A veteran BBC journalist, documentary filmmaker and author Taylor has spent more than 40 years reporting on terrorism and political violence. In particular he is known for his reporting of the conflict in Northern Ireland and, after 9/11, the Al-Qaeda network, Islamic extremism and the intelligence services.
Brought up in Scarborough, Yorkshire, he read Classics at Cambridge, and as a student got his first taste of broadcasting working on local radio in America. After this he decided to pursue a career in the field and in 1967, he secured a job as a researcher on Thames Television’s This Week programme. As part of this role his first assignment was setting up a documentary on the Six Day War, just days after hostilities ended.
He went on to report for This Week throughout the 1970s on a wide range of issues. This included; the Vietnam War, the Palestinian conflict, the Miners’ Strikes, alcohol abuse, the politics of tobacco and the escalating conflict in Northern Ireland. Later, his Northern Ireland coverage became his speciality in the decades to come.
In 1979, Taylor wrote the first of his nine books, Beating the Terrorists?, a controversial investigation into ill-treatment at RUC interrogation centres based on his initially banned television report.
In 1980, Taylor joined the BBC’s Panorama and continued his coverage of the Irish conflict. He reported on the hunger strikes, the so-called ’dirty war’ and the rise of Sinn Féin. He also covered the guerrilla war in South Africa, becoming the only journalist ever to film the ANC training in the bush, and Israel’s war in Lebanon where his team was ambushed. Taylor revealed the spread of heroin to quiet rural areas in England, and he was beaten up chasing drug smugglers in Pakistan. At the end of the decade, he moved to the studio to present Newsnight and BBC Two’s social affairs strands, Brass Tacks and Public Eye.
The 1990s saw him making a series of award winning and acclaimed documentaries including The Maze Enemies Within, Families at War, States of Terror and Remember Bloody Sunday. They culminated in his landmark trilogy on the Irish conflict, Provos, Loyalists and Brits, for which he wrote accompanying books.
In the wake of 9/11, Taylor focussed on al-Qaida and the phenomenon of Islamist extremism with six BBC two series:
- True Spies, which saw Taylor reveal the astonishing undercover operations of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad for the first time;
- Age of Terror, looking back over 30 years of political violence; BAFTA-nominated Generation Jihad, investigating the terrorist threat from young Muslim extremists radicalised on the internet;
- Modern Spies, for which he gained exclusive interviews with serving members of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ;
- The Spies Who Fooled the World, examining the suspect intelligence used to justify Britain’s involvement in the war in Iraq;
- Woolwich: The Untold Story, investigating how the murderers of Gunner Lee Rigby were radicalised at home and abroad.
Taylor has won a variety of awards including an OBE for Services to Broadcast Journalism (2002). And, a John Grierson Award for Best Historical Documentary for SAS Embassy Siege (1990), which was also nominated for the BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award in 2003, and recently a RTS Lifetime Achievement Award (2014).