Her career propelled her somewhat reluctantly to becoming one of the best-known faces on British television. She was essentially shy, she says, and at the peak of her fame would have given it away had this been possible: "I disliked it intensely. But it is silly to over-complain, because it did bring me a really interesting life. What I was doing meant I had visiting rights in many, many different worlds. I dined at Number 10 and Number 11, I've been to Chequers, met every prime minister since Harold Wilson and interviewed most of them. I've met sports stars and film stars and movers and shakers and leaders from all over the place, and most people don't get the opportunity to mix in those worlds. It's been absolutely fascinating."

It was when the fascination with the world of television news wore transparently thin that she decided to quit — while still ahead, in terms of popularity and trust ratings with the public, but so disillusioned that work satisfaction had been practically eliminated. "I was so uninvolved a year and a half ago that it prompted me to hand in my notice. I just thought, I can either take the money and run and go on doing this job, or I can decide it isn't a job that's worth doing any longer and leave." She left.

"I could see the whole ethos of television news changing," she says, "partly because the technology changed and it became a 24-hour operation. When I was at News at Ten we'd have time for a rehearsal at half-past nine and then we would often sit and twiddle our thumbs — nothing would change. Now you go into the studio at one o'clock and the running order is changing throughout — it is constantly being rejigged and you are on the earpiece all the time being told what changes are happening.

"[But] I think the level of thought behind the news has also changed enormously — [at the BBC] I used to get into work at a quarter-to-eight and go to the meeting at half-past eight and by that time the running order had largely been decided. So I would go in with ideas for the one o'clock news and be told: 'We haven't got time, we haven't got time!' And so often the concentration was on a paedophile, a dead girl or two, some sort of traumatic, over-developed event about a child — whether it be a lost child or some sort of molestation — which is of course news, but I think we spent far too much time on these things. I think the crunch came when Bruce Forsyth's wife's dog was missing at a time when a lot of other things were going on. And I said: 'Is this really one of the 12 most important things happening today?' "

The rot had started

"It used to be that people would give their eye-teeth to work for the BBC. And the standards were very high and the level of intelligence of the people who were commissioning editors or controllers of the channels was very high. And it wasn't just intelligence — they cared about the people who worked for them. I think the managerial skills of these highly intelligent young people who run the BBC now are very poor. I can tell you there is an atmosphere of fear, based on the fact that people have very short contracts, and the youngsters are pushed and pushed and pushed. You no longer see people smiling when they work on news programmes."

Her own beginnings in television were very different. With a BA in economics and social anthropology and a post-graduate diploma in adult education from Manchester University, where she was president of the Students' Union, she turned down offers of jobs with both the BBC and Granada TV — "The student riots were going on in 1968 and I was on Look North and those sort of programmes so often that they both said, come and work for us" — in favour of a career in adult education. Back in Manchester from Northern Ireland after her first marriage failed, she telephoned then Granada TV editor Gus MacDonald and reminded him they had made her an offer six years previously. "He said: 'Well, you're a bit old now' — I was 30 — 'but you can come for an interview.' '" Initially offered a three-month contract as a researcher with World In Action, she quickly found herself dispatched to Rochdale to make a film. "Apparently the IBA had told Granada they didn't have enough women on screen. I didn't know one end of a television camera from another — I hadn't a clue — but a wonderful cameraman named Mike Popley saved my bacon and we made a little film. Two days later they said: 'Right, you're on Granada Reports.' "

She worked on the educational programme The Messengers and on a community action series Reports Action — "The first of its kind. We even advertised children for adoption, with their full co-operation of course, interviewing them on screen. I was enjoying that when the BBC came scouting around Manchester and asked me I would go for an interview. I was seen by Desmond Wilcox in London and he offered me a job on Man Alive. A lot of people in the north thought I had sold out by coming to London. They got very cross. Anyway, I came in 1976, didn't know anybody, got lost all the time, and felt terrible. I remember driving my little Renault 5 down the Marylebone Road trying to find my way to Kensington House, and thinking, I haven't a clue where I'm going."

Where she was going, after a spell on Tomorrow's World, was to ITN, even though newsreading hadn't even crossed her mind, she says. Having turned down the first offer from then ITN editor Nigel Ryan — "I was so naive about the implications of what he was saying when he asked me to come and read the news" — when again he came calling six months later she agreed on the condition that she would be allow to report some stories as well as sit behind a desk: "They said I could be medical correspondent!" I remember a dear friend taking me out for the night before I went to work for ITN and saying: 'This is the last time we'll ever have a private supper', and me not really knowing what she was talking about."

Absolutely fantastic

She fondly recalls even her on-screen partnership with the notoriously bibulous Bosanquet — he wrote verse for her and once wished Anna's mother a happy birthday at the end of a bulletin, despite Mrs Ford being already deceased: "Reggie was a dear. I mean, you wouldn't have chosen a man who had epilepsy, was an alcoholic, had had a stroke and wore a toupée to read the news, but the combination was absolute magic. The first thing he said to me was: 'Do you play darts?' And he shut the office door and there was a very used dartboard on the back of it. Luckily, because of working on the newsdesk at Granada, I'd played a lot of darts and a lot of snooker, so I could keep my end up. And he put a bottle of wine in my desk — we got on very well."

These are tales of golden opportunities that she fears will never be open to the young TV journalists of today; nor will those currently employed in the medium enjoy the sense of pride and camaraderie that once came as part of the package, she says. "There has been a fantastic cutback over news during the past few years. The place is cut to the bone [more than 3,500 jobs lost] and now I read that they are trying to cut hundreds more people — I can't see how they will do it and maintain any form of decent news programme on air, it simply can't be done. I'm not an expert on the finances of the BBC but I know how much we [the BBC] get from the licence fee, and I think that if we could afford to lose £22million or whatever on management consultants then we could have spent that on the people who work there.

"And the people who make the programmes are now producing, for one news programme, three or four items, which means getting in at the crack of dawn, commissioning each item, ringing the interviewee, getting film crews round, writing the script and getting it on air. They are stressed beyond belief, and on very short-term contracts. They're afraid and they are bullied. I was potentially bullied by an editor shouting at me in the rudest possible way, and I said: 'Can I come and see you after the programme?' And I told him that if either of my children had spoken to me in the way he had I would have sent them to their rooms. Well, I could put up with it and stand up for myself, but the youngsters, the people who are doing the work [can't]. And people hardly ever bothered to praise them. I did not like to see how my younger colleagues were treated."

If she ascribes much of this to John Birt's uncaring legacy, Ms Ford has little time for his successors. They failed to address the problems, she says. "Greg Dyke came in [as Director-General] and Greg Dyke was a populist and certainly he was tremendously popular within the BBC because, unlike Birt, he was able to talk to people and communicate with people and didn't have a severe case of lack of social skills. So he'd sit on the front of his desk, swinging his leg, and he invented this thing called the Cut the Crap card, but the bureaucracy grew under him and nothing really changed. And now Mark Thompson is there and he is clearly highly intelligent, but I think he and the other men in BBC management lack social skills, they don't have a high emotional quotient. Highly intelligent, yes, but they lack empathy and they lack the ability to talk to people. Before I left I had to go to see one of my bosses for a meeting, with other newscasters, and it was supposed to be a conversation about how did we, the newscasters, feel about the whole news agenda. I think he spoke for one hour and ten minutes about the new technology and then said: 'Oh, we don't have time for any more.' That was the meeting. It's very sad that the people in charge don't know what's going on." Up-and-coming managers should be taught how to establish fruitful relationships with staff, she believes, and urged to work towards reestablishing a more caring ethos. "And I think the BBC must differentiate itself from all other television companies by making extremely high-class programmes. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be popular programmes, but they should be the best we [note that 'we' again] can possibly do."

Conversation with Anna Ford is by no means a one-track excursion: she talks easily and with contagious humour about times past and present, lapsing into accurate regional accents when required — a skill doubtless inherited from her parents, both of whom were successful actors before raising a family. Her Manchester-born mother found work in London after repertory success in the north; her father, from Ealing, not far from where Anna now lives with the two daughters from her marriage to the late Marc Boxer, studied at RADA. They were introduced to one another by John Gielgud and went on to act with him and Laurence Oliver, Peggy Ashcroft, Alec Guinness — "All that lot," their daughter says — before her father was offered a Hollywood opportunity by producer Sam Goldwyn.

'Hollywood is dire'

The vicar in question was Anna's father John, who had deserted the stage, attended Lincoln Theological College, was a conscientious objector in the Second World War and became a curate in Bristol before being appointed to his own parishes. "I don't know why he entered the church," says the Fords' only daughter and the youngest of their five children. "I think he was unhappy on the stage. It's not a very satisfactory life, especially if you are emotionally immature and I suspect that both my parents were emotionally immature at that age. They didn't have a bean. In the first parish my father went to he earned £120 a year and had to borrow £20 to make ends meet. Yes, we lived in big rambling vicarages, so there were compensations. They never talked about the stage when we were growing up — it was almost a taboo subject. My mother dedicated herself to bringing up five children. She was a very good sculptor too — she was talented in lots of ways but, like many women of her generation, gave up all these things to devote herself to family life."

Anna taught race relations in Bolton, then married, and moved to Belfast where she worked in a college of further education and in Long Kesh jail "because we believed in education being a gateway to something new and there were these young men locked up with nothing to do, sort of festering away. I got put into Compound 17, where those inside were all interned members of the Provisional IRA aged between 17 and 40, I guess. And you used to be driven around this appalling place, which was just mud and vast walls of iron mesh with barbed wire on the top, and the compound would be opened up, you'd be put in and it would be locked behind you and you'd stay there for an hour-and-a-half and devise a class. We would discuss politics and then what life might have been like had they grown up on different streets. Eventually some of them said to me, quietly: 'Please stop the priest coming in.' One of them even said: 'Could you stop my mother coming in?' Because by then some were studying and one was doing an Open University degree and of course the priests were going in and saying: 'Come on, you must go on fighting the fight,' and the mother was getting them to organise inside the Kesh. And the British Army was pissing into their beer and tearing up their essays.

"I never asked them their names and I never asked them what they had done and undoubtedly some of them were murderers. But I thought my job was simply to help them understand whatever it was at that moment they needed to understand. It was rewarding, but it was pretty dire and I had my books taken away because this Army sergeant said: 'It says Karl Marx here — you can't take in seditious literature.' Some evenings when it was pouring with rain and I'd be kept waiting and be searched, I would think, why am I doing this?"

The extraordinary route that took her from Manchester to ITN also included a brief diversion into part-time folk singing — "I used to sing just to earn a bit of money as a student and once was on the same bill as Gerry and the Pacemakers" — and then, following the instant recognition that comes with the newsreader's territory, the sudden explosion of personal publicity with which she was never comfortable: "I hated going shopping. I'd come to London and although I knew a few people I hadn't really settled in. I was living in a little house in Shepherd's Bush and suddenly everybody knew me and every time I went shopping people would sort of nudge and wink. Angela [Rippon] and I used to meet and talk about the great rivalry the press set up between us — length of legs and colour of eyes and all the rest of it. We used to laugh about it."

The publicity did not exactly diminish when she famously pushed Robin Day into a bush because of a sexist remark — "Robin Day was a pig," she now says, cheerfully. Or when she poured a glass of wine over Jonathan Aitken after he'd sacked her from TV-am ("That was good taste, not bad temper," she later explained) where she'd joined David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Angela Rippon and Robert Kee, initially under the chairmanship of Peter Jay. She now describes the TV-am episode as "a learning curve from which you learn who to associate with and who not to. I would never throw in my lot with Peter Jay or David Frost again".

Back to newsreading

But one suspects Ford relishes such battles, even if the causes, such as the dumbing down of British television, its failure to cater for the over-55s in the community, and on-screen ageism, exasperate her: "I do think that complaints about dumbing down are justified. I must sound very old-fashioned when I use the word vulgarity, but we are constantly seeing people on screen who are of low intelligence and low education and whose views on everything seem to be made very important. As for ageism, everybody in our society should be presented on screen. How many presenters do you know on television who are over the age of 60? There used to be Esther, me until I resigned, Peter Sissons, there's Peter Snow, David Dimbleby, Anne Robinson... but there are more than 16 million people in this country over the age of 55 and they are poorly represented, and I don't think the BBC is intent on making programmes for them.

"They're catered for on Radio 4, but they are not catered for on screen. Most of the complaints that I ever got were from people of my age group, who had grown up in a world where you tried to better yourself and where lifelong learning was important and where you wanted to understand the world about you. People like that want programmes that draw them out, which test them, which expect a lot of them. There are some programmes like that on television but often, as my contemporaries do, I turn over page after page of Radio Times and think, there's absolutely nothing here I want to watch."

Journalism plays only a minor role in Ford's retirement, although she remains "much busier than I had hoped to be". She is Chancellor of Manchester University, a non-executive director of Sainsbury's, sits on the board of a small educational software company, and chairs Index on Censorship, set up to protect the human right of free expression. And this autumn she will present The Gardening Quiz for Radio 4. She has also taken up botanical painting — "It sounds eccentric, but I like drawing hens. But I'm too busy really — I've brought up two children and suddenly — I'm 64 in October — I have started to think that if the sun shines what I really want to do is go into the garden and sit with a newspaper for as long as I like." She says she doesn't think she'll ever work in television again, which is shaming for those running an industry who, in these turbulent times, should be trampling over one another to harness her experience, intelligence and commitment.

Later she says: "I wish I'd become a writer-journalist earlier on. I think I had a bent for writing and if I'd been more focused and known what I wanted to do, rather than flapping around, I'd have enjoyed working for a newspaper and doing written journalism. I enjoy writing when I make myself do it and I would have enjoyed working for a good newspaper. We were brought up with the News Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian. I'd love to have worked for The Guardian. Journalism is an ancient and admirable profession. We live in a democracy where Government is trying to clamp down on the information we can get, where Parliament is trying to pass laws where everybody is subject to freedom of information except MPs — where would we be without the fourth estate?

"But the truth is, I've been lucky. Look, I was offered two jobs in television when I graduated from university without asking for them. Mine was the generation that was incredibly lucky — we were the 10 per cent of the population that went to university and there were jobs galore. My daughters have graduated at a time when they can apply for 200 jobs and not even get an interview, and it's not because they're less intelligent and I certainly think they are harder working than I was. So I think lots of women could have done what I've done. I just happened to be there, that's all."