Mavis Nicholson (née Mainwaring; 19 October 1930 – 8 September 2022) was a Welsh writer and radio and television broadcaster. She was born in Wales, and worked throughout the United Kingdom.[2]
In 1951, at the end of her undergraduate studies, Nicholson won a scholarship to train as an advertising copywriter and with this moved to London. There she and her husband were at the centre of a lively social circle, including their former tutor, Kingsley Amis, and the journalist and broadcaster John Morgan.[5] According to Peter Corrigan's obituary of her husband, Mavis and Geoff Nicholson "became a much-loved double-act. Amis did not always approve of their views and claimed to have invented the word 'lefties' during one little set-to with them. While it was true that the Nicholsons didn't have dinner parties as such – they invited people for an argument and threw some food in – they were by no means belligerent but had in abundance the Welsh love of debate".[7]
Career
Early years
Nicholson stopped her work as an advertising copywriter when she had her children. Her second career as a broadcaster began in 1971 when, because of her probing and engaging conversational style at the dinner table, she was asked by Thames Television to host a programme on newly launched daytime television (British television had previously only started to broadcast in the late afternoon).[3]
Broadcasting
Nicholson's screen debut occurred when she spoke out over a local dispute over school buses. The presenter of Thames TV News, Eamonn Andrews, told her she was a natural for the job. [6] A year later, Nicholson had secured her first presenting job on the 1971–72 show Tea Break.[8] By April 1972,[9] this had become Good Afternoon, after which her TV career spanned the next 25 years.[10] Nicholson then presented British television programmes such as After Noon, After Noon Plus and Mavis on 4 from the 1970s to 1990s, on which she interviewed people including Elizabeth Taylor, Kenneth Williams, Kenny Everett, David Bowie, James Baldwin, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.[11][12][13] Nicholson presented the Channel 4 programme A Plus 4, which ran from 1984 to 1986. In 1983, she presented the discussion series Predicaments, also a Thames production for Channel 4; she dismissed the view that the programme was "voyeuristic" as "middle-class queasiness".[14] For the BBC, she appeared on Start the Week regularly in the 1970s, presented You and Yours in 1976 and hosted a number of interview and discussion series, including Open Air from 1988 to 1989 and Welsh editions of the Radio 2 Arts Programme in the 1990s.[15]
In the 1980s, she and her husband returned to Wales to live in a farmhouse in Powys.[16] In the early 1990s, she fronted a number of Channel 4 series produced by YoYo Films, such as Third Wave, In with Mavis, Moments of Crisis and Faces of the Family.[17] She also presented the discussion show Right or Wrong, made by Central Television and taken by some other regions including Meridian.[18] Her last work for television was Oldie TV in 1997, a television version of The Oldie magazine. However, in 2005, she returned to interview Elaine Morgan in an On Show programme for BBC One Wales, broadcast on 13 March that year.[19] On 25 August 2016, BBC One Wales broadcast a profile called Being Mavis Nicholson: the Greatest TV Interviewer of All Time? in a peak 9 pm slot.[20]
Other activities
After a deeply sympathetic interview with Richard Ingrams, he was compelled to appoint her as resident agony aunt for his magazine The Oldie, for which she wrote until 2014.[6][21][22] She was the author of the 1992 book Martha Jane & Me: A Girlhood In Wales.[23]
Nicholson also presented radio shows, including a history of the department store and a look back at her childhood.[24]
Personal life
Nicholson married Geoffrey Nicholson in 1952. They met while studying at Swansea, and remained married until his death in 1999. Together, they had three sons.[3][5]
