Working Life Stories: Martine Croxall

Life/Redefined shines a spotlight on inspirational Redefiners who prove that, as you enter your 50s and beyond, anything is possible.

“I never intended to be on air,” says BBC presenter Martine Croxall, recalling how she began her career. But with a 33-year career at the BBC behind her and despite a difficult year when she was temporarily taken off air, she is back where she should be - presenting the news. Here she talks to us about her career to date, about the need for organisations to ensure their culture is inclusive and about why achieving equality is a constant work in progress.

Studying Geography

Martine didn’t always want a job in journalism. As a teenager, she wanted to be a vet, but realised that she wouldn’t get the grades in science since she was more of a humanities person. She chose to study geography at the University of Leeds and doesn’t regret it.

She says: “There was a certain sniffiness about geography back in the late 80s. People said the only job you could get was teaching geography, but it has taught me a range of skills, including handling large volumes of information and data which has been very useful in my job. People ask me how often I use my geography degree. Every day.” She adds that while politics graduates, who are numerous in the media, tend to see news stories through the prism of politics, she sees them through a spatial prism and is interested in how they affect the way the world is.

Martine’s commitment to geography, which now has the highest employment rate six months after graduation, has indeed come full circle as, since 2011, she has been an interviewer for the Royal Geographical Society’s "Discovering People" series.

Starting Out In Local Journalism

Her journalistic career began with work experience on the Hinckley Times, her local newspaper in Leicestershire. Her dad had been a typographic design apprentice on the paper in the 1950s so there was a close family tie. Martine also did a bit of student journalism, although she says she suffered from imposter syndrome as she felt the other student journalists seemed immensely confident and certain of what they were doing.

When she graduated she travelled around Africa for a year and, on her return home ‘popped into’ her local radio station - BBC Radio Leicester - to see if there was anything she could do. At the time, she wanted to be a radio magazine producer, which, at the time, did not require a journalistic background, but that soon changed and everyone was offered journalism training. Martine joined as a programme assistant on phone-in programmes, never intending to be on air. Six weeks into her work experience, she was told to go out and report on the launch of a charity in Leicester. She didn’t feel ready, but there was no-one else to do the job. At the launch she interviewed a man dressed as a latex tree called Woody Tree. The photo of her with him went on the cover of the BBC’s internal magazine, Ariel.

From there she did lots of outside broadcasts around Leicester and Rutland and found the chaos of the newsroom exciting. Local radio was a fantastic grounding for her later career. She stayed at Radio Leicester for just over five years, doing almost every presenting job there before doing a secondment on the East Midlands Today tv programme in Nottingham where she did some presenting. After that she applied to join Newsroom South East in 1997.

Within a few days of arriving, someone went off sick and she found herself presenting the news bulletins. In 2000 she heard of a job going at BBC TV centre working on the UK Today regional round-up programme on one of the corporation’s new digital tv channels. Often the news reports were filed at the last minute and sometimes the programme had to start with the sports news because the news items weren’t ready. Martine also had to learn to fill time. “It was a brilliant grounding for what came later,” she says.

National And International News

She then moved to BBC World where she did overnight shifts. She recalls one shift where she had to deal with a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv, the massacre of the royal family in Nepal, a hostage situation in the Philippines, trouble in the Niger Delta and a group of children in the US holding the FBI at gunpoint. “The editor asked me if I was going to be okay. I didn’t know, but the only thing you can do is feel your way through asking those what, when, where and why questions,” she says. “It was a great baptism of fire. There is no substitute for just doing it.”

From BBC World she moved to the domestic 24/7 news cycle on BBC News 24, including the press review for which she recently got into a little hot water for a throwaway comment for which she apologised. The rest is history.

Looking back she says it is not the big breaking stories that have been hardest to deal with, but longer-running ones, such as conflict in the Middle East, which require a lot of context and sensitivity. “You have to tread carefully and be impartial and interrogate,” she says. You also need a good memory and ‘hinterland’, which is where having more experience of life can come in useful.

Martine says she has worked hard over the years, although she has also had some lucky breaks. She also says that remaining open to learning something new has been vital. Her childhood curiosity - always asking why - has stood her in good stead. While there have been huge technological changes in the last decades, the art of telling stories has remained the same, she says.

Becoming A Union Rep

During her time at the BBC, Martine was a union representative for a decade and represented fellow presenter Carrie Gracie in her equal pay case. Having advised many women now - and indeed she is currently fighting her own case - she feels the issues around equal pay and discrimination are systemic and are exponentially worse if you are a woman of colour or have a disability or both. “Women in all sectors of employment are just asking for equal pay which is what we are legally entitled to,” she says.

Martine has also had to contend with the pressures of working and bringing up her children. Her advice to women who might be thinking that juggling family and work is too hard is to hang on in there if they can because getting back into your career, particularly one as competitive as the media, is very hard. She was the main earner in her family - Martine has two children, both now over 20 - and she recalls the exhaustion of trying to keep it all together. She says she was lucky that her former partner was able to go part time so they could share the childcare, but she admits to running herself ragged and feeling ‘jetlagged after 10 years of night shifts’ to be able to spend time with her kids. “I would implore women not to come out of the workforce entirely if they have a staff job,” she says. “It is so much harder to get back in.”

She feels there has been some improvement for women in the last few years, particularly in relation to the menopause, but that maternity and part-time discrimination are still big issues in many workplaces. Another problem is the temptation for employers to recruit younger workers as a cheaper option. “But sometimes there's no substitute for experience”, says Martine. Unsurprisingly, she is very big on people knowing what their rights are and fighting for them.

Martine feels very lucky to be surrounded by a group of supportive women colleagues. BBC Women was set up after the Carrie Gracie case came to light in 2017. They are still going strong and “hold each other up”, says Martine. “You need people around you who have cool heads and shoulders to lean on because women can often feel like they are imagining things. There is the shock of discrimination, then denial then they feel very low and eventually they think I’m going to stand up for myself.” She adds that she is keen to help those coming up behind her too. “As women we have to throw down a ladder,” she says, adding that structural change is a slow process, particularly in older organisations.

All organisations need to check their culture, she says, because equality and inclusion are a constant work in process. She is, nevertheless, a firm believer in the BBC as an institution. She calls it ‘an extraordinary idea’. “It always was and remains so. It has given me a 33-year career,” she states.

Handing Down Knowledge

Martine is also keen on handing down her knowledge. She does presentation skills training and really enjoys it. She says the skills are useful in many walks of life, from giving a paper at a conference to chairing a meeting, and not just on air. Her approach is to encourage people to be an ‘amplified version’ of themselves rather than to follow an identikit script. “People can tell if you are not being yourself,” she says. “The mask will drop at some point. You can’t keep up an act for 33 years.”

That’s certainly the case with Martine. She comes across in the interview exactly how she does on tv and she laughs that she has been praised for being ‘really ordinary’. Over the years, she has become more informal in her style, although always professional. “As a presenter you are in people’s living rooms. People don’t want someone in a black tie or ballgown,” she says.

She hopes that by being ‘warm and authoritative’ she has been able to earn people’s trust over the many years she has been on the tv. She feels she has earned that trust after a lot of hard work and long hours. She knows she is not everyone’s cup of tea, but she knows that she is good at her job.

After a difficult year when she was not on air, she is really enjoying being back in the presenter’s chair and says her new bosses are ‘fantastic’. She has had some big stories to get her teeth into, which she takes as a vote of trust. “They trust me and I trust them,” she says. “It makes it all much easier.”

She still has the same enthusiasm for journalism that she had in the early days, describing how she loves it when you think the programme is going to go one way and something totally derails it. “You get to tell the first draft of a story,” she says. “You have the opportunity to ask questions on behalf of the audience and there is a strong sense of team work. It’s a privilege.”

In the current mire of misinformation, Martine is also very aware of the importance of the BBC’s global reputation in a world where press freedom is often curtailed and of its insistence on fact checking. She says it is important to hold your hands up if you get something wrong. “We have to be honest. Transparency is vital and we have a duty of candour,” she says. “We all get things wrong, but we are so lucky that the BBC is held to account.”

55/Redefined acquired the assets of workingwise.co.uk, where this article was first published, in 2024.

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