Lynn Faulds Wood
Lynn Faulds Wood is an award-winning TV presenter and health campaigner.
With her husband John Stapleton, Lynn presented the BBC’s Watchdog programme for eight years, winning many awards, including four Consumer Journalist of the Year, Consumer Journalist of the Decade and two Motoring Journalist of the Year awards.
Before that, Lynn was award-winning Action woman in women’s magazines, “Lynn’s Action Line” for the Sun (receiving 100,000 responses to one campaign which resulted on a march on Downing Street and closed down Club Row pet market) and consumer investigator for a year for the Daily Mail.
Over her career, Lynn has been responsible for bringing in many new laws and standards, multi-million pound recalls and responsible for the redesign of many products. On air, in pursuit of company bosses who wanted to evade unhappy customers, she has been attacked with an axe, a rottweiler dog chain and almost killed by the owner of a fleet of illegal lorries.
While presenting Watchdog, Lynn was eventually diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer after a year of medical delay and puts her survival down to luck. Eventually she left Watchdog to make medical programmes. Her first, on GP training in cancer symptoms – ‘Doctor Knows Best’ – attracted an audience of over 10 million viewers and helped to change the way our GPs are trained. Lynn followed that with an investigative series – ‘The Ladykillers’ (“looking at all the other diseases I might get in the future and heading them off at the pass”, says Lynn) - and an award-winning investigation into bowel cancer – ‘Bobby Moore and Me’ – after which she was named by Britain’s doctors as Medical Broadcaster of the Year.
The ‘Bobby Moore & Me’ programme brought in 28,000 letters and Lynn decided to take a break from TV to concentrate on saving lives from bowel cancer. This was spectacularly successful as she helped to change the official symptoms advice for the UK, to set up formal training courses for doctors in diagnostic equipment (no more see one, do one, teach one ..), helped to create awareness campaigns with Prince Charles and the Pope – but above all, to save literally hundreds of lives by talking about this neglected, common cancer in the media. In 2006 she was awarded a European Woman of the Year title.
Recently Lynn has been GMTV’s consumer champion - her ‘Lynn’ll Fix It’ investigative slot receiving 9,000 emails in the first seven weeks, her anti-counterfeiting series putting two fraudsters in prison and resulting in Lynn being told by police she should wear a “stabbing jacket” if she wanted to continue this dangerous activity. She teamed up with Esther Rantzen for BBC1’s series “Old Dogs, New Tricks”, had a cameo role in Jennifer Saunders’ latest series, makes regular appearances on shows like Ready Steady Cook and won £25,000 for her work on bowel cancer on a quiz show.
Lynn continues her active campaigning to save lives from cancer as President of the European Cancer Patient Coalition, runs her own bowel cancer charity – Lynn’s Bowel Cancer Campaign - and has just celebrated 30 years’ of marriage to her GMTV presenter husband John Stapleton. Their son Nick is 20.