Esther Rantzen and the TV Moment That Introduced Nicholas Winton to the World

Dame Esther Rantzen will be remembered for many things, but among her most enduring achievements is a single episode of television that turned a quiet humanitarian into a national hero. The broadcaster, who founded the children's helpline Childline and later The Silver Line for isolated older people, spent more than two decades at the helm of the BBC One programme That's Life! It was there, in February 1988, that she helped bring the story of Sir Nicholas Winton to public attention in a scene that remains one of the most celebrated in British broadcasting history.

Rantzen presented That's Life! from 1973 until 1994, steering it away from straightforward consumer affairs and towards a broader mix of investigative journalism and human interest storytelling. Under her direction, the series attracted enormous audiences and became a fixture of the weekly schedule. Her skill lay in combining campaigning zeal with an instinct for the emotional power of ordinary people's stories, a combination that would produce her career-defining moment.

That moment centred on Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker born to German-Jewish parents who, in the months before the Second World War, organised the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia after Nazi forces occupied the country in 1939. Winton had travelled briefly to Prague, where he compiled lists of children in need of sponsorship and set about finding them homes in Britain. He worked with activists and humanitarians on the ground to overcome formidable political obstacles, including the problem of moving children through the Netherlands, which had closed its borders to Jewish refugees.

His efforts succeeded in part because of a House of Commons ruling that permitted young refugees into the country, passed just a couple of months before his rescue operation got under way. With assistance from his mother, Winton placed photographs of the children in British magazines such as Picture Post in the hope of finding families willing to take them in, and he arranged for hostels to accommodate some of the refugees as well. He also raised funds to cover the children's travel and to provide them with essentials once they arrived on British soil.

Remarkably, Winton's achievements went largely unreported for nearly five decades. The silence was broken only when his wife discovered a scrapbook in their loft containing the names of the children he had saved. The scrapbook was handed to Holocaust researchers, who used it to trace some of the survivors. It was this discovery that eventually brought Winton's story to the attention of the That's Life! team, setting the stage for the episode that would define how the public remembers him.

Speaking in February 2024, Rantzen recalled her first contact with Winton, whom she called Nicky, and said she had congratulated him on his extraordinary achievement. To her surprise, he expressed disappointment about his efforts, telling The Radio Times that "not enough" people had been saved. Rantzen said she was devastated that he felt he had failed and became determined to prove to him that every life he had rescued was precious.

She invited him onto the programme, and during that first appearance his scrapbook was shown to the studio audience. Two women he had saved as children, Vera Gissing and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, then revealed their identities to him on television. They were seated on either side of Winton, who had no idea what was about to happen. Rantzen later described the surprise as incredibly moving.

Lady Milena is among the most widely recognised Holocaust survivors in the UK. She left Prague with her younger sister Eva at the age of nine on a special train arranged by Winton. The sisters were cared for by a family in Tameside until their mother, who had escaped via Norway, arrived the following year. Gissing, rescued from Prague in 1939 at the age of 11, lost most of her family during the Holocaust and settled in Britain after the war ended.

The emotional force of the encounter left even the presenter struggling to maintain her composure. Rantzen said it was the only time in her career that she had to pause recording to wipe away her tears. The response from viewers was immediate, with several people contacting the production team after the broadcast and realising their own connection to the man they had just watched being honoured.

That reaction gave the programme's team an idea that would become one of the most famous moments in the history of British television. In the following episode, Rantzen asked everyone in the audience who owed their lives to Winton to stand. Winton, seated in the front row, turned round to see the entire ground floor of the Television Theatre rise to its feet. The image of that silent, spontaneous tribute has since been shared repeatedly online, introducing his story to generations who were not yet born when it first aired.

Rantzen said she had watched the episode many times and found herself deeply moved on every occasion. She stayed in touch with Winton, meeting him regularly until his death in 2015 at the age of 106. He had been knighted in 2003 in recognition of his humanitarian work, and in 2014 he received the highest order of the Czech Republic, the White Lion. The two remained linked by the programme that had introduced him to the nation, and Rantzen said hearing the stories of the children he saved made her feel immensely lucky to have been a Jew born in England in the 1940s.

Winton's life has since inspired numerous films and documentaries, most recently the biopic One Life, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival before its wider release. Through her stewardship of That's Life!, Rantzen secured a legacy that extends well beyond entertainment: she gave a modest, self-doubting man the recognition he had never sought, and in doing so created a piece of television that continues to move audiences decades later.