The next morning the BBC carried this radio tribute in Today:
When I first joined Panorama seven years ago, I remember Richard Dimbleby telling me on location in some flooded British town that it was all very well to have a good degree and be bright, but what was really needed in television was discipline. And he was, in fact, the most disciplined performer I’ve ever seen. He approached his job like an artist or an engineer, and to watch him linking a show or doing a commentary on a big public event was to see technical perfection. He loved his work, not only television but all work. He loved being busy and he loved the challenge of complicated situations in which he’d be obliged to follow one set of events from a monitor screen, for example, with one eye whilst keeping pace with another set of events with the other. He was the only man in British television who became well known in America, because of his work on Telstar and Early Bird, and whenever I’ve been in New York with him, New Yorkers and especially policemen (for whom he seemed to have a predilection) would salute him at crossroads and say ‘Hullo, Richard!’.
I’ve often talked to other people in the BBC about what the qualities were in Dimbleby that created such an impact on viewers, mostly favourable but not always. And I think the secret was that he reflected many of the key qualities of the English. He was simple, and had a very straightforward and concrete approach to things and situations. He had a strong sentiment and a strong loyalty and I’d say probably did more than anyone else to show the place of the Royal Family in the Sixties. But since the last years of his life were overshadowed by cancer, what I recall most clearly about him was his courage under the strain of it all. I remember coming back with him from a filming outing in New York one afternoon late in autumn. We were much later than we’d expected, and Dimbleby was tired and in quite evident pain, but never during the preceding, extremely tiresome hours had he been impatient or tried to cry off the story. This is professionalism of a very high order and it’s this which will be remembered.
Messages of condolence flowed into the BBC from all over the world, especially from the Commonwealth and from countries with particular debts of gratitude to Dimbleby: Yugoslavia, Persia and Greece. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast special tributes.
The European Broadcasting Union said: ‘His death brings a sense of personal loss as much to us in Europe and beyond as it does to you who live in England.’
North German Radio said: ‘He stood for all the qualities which have made BBC Television an example of fearless yet thoroughly honest journalistic work.’
From Moscow Boris Belitzky telegraphed: ‘A great voice has gone off the air.’
Fred Friendly cabled from CBS News in New York: ‘Richard Dimbleby – BBC – was a dateline all in his own right like Coventry, Parliament, Trafalgar and Dunkirk. His voice, the voice of Britain, and that of Ed Murrow CBS were stilled the same year. These men often meant as much to citizens in each other’s countries as they did in their own. We at CBS News are additionally saddened by the death of another friend and colleague whose voice and whose truth all of us can so ill afford to lose.’
But perhaps the message that said most came in halting English from an Italian worker living in Germany:
As foreigner friend and fans’s programs of B.B.C. specially in ‘panorama’ I am really shocked about Mr Dimbley’s death, former broadcast man and director of ‘panorama’. His face was so familiar and friendly speaking that I really enjoyed so many times watching your program on panorama, so beautifully runned by him. In the same time this hour of sorrow for everybody’s feeling will you so kind to have my personal feeling of regret for all family’s B.B.C. for such big loss. I am very sorry if I am ask you for a favour and to send my feelings as unknown friend, to Mr Dimbley’s wife and my warm cuddle for his sons david and jonathan in this hour of big sorrow for them.
Thank you very much for all.
Yours faithfully
Filippo Palmerini