Michael Aspel barely acted at all, and the one film that properly used him needed exactly what he had: the evening newsreader's voice in The War Game, reading blast radii and casualty figures as if they were the weather. The rest of his television career explains why it worked.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in the 48 minutes of The War Game (1966) a voice gives the number of doctors available per thousand casualties, and the voice does not alter. It is the tone of the BBC evening bulletin because it belongs to Michael Aspel, who had spent the early 1960s reading the BBC's national news. Peter Watkins wanted a nuclear attack on Kent to pass for news footage; Peter Bartlett shot it on grainy black and white from the shoulder, Michael Bradsell cut in real street interviews with people in Kent, and the last piece was a commentator the audience already trusted. We were horrified, and what horrified us most was not anything on screen but that level, unbothered delivery counting it.
Aspel would not call himself an actor and neither would we, though he has said that acting was what he first wanted to do, and that he appeared in one film and thought well of it. He started in radio acting with BBC Wales in Cardiff around 1954, moved to announcing and newsreading there in 1957, and by the early 1960s was one of four regular national television newsreaders. Then came the long turn into light entertainment: Come Dancing, Ask Aspel, fourteen Miss World contests, Give Us a Clue in the 1970s, Aspel & Company on ITV from 1984 to 1993, This Is Your Life from 1988 to 2003 after Eamonn Andrews, and Antiques Roadshow from 2000 to 2008 after Hugh Scully. He largely stopped after 2008.
On screen he keeps out of the way. Early notes on his BBC work called him bland, and he agreed: "My secret originally was my blandness." That is not false modesty. The same quality let him carry on, steady and dignified, when Kenneth Horne died on air in 1969, and it is why comedies kept casting him as a newsreader or as himself, as in his uncredited turn as a television commentator in The Magic Christian (1969). Put Aspel in a scene and he will read the scene to you rather than play it.
That is also the limit. There is no edge to the manner and no second thing underneath it, and as a screen presence it works properly only where reading the scene is the whole job. Watkins's film is that job. It asks nothing of Aspel except to be what he was on other evenings, and the horror comes from how little he has to change.
The BBC kept The War Game off the air until 1985. In 2025 Aspel introduced a screening of it for BBC Four, nearly sixty years after he read its casualty figures without a tremor. Watch the film. Then notice that the voice reading it to you is the one the country had trusted, a few years earlier, to tell it what had actually happened.
Biography
Michael Aspel is an English television presenter and newsreader. Born on 12 January 1933 in Battersea, London, he joined the BBC as an announcer in 1957 and later became one of its regular newsreaders.
He provided narration for the 1966 film The War Game. Aspel presented numerous programmes including Crackerjack, This Is Your Life and Antiques Roadshow. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1993 for services to broadcasting.
