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Jeremy Gordon Thompson (born 23 September 1947) is an English journalist and former news presenter for Sky News, the 24-hour UK television news service operated by Sky UK. He was based at Sky News Centre in west London. He started out as a journalist on the Cambridge Evening News in 1967. In 1971 he joined the BBC as a reporter on Radio Sheffield, moving on to become a reporter on BBC Look North Leeds.
In 1977 he was appointed as the BBC's first TV North of England Correspondent. He moved to ITN as Sports Correspondent in 1982. He worked as a TV foreign correspondent from 1986 to 1998, initially based in Asia and Africa for ITN; on joining Sky News in 1993, Thompson became head of its Africa bureau, based in Johannesburg. Two years later, in Washington, D.C., he established Sky's first US bureau. From 1999 until his retirement from Sky News at the end of 2016, he presented Live at Five, Sky News's flagship news programme.
Thompson was educated at Sevenoaks Prep School, Sevenoaks School, and later The King's School, a boarding independent school for boys (now co-educational and non-boarding), in the city of Worcester, where presenter Chris Tarrant was a fellow pupil.[citation needed]
Thompson was frequently Sky News's leading anchor on major stories, often presenting on location. His assignments included reporting from Rome and Vatican City on the death and funeral of Pope John Paul II in April 2005, the London bombings of July 2005, Hurricane Rita and the Asian tsunami where he was the first British presenter on the scene, reporting live from Phuket on the immediate aftermath of the disaster. He also reported from Haifa in northern Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War.
Thompson was a foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and Washington, D.C., from where he covered many major world events. He became a studio-based presenter in 1998, but continued to present on location regularly. In September 2016, he announced his impending retirement from Sky, set to take place at the end of the year.[1] He presented his final Sky News bulletin in the studio on 20 October 2016, and his final bulletin on location from Washington, D.C., on 10 November 2016.
His autobiography, Jeremy Thompson - Breaking News, was published in October 2017 by Biteback Books.
In February 2006, Thompson won the Royal Television Society's award for Presenter of the Year.
The judges' citation noted that Thompson ...
... has a unique ability to capture the moment, to know which tiny little things really matter and – crucially – he knows when to shut up and let the pictures do the talking.[2]
Thompson also appeared as himself in the following movies:
