- Des Kelly
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For the Ceylonese musician, see Desmond Kelly.
Des Kelly (born 1965) is a British journalist and broadcaster. The award-winning sports columnist for The Daily Mail appears In the paper every Saturday, having joined in 2004.
Des is also a presenter on talkSPORT commercial national radio station, which broadcasts from London across the United Kingdom. He is the host of The Press Pass every Sunday evening, between 6pm to 8pm, a show introduced on the first weekend of the Premier League season in August 2011.
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Journalism
A past winner of the SJA Sports Columnist of the Year award, Kelly has been nominated as UK Press Gazette Sports Writer of the Year and highly commended on three separate occasions by the Sports Journalists' Association for his articles.
A regular television contributor to Sky News and BBC Breakfast, he is a popular member of the BBC Radio Five Live Fighting Talk panel show, and often appears on Sportsweek and the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Previously, Des was the Acting Editor and Deputy Editor of the Daily Mirror. Kelly replaced Piers Morgan after he was sacked for publishing faked photos of Iraqi prisoners being 'tortured' by British troops [1] and edited the paper in the wake of that controversy. But Kelly subsequently parted with The Mirror later in 2004.
He is a former Assistant Editor and Head of Sport of the Daily Express, Football Editor of the Sunday Express, and the Chief Sports Reporter of the now defunct Today newspaper. He was previously a columnist for The Sunday Times, has written for GQ, appeared in the German newspaper Bild and also L'Équipe in France.
Broadcasting
Kelly was on BBC1's Inside Sport alongside Gabby Logan throughout its three-year run from 2007 to 2009. His contributions included interviews with Michael Schumacher[2], Arsène Wenger[3], Petr Cech [4] and a piece on GB Blind Football [5].
Des has made television appearances on the BBC's Match of the Day 2 - and remains the only journalist to appear as pundit on either Match of the Day show. He has also guested on Channel 4's Clive Anderson's Sports Talk Show, Ant and Dec's Family Fortunes on ITV, Sky Sports' Hold the Back Page show and one of his first assignments was to provide live reports for Sky News from England's 3-0 win over Poland in 1989. He has been a contributor to a number of programmes, including BBC's The Noughties... Was That It? and Britain's Most Annoying People as well as GMTV and others.
A BBC Fighting Talk favourite, Des is nicknamed 'The Fonz' and 'The Fruit Machine' on the show. He is known as 'The Fruit Machine' in honour of a popular fancy dress anecdote. His Fighting Talk theme tunes are Happy Days and a traditional Irish reel.[6]
Outside journalism
Kelly is patron of the Great Britain Blind Football team and opened the new Royal National College for the Blind Paralympic Centre in Hereford.[7][8] He is also a member of the Jaguar Sports Academy and is on the judging panel for the Laureus World Sports Awards.
Des has also been an Executive Consultant for the PR agency Hill & Knowlton and director of the internet company Fast Web Media. At Hill and Knowlton he was Master of Ceremonies at various corporate nights involving supermodels Jerry Hall and Petra Nemcova, football manager Arsène Wenger, the BBC Match of the Day team, Cilla Black, chef Antony Worrall Thompson, the cricketers Nasser Hussein and Jeff Thomson and footballer Marcel Desailly.
He has completed two London Marathons, the Network Q Rally of Great Britain twice [9][10], the Arctic Rally, the Belgium Bianchi Rally and others. He took part in the world's first two-seater F1 race with Fernando Alonso at Donington Park. He completed in the 2007 Isle of Wight Round The Island race on board an Extreme 40 sailing boat, made a parachute jump for MENCAP, has run with the bulls in Pamplona.[11] and climbed Kilimanjaro as part of a Football League team raising funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care in the summer of 2011 [12].
Personal
Des lives in Bristol. Born in London of an Irish family, he was educated at Wimbledon College and has a University of Surrey BA (Hons) in English and History from Froebel College in Roehampton, London.[13] After meeting at a Christmas party in 1999, his partner was TV presenter Carol Vorderman and they lived together in London from 2001, but separated in 2010.
References
- ^ Editor sacked over 'hoax' photos BBC News 14 May 2004
- ^ BBC SPORT | TV/Radio Schedule | Inside Sport | Inside Sport: Michael Schumacher
- ^ BBC SPORT | TV/Radio Schedule | Inside Sport | Inside Sport: Arsene Wenger interview
- ^ BBC SPORT | TV/Radio Schedule | Inside Sport | Inside Sport: Petr Cech
- ^ BBC SPORT | TV/Radio Schedule | Inside Sport | Inside Sport: Des Kelly tries blind football
- ^ Incompatible Browser | Facebook[dead link]
- ^ State-of-the-art facility makes an impressive bow (From Hereford Times)
- ^ BBC personality Des Kelly launches thePoint4 at Hereford's Royal National College for the Blind (From Hereford Times)
- ^ RallyBase
- ^ Network Q Rally of Great Britain 2000 Entry List
- ^ The horns of death: The bulls are free. All brave drunks are suddenly scared sober. What a stupid was to die | Mail Online
- ^ DES KELLY: Scaling Kilimanjaro with Chris Kamara and Brendan Rodgers | Mail Online
- ^ AIM25 collection description
External links
Categories:- Daily Mail journalists
- 1965 births
- Living people
- People from London
- British journalists
- People associated with the Royal National College for the Blind
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