Love behind the autocue: BBC stars kept apart on screen after affair

 
p10 p11 willcox sophie long
26 November 2012
The Weekender

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Two BBC presenters have been banned from appearing on screen together after having an affair.

Tim Willcox and Sophie Long, who are both married, have told their partners the marriages are over, and they have fallen in love.

But the pair, who in the past have been co-presenters on the BBC’s 24-hour news channel, have been told they cannot appear on screen together until the situation has settled down.

Long, 35, only got married two years ago, to childhood sweetheart Will Green, 35, a sales director for a Plymouth-based yacht company. Willcox, 49, attended the wedding and took his trumpet to serenade the couple.

Now Long has told her husband she is leaving him for her colleague. He has broken the news to wife Sarah, 49, the mother of his four children.

In the next few weeks the four will be deciding who will remain at their respective marital homes. A friend of Willcox said: “He is very charming and has lots of female fans but he is also very honourable so all this will have been very difficult for him.”

In September 2010, not long after he attended Long’s wedding, he was sent to Chile to report on the rescue of 33 miners trapped underground.

He was praised for his extensive live coverage, became a “pin-up” of the miners’ wives, and was the only foreign correspondent to interview Chilean president Sebastián Piñera.

In March last year he reported live from the disaster zone during the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and a few weeks later was reporting from Libya on the civil war there. A graduate in Spanish from Durham University, Willcox started his journalism career on a Sunday newspaper. Before switching to the BBC he had worked as a presenter for ITN.

Long also worked for ITN before joining the BBC. Before her journalistic career she was as an election monitor in Cambodia. She moved to Reuters news agency before a stint as a newsroom assistant with ITV. She gained a BBC scholarship — endowed in honour of the late Jill Dando — to do broadcast journalism before gaining a job with the corporation in the regions.

Willcox can be seen presenting bulletins on the BBC 24-hour news channel at weekends, as can Long, although they usually cover different slots. The BBC declined to comment.

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