Remembering John Stapleton
Movers and Shakers: a podcast about life with Parkinson's
Podot
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we're issuing a special episode to remember the life of John Stapleton, who died last week. We were privileged to have John join us in the pub earlier this year to discuss his life, career and PD journey. From getting pecked off our screen's by Rod Hull's intemperate Emu to making a film about his diagnosis with his award-winning documentarian son Nick, John led an extraordinary life. In this episode, we reflect on what made him a great presenter and a superb advocate for people with Parkinson's, and replay our conversation with him.
Presented by Rory Cellan-Jones, Gillian Lacey-Solymar, Mark Mardell, Paul Mayhew-Archer, Sir Nicholas Mostyn and Jeremy Paxman.
Produced and edited by Nick Hilton for Podot.
Sound mixing by Ewan Cameron.
Music by Alex Stobbs.
Artwork by Till Lukat.
PR by Sally Jones.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pod-O. |
| 0:03.8 | You're listening to Movers and Shakers, a podcast about living with Parkinson's. |
| 0:19.7 | Hello and welcome to Movers and Shakers, the podcast about Living with Parkinson's. |
| 0:24.6 | I'm Rory Kathleen Jones, and this is a special episode in which we're going to pay tribute |
| 0:28.5 | to a wonderful broadcaster and thoroughly nice man, John Stapleton, who died last weekend. |
| 0:35.0 | Last autumn, John went public about his Parkinson's diagnosis in a series of |
| 0:39.5 | short films shot by his son Nick, himself a very talented BBC reporter. We then invited him on |
| 0:46.2 | to Movers and Shakers and in February he joined us in the pub for a conversation which roamed far and |
| 0:51.8 | wide, from his first job, age 17, on the Eccles and |
| 0:55.3 | Patrickcroft Journal, to the time it now took him to put his socks on. In a moment, we're going |
| 1:01.0 | to replay that episode, but first, I've got Nicholas Mostynne with me, and Gillian Lacey |
| 1:06.0 | Salomar and Mark Mardell join us down the line. Mark, you presented that episode. You sort of ran it, |
| 1:13.2 | but it was quite easy, wasn't it? He was such a consummate professional. |
| 1:17.5 | There's the very phrase I was going to use, consummate professional. He was fantastic. I'd done my |
| 1:21.8 | bit of research, and he picked up on every cue and came in with it and talked about his early life, talked about |
| 1:28.7 | his experience now. |
| 1:30.0 | But what I also came over was, what a nice guy he was. |
| 1:32.7 | He was just so friendly, so happy and thoughtful. |
| 1:36.7 | I thought he was a great guy. |
| 1:38.3 | And then after we did this, we recorded a little bit together. |
| 1:41.4 | He wanted to do something on his voice. |
| 1:43.2 | Because that's something you had in common with him. Yeah. although he was much more, he was worried about his voice. I thought |
... |
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