Category: East Midlands TV
Date: 01.09.2005
Printable version
Marie Ashby returns to the BBC after 15 years to present two shows in the East Midlands - the highly successful Inside Out and the brand new East Midlands Politics Show.
Unable to turn her back on live news, she'll also be popping up on BBC East Midlands Today with her former co-host Dominic Heale.
On leaving Central News, Marie says: "It's an incredibly exciting move that brings me back to the East Midlands and makes me feel like I'm really coming home.
"The BBC is where it all started for me and the East Midlands has been my home for nearly 20 years."
At noon from Sunday 18 September on BBC ONE, Jon Sopel reports on the important issues of the week and interviews high profile guests before handing over to Marie in Nottingham for a full 20 minutes looking at local matters in the East Midlands.
Mike Bettison, Head of Regional and Local Programmes, BBC East Midlands, says: "It's a great coup for BBC East Midlands to have someone of Marie's calibre joining our team. We're looking forward to the great contribution she'll make on and off screen."
Marie says: "I'm just so excited about being closer to home and having such a wide variety of work in my new job back at the BBC. Life couldn't be better."
Marie first joined BBC Radio Cumbria as a district reporter covering the Lake District after completing a post-graduate journalism course.
In her first week for Radio Cumbria, Marie was given a tape recorder, a car and sent to the lakes and simply told to come back in a week with some stories.
Later that year, Marie took a reporter's job at BBC Radio Nottingham where listeners would have known her as Marie Stevenson.
Throughout her time reporting in the East Midlands, Marie has reported a wide variety of stories: navigating her way through the politics of the 1987 General Election, interviewing Neil Kinnock and Brian Clough; through-the-night bulletins covering the Kegworth air disaster; and the Broxtowe child abuse case, then Britain's biggest ever child abuse case.
In 1989 Marie left BBC to join Central News as a reporter and was soon an anchor presenter on their main news programme.
Marie has also presented a wealth of other programmes covering political and social issues and more recently she's taken viewers on ariel journeys across the Midlands in a helicopter.
