Kate Adie

Uncompromising,

authoritative,

straight-talking,

cool and courageous

in her 'pearls-and-flak-jacket'.

I used to be obsessed by the news in the late 1980s, when I was young (this obsession still continues).

I remember my Dad telling me about Kate Adie and why she mattered on television - until that point she was just another news reporter to be fascinated by. Maybe that's the best way to see her, as a reporter doing a job. However, like my Dad expressed to me at that impressionable age, she's one of the only female correspondents who reported from the front lines and she was the Chief News Correspondent at the BBC for fourteen years. From the London Iranian Embassy siege in 1980 to the war in Sierra Leone in 2000, via several bullet grazes, Kate Adie saw me through my childhood.