Esther Rantzen, Nicholas Winton and the TV Moment That Defined a Career

Dame Esther Rantzen will be remembered above all for the charitable organisations she built, including Childline and The Silver Line, but her long career in broadcasting also produced one of the most celebrated moments in the history of British television. That moment came in 1988, during an episode of the BBC One programme That's Life!, which she presented for more than two decades and which she used to bring an extraordinary wartime rescue story to national attention.

Rantzen fronted That's Life! from 1973 until 1994. Under her stewardship, the programme evolved from a straightforward consumer rights show into a broader issues-based series that attracted very large audiences. Its mix of investigations, human interest stories and live studio surprises gave it a distinctive place in the schedules, and it was this format that allowed a forgotten chapter of Holocaust history to be shared with millions of viewers.

The story at the centre of the broadcast concerned Nicholas Winton, the man who organised the rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia after Nazi forces occupied the country in 1939. Winton arranged for the mainly Jewish children to travel to Britain, where he found them homes and sponsorship. He was later knighted in 2003 in recognition of his humanitarian work, and he died in 2015 at the age of 106.

Born to German-Jewish parents, Winton made a list of the children who needed sponsors and set about securing places for them in Britain. His efforts involved working alongside activists and humanitarians in Czechoslovakia and navigating considerable political obstacles. Among the difficulties was the fact that the Netherlands had closed its borders to Jewish refugees, requiring alternative routes to get the children out. A House of Commons ruling passed a couple of months before his rescue mission began, allowing young refugees into the country, proved decisive in making the operation possible.

Winton also enlisted the help of his mother. Together they placed photographs of the children in British magazines such as Picture Post in an effort to find them homes, and they arranged for hostels to take in some of the refugees as well. He raised money to cover the children's travel costs and to provide them with the essentials they would need on arrival in Britain. Despite the scale of what he had achieved, his work went largely unreported for nearly fifty years.

The silence was broken only when Winton's wife found a scrapbook in their loft containing the names of the children he had rescued. The scrapbook was handed to Holocaust researchers, who used it to help track down some of the people Winton had saved. It was through this chain of events that his story eventually reached the makers of That's Life! and, in February 1988, became national news when Winton appeared on the programme and Rantzen told viewers what he had done.

Rantzen later described how she had first contacted Winton, whom she knew as Nicky, and congratulated him on what she called his extraordinary achievement. Speaking in February 2024, she recalled that he had responded with a sense of disappointment, remarking that not enough people had been saved. She said she was devastated that he felt he had failed and that she wanted to prove to this remarkable man that every single life he had rescued was precious.

That desire shaped what happened next. Winton was invited onto the programme, and during his first appearance his scrapbook was shared with 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 that the surprise had been arranged. Rantzen remembered the moment as incredibly moving, and she later admitted that it was the only occasion in her career when she had to stop recording in order to wipe away her tears.

The stories of the two women illustrate the human reality behind the statistics. Lady Milena is one of the most widely recognised Holocaust survivors in the United Kingdom. She left Prague with her younger sister Eva when she was nine years old, travelling on a special train arranged by Winton, and the two sisters were cared for by a family in Tameside until their mother, who had escaped via Norway, arrived the following year. Vera Gissing was rescued from Prague in 1939 at the age of eleven. She lost most of her family during the Holocaust and settled in Britain after the war ended.

The broadcast had consequences that went well beyond the studio. Viewers who watched the episode contacted the That's Life! production team after realising they too had a connection to Winton. Their responses gave the programme's team an idea that would become one of the most famous moments in British television history. In the following episode, Rantzen asked everyone in the audience who owed their life to Winton to stand. Winton, who had been seated in the front row, turned to see the entire ground floor of the Television Theatre rise to its feet.

Decades later, the footage continues to find new audiences through social media, and it is regularly rediscovered by people who were not yet born when it was first shown. Rantzen said she had watched the episode many times and that each viewing left her deeply moved. She remained in contact with Winton after the programme, meeting him regularly until his death, and she said that hearing the stories of the children he had saved made her feel immensely lucky to have been a Jew born in England in the 1940s.

Winton's achievements have since been commemorated in a number of films and documentaries. The most recent is the biopic One Life, which starred Sir Anthony Hopkins and premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Rantzen's decision to give Winton's story a national platform in 1988 helped ensure that a rescue operation which had gone unrecorded for half a century would not be forgotten, and it remains one of the defining achievements of her broadcasting career.