Sue Lloyd-Roberts – can you help?

Co-written with BBC Newsnight producer James Clayton

Sue Lloyd-Roberts is one most of the most extraordinary reporters in TV history – fearless, dogged and ground-breaking. I first knew her on when she was working on News At One and I first joined ITN as a young trainee in 1980. As a former ITN trainee herself, she was an inspiration to me as a budding reporter. In those days she went out and quickly reported whatever news item the programme editor threw at her at 7am that morning. But in the last 25 years she’s developed a reputation as an incredibly courageous and resourceful investigator of human rights abuses under many of the nastiest regimes around the globe.

Sue was the first journalist into Homs in Syria – smuggled into town in the back of a car. She was given a seven year prison sentence in absentia in China for her reporting on Chinese gulags and still went back there to report despite the risks. Then there are her reports on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Burma and North Korea (for which she won an Emmy award in 2011). She has also been awarded an MBE and a CBE for her humanitarian journalism, and having spent her life trying to give vulnerable and repressed people a voice. I have often wondered why the tyrants of the world never ganged together and devised a way to silence her.

Although most of her output in recent years has been for the BBC, her human rights journalism began in her days at ITN, with much of it on Channel 4 News.

Sadly, Sue has now been diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia. She’s had two courses of chemo in anticipation of a stem cell transplant and was due to go into hospital last month for a transplant. Unfortunately the donor failed his medical at the last moment. So she urgently needs a donor whose tissue type is the same as hers.

The BBC, with big support from the Director-General Tony Hall, is holding an open day next Monday, 22 June, for the Anthony Nolan Trust at New Broadcasting House in central London. Anyone who is 30 or under is being asked to come give a saliva sample, if they want to become potential bone marrow donors. Even if it does not help Sue, there are 37,000 other people out there waiting, so it could help hundreds of other people. The day is not just open to BBC staff, but to any member of the public who wants to turn up and volunteer as a possible donor. It takes place between 10am and 4pm, and the trust will set up on the second floor at New Broadcasting House. Sue will be there to talk to people.

If you are 30 or under and can’t make it you can register online:

https://www.anthonynolan.org/apply-join-bone-marrow-register

If you are over 30 there is still a way of registering to help with another charity online – Delete Blood Cancer UK – who will register people up to 55 years old.

For further details, please contact james.clayton@bbc.co.uk