About Gordon Adair

Journalist and Author

My Story

If I am asked how I got into journalism, I will – invariably – tell people that I got IN to journalism to get OUT of the rain. This is, unlikely as it seems, the truth.

I was near the old Belfast College of Business Studies just off Blackstaff Square with my then girlfriend when it began to rain and I mean rain. Big, heavy, Belfast raindrops slapped onto the pavement. We ran for the doors of the college and into the welcoming dry of the foyer. To kill a little time, I began to browse some of the courses on offer and one seemed to jump out at me – a part-time city and guilds in newspaper and radio journalism. I enrolled there and then and quickly fell in love with journalism. As part of the course, I had to secure a work placement. I got this in the Portadown Times where I was lucky enough to find myself learning at the knees of three legends of local newspapers: David Armstrong, editor, and the late, much-missed Victor Gordon and Brian Courtney. My career then took me to the Newsletter and Daily Mirror before I joined the BBC in 2000.

A year later, I found myself back in my native Armagh as a regional reporter for the Beeb.

A little over a decade after that I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. It became increasingly difficult to function as a TV reporter while having to fight the disease. In July 2024, I retired from the BBC due to ill health.