Sunday, October 18, 2009

Lizo Mzimba left Newsround on 30 May 2008. He had worked on the programme for many years before becoming one of its senior reporters. Lizo was reputed to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Doctor Who and Harry Potter, and occasionally got important scoops on developments in those series. His enthusiasm for the Harry Potter books and films was something of a legend.

As a presenter Lizo was generally OK, but when things went wrong on live TV he was often unable to cope as well as some of his colleagues at the time, such as Ellie Crisell. Ellie, accompanied by her newborn baby and fellow presenter Laura, sent her good wishes when he left Newsround to become the BBC's Entertainment Correspondent.

Lizo started well at his new job, but more recently has been seen making a hash of things.

Last week, speaking on the BBC News channel, he reported that Ofcom wasn't intending to do anything about complaints over the Dannii Minogue remark (see blog on 11 October 2009) but unfortunately his reportage came across as sympathetic to the complainants.

And Yesterday morning, in a live interview with David Furnish who was attending Stephen Gately's funeral, Mzimba asked in general terms about a newspaper article that had appeared the day before. Furnish began to reply, mentioning Jan Moir and The Daily Mail by name, at which point Lizo became flustered and cut short the interview.

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