From the NZ Listener, 9th August 1976
Regular frontman on the Wellington contribution to News at Six, Bill Saunders was born and brought up in Christchurch. After a brief career in law he joined the NZBC as an announcer and transferred to Wellington a year later.
His first experience as a TV reporter was in 1968 on Wellington's Town and Around. He then went to Compass, the first local current affairs documentary programme. For Bill it was an interesting period as many of the programmes examined issues leading up to the 1969 elections. One of the documentaries he directed. Three Score Years and Then?, which looked at the accommodation problems of old people, won a Feltex award as the best documentary of the year. After Compass he worked on Survey, a "softer" documentary series, until going overseas in 1971.
During his two years away Bill did some freelance broadcasting in London — one of the programmes was the Tomorrow Today series, a science programme which has been shown here, for which he wrote scripts and was one of their front men. Since returning to New Zealand Bill has done a wide variety of broadcasting work. When the NZBC was split last year he went back to radio as a presenter of the new Report programmes.
Since he joined TV2 at the end of last year he has discovered that this versatility has stood him in good stead.
Because we are a small branch office of the news and current affairs operation, as well as working on News at Six I have to cover spot news stories, sports items or present the weather. But my preference is for the longer in-depth items with human interest.
One other piece of human interest information about Bill Saunders is that he is married and has a very young family - a two-year-old son and one-year-old daughter.
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