Hailes, Anne

Anne has been working in the media all her working life. She began her broadcasting career with BBC Northern Ireland in the 1980s, contributing to radio programmes, before establishing her own sixty-minute weekly magazine, At Home with Anne Hailes. She was also involved in programmes for the BBC World Service.

Anne later joined Ulster Television, starting as a production assistant. She went on to produce and present Ask Anne, one of the station’s highest-rating programmes at the time. She later diversified into medical programming, producing a six-part medical documentary, Case Notes, based in various hospitals across Northern Ireland. She also produced Time on Their Hands for RTÉ – a series that followed her travels through Poland, tracing the Jewish experience there during World War II.

Anne has freelanced with a leading public relations agency and has written for a number of business organisations in Northern Ireland. She has worked as press and PR officer with the Ulster Actors Company, based at the Arts Theatre and appeared in the Opera House and the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, playing entertainer Lionel Blair’s mother in a summer musical.

Anne has travelled extensively, making TV documentaries and feature-writing: Hong Kong, China, Bangladesh, Sudan, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Rwanda, Tanzania and most European countries. She currently writes features and theatre reviews for the Irish News and a number of magazines. She also speaks with a wide variety of groups throughout Northern Ireland.

Anne is the author of two books: the history of the deaf community in Northern Ireland: Turn on the Light Mummy, I Can’t Hear; and Standby Studio, published in 2009 – a look at Belfast and Northern Ireland in the 1960s and the birth of Ulster Television, where she started her career, initially behind-the-scenes. It features the personalities of stage and screen of the time, including Tommy James, Sir Bruce Forsyth, Sir Patrick Moore, and even the Beatles, with background stories about hilarious disasters in the studio during live programmes.

Anne was educated at Belfast Royal Academy.

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