A former television presenter who started out as a journalist on a weekly paper has died at the age of 65.
Mike Morris was best known for being a presenter for TV-am’s flagship breakfast programme Good Morning Britain, after joining the show at its launch in 1983.
He started out as a journalist with the Surrey Comet in 1969 and held various positions during his career until becoming the main anchor for Yorkshire Television’s regional news programme Calendar, where he stayed his retirement in March 2002.
Mike is understood to have suffered from a short illness and died on Sunday at the age of 65.
TV presenter and former colleague Lorraine Kelly tweeted: “Very sad news – my old friend Mike Morris who shared a sofa with me on TVam has died. He was a good man and a very underrated broadcaster.”
After leaving the Comet, Mike later moved to Sydney, working for Australian news agency AAP Reuters, before returning to the UK and working for United Newspapers as a sports journalist.
He moved into broadcast journalism in 1979, working for regional news programme Thames News before joining TV-am for its launch and becoming one of its chief weekday anchors in 1987.
Mike stayed working at the station until it lost its franchise in 1992 then he joined Calendar in 1996, where he remained until his retirement.
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…from an era when talent and knowledge was far more important than the vanity-obsessed presenters of the modern world. Proper journo. Rest easy, Michael.
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I was saddened to learn about Mike. I remember his first day on the Surrey Comet where I worked as a sub. I met him a few months back at the funeral of one of our mentors, Comet chief sub John Vivian, and he told me he had a heart condition, cardiomyopathy.
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So sorry to hear that Mike has died. I first met him when he was on the Surrey Comet and I was working as a reporter on another paper in the area, the Surrey Herald, and we later worked together at TV-am. A really nice guy and a first-class journalist.
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