In 35 years of peddling news there is little left to shock poised, suave, super cool Angela Rippon. One of the best-known faces and voices in British broadcasting is hardened to tragedy. At least, she thought she was, until she went to Zimbabwe with the British Red Cross.

In Africa's former breadbasket, now the scene of mass hunger and death from AIDS, she sat down and cried.

The first non-royal to be made vice president of the humanitarian organisation, her tour to a country where five million could soon die, where crops have failed for three years, and where, in a single week, three schoolchildren died at their desks, horrified her.

Scenes of appalling poverty and disease made her angry and helpless. Red Cross is non-political and she must skirt cautiously around mention of Robert Mugabe's corrupt and brutal regime.

She is addressing a Cumbria Red Cross lunch, at Windermere St Anne's School. As far removed from the squalor and hopeless that is Zimbabwe as you could get.

We chat in the headmistress's elegant study, overlooking the lake.

Immaculate in an ice blue trouser suit, expensive tan designer shoes, not a coiffured hair out of place, the racehorse physique is a picture of perfection, right down to manicured pretty pink polished fingertips.

Angela Rippon has just written a book, Looking Fab at 50. In fact, she is 58 and proud of it, smirking at suggestions she looks a decade younger.

Profile writers have not always been kind to the country's first woman television newsreader. A Joyce Grenfell image lingers, arched feline eyebrows highlighted rather than a razor memory and admirable brain.

Lynda Lee-Porter once wrote in the Daily Mail interviewing her was "like epees at dawn". She was satirised by Pamela Stephenson in Not The Nine O'Clock News, saw the rise of fall of rockband Angela Rippon's Bum.

An Internet site is dedicated to Angela Rippon anagrams. They include: a nipple groan; prone anal pig; and no pagan peril.

She will always be remembered for her high kicking routine on Morecambe and Wise's 1977 Christmas Show. It had an audience of 29 million viewers.

For the first time in 20 years, she returned to mainstream television news to front ITV's late-night Iraq war coverage.

ITV bosses figured a trusted and reassuring face was important in times of crisis and, she admits, hers doesn't come more familiar.

"People have been used to me coming into their sitting rooms for such a long time now, I'm almost like part of the family," she grins impishly, bright eyes tinkling.

"I went on air at nine o'clock and at 9.30 Baghdad fell. I was reading pictures live as they came in. My preparation was 35 years in broadcasting.

"Yehudi Menuhin was once asked on his way to the Met in New York how long it would take him to get there. He replied, a lifetime'. There are similarities.

"I had spent the previous two weeks studying a video on aircraft recognition, payload ranges and so forth. I had to know the difference between Stealth bombers and B52s, Abraham and Challenger tanks."

Homework comes with the job. She has interviewed every British Prime Minister since Wilson and more politicians than she cares to remember.

"Enoch Powell was the most difficult. A fascinating man, he was completely expressionless. It was like talking to an automaton. I asked him about his reputation as a misogynist and for being without humour. Three questions later, he suddenly went, ha, ha, ha'. It was his idea of a joke.

"Prime Ministers are much nicer, I find, after they have left office. Thatcher was, and is, a particularly extraordinary woman."

Angela Rippon guards her own private life fiercely. There are no beans to be spilled on her marriage break-up, or subsequent men in her life.

"Now I've been in the business 35 years, I have earned the right to a certain amount of privacy," she counters. "My job is public, not my life."

Politicians, on the other hand, are fair game.

"I always take the view that they are accountable servants of the people. They are elected to do our bidding and there are no holds barred. I would ask them about anything."

Fame has brought a dark side. Twice she has suffered at the hands of muggers.

Angela was a founder of breakfast television, fronting TV-am in 1982. Two years later she crossed the pond to work for CBS in Boston, meeting top political figures and members of the Kennedy family.

Back home, she presented Come Dancing, Antiques Roadshow, award ceremonies, What's My Line, to name a few. Ask her about her favourite stint in television and she replies working for Westward TV, as a raw Devon journalist.

"I've only dried up once in my own career, and it was at Westward. There was no autocue and something distracted me. I went completely blank. It was ghastly. It only lasted a few seconds, but I will never forget it. Fortunately, I don't think anyone else noticed it."

Ballet has always been a passion. She started having lessons at the age of four, to help combat knock-knees, and continued until she was 17. She is chairman of English National Ballet.

Involved in a number of charities, the Red Cross role is particularly poignant. She hopes she can help encourage donations towards providing 100,000 Zimbabweans with basic food and medicines.

Her distress at the country's malaise is obvious. It was a shrewd move on Red Cross's behalf to get such an eloquent and influential ambassador.

She trots out the awful statistics. Forty two per cent of the adult population has AIDS. An entire generation has been wiped out. Parents have gone, children are infected, aged relatives left to cope.

On her trip to Zimbabwe, she met eight families, which offered "a bleak snapshot of the horror encompassing the country".

Two children, aged two and four, were dying with AIDS. They had no energy to play and were looked after by their 54-year-old grandmother, four years younger than Angela, and a lifetime older.

The field where they used to grow maize and vegetables was parched dry and barren. Angela gave them porridge, it would keep them going for another couple of weeks.

Red Cross is the only charity to work across Zimbabwe without interference from the Mugabe regime.

Angela Rippon is appealing for funds to help save lives in the dark hole that is now Zimbabwe.

May 29, 2003 15:30