His reporting career was drastically cut short almost before it began when he was machine-gunned in both legs during the Nigerian Civil War (paradoxically, the narrative comes to life when the author seems about to lose his). Thereafter he was confined to the picket line as ITN's industrial editor at the zenith of the unions' fortunes and, far from coincidentally, the nadir of the country's. It was an important, if dreary, job (I know; I spent several miserable months as the BBC's industrial correspondent at the same time). Sissons was good at it but was obviously grateful to come out of the cold to present Channel 4 News from its catastrophic early days to its later flowering as the programme everybody was supposed to admire and hardly anybody watched.  

The programme was built around him (it had few, if any, heavyweight television reporters). He was a brooding presence with a trenchant and abrasive interviewing style. These were the glory days for him, and for ITN. Then the BBC came sniffing with bags of gold.

John Birt, newly arrived at the BBC, offered to ditch both David Dimbleby and  John Cole, the BBC's  splendid, if not always comprehensible, political editor if he would come over to front all the main events and run the BBC at Westminster. Sissons wisely declined, fearing the BBC political unit's "world class backstabbers".

Actually, the best could stab you in the front and not leave a mark. Thus, the following comment from John Sergeant to Robin Oakley, who had been recruited from the Times over his head to be political editor and had embarrassingly "dried" while live on the Nine O'Clock News: "Never mind, Robin, lots of us have almost done that."

The next time they offered him Question Time and the Six O'Clock News. They even paid ITN a whopping "transfer fee" as well as his even more whopping salary. He went for it.

Question Time sounds a nightmare. It was a tedious, predictable hot-air balloon of a programme, invented to keep Robin Day out of mischief and to fill a sudden gap in the schedules. Following Sir Robin was never going to be easy — Sissons had the gravitas and the forensic skills, not the flamboyance — but the BBC made it impossible. His first editor he describes as breathtakingly two-faced; charming to his face but, behind his back, writing letters to viewers complaining about how inept he was. That he lasted in the chair through a four-year whispering campaign (and kept up the ratings) was heroism of a particularly BBC kind.