomb. I remember asking one of the earlier astronauts whether he felt at all poetic about the Moon (I had Keats’s phrase, “Alone and palely loitering,” in mind) and he said he didn’t. So I asked, “Well, what is the Moon to you?” And he said, “A big fat target.” They were test pilots first and foremost, certainly not round-shouldered academics.”