The investigative reporter and presenter Tazeen Ahmad, who has died of cancer aged 48, tackled controversial and sensitive subjects in her work for the BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and NBC. Fearlessly confronting wrongdoers, she changed lives with her reports, some of which led to successful criminal proceedings.
In 2011, for Channel 4’s Dispatches, she exposed violence against children in a mosque; a teacher was subsequently jailed. The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Gangs (2013), also for Dispatches, explored the grooming of girls in the Midlands and won Royal Television Society and Asian Media awards, as well as receiving a Bafta nomination.
On a trip to Afghanistan in 2012 for NBC, she reported on the bombing of a mosque, a beheading, the Taliban, and the plight of Afghanistan’s women and most vulnerable children.
Closer to home, she worked undercover at Sainsbury’s for six months just after the 2008 financial crash. Her book, The Checkout Girl (2009), depicted the anxieties about money, and the loneliness, of the people she served. The empathy and compassion she showed for her subjects came to the fore a few years later, when she made a career shift away from journalism and towards psychotherapy, coaching and mentoring.
Tazeen considered her second career, which came about after she experienced a frightening, unaccountable blankness while broadcasting live for NBC in 2012, to be as important as her journalism. “Post-traumatic growth” is how psychologists describe the flourishing that can follow extreme difficulty. Tazeen called it “the gift of adversity”.
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Tazeen was the middle child of Shaher (nee Bano) and Waheed Ahmad, both academics. In 1974 work took the family to Port Harcourt, Nigeria, then in 1981 to Edgware, north London. After her international upbringing, 1980s Britain was a shock.
“In Nigeria we lived in an expat community so it was very mixed … and I never experienced racism in any form,” she said. “But in Britain in the mid-80s I experienced quite chronic racism on the school, on the streets, it was everywhere except for our home. I was just, well, a Paki. I was never received in the way that I was, which was a complex, unique mix of my cultural and geographical inheritance.”
After Little Stanmore middle school, Middlesex, and St Margaret’s school in Bushey, Hertfordshire, Tazeen, whose parents had separated, moved to Islamabad aged 14 with her father. The move, she said, “injected all sorts of pride back into me about my Pakistani heritage”. After completing her O-levels, and more resilient, she returned to the UK in 1988.
Her childhood ambition had been to write fiction, but, in 1994, after A-levels at Harrow Weald college and a media and communications degree at the University of East London, Barking, she got a job as a researcher at BBC Radio. The corporation then was, as Greg Dyke later put it when he was director general, “hideously white”. Working freelance later at ITN, she found the situation not much better.
However, many of the biggest stories at the time had a race dimension, such as the trial of OJ Simpson, the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Bradford riots, and participants declined to be interviewed by white journalists. Tazeen put herself forward, and made her mark. However, she feared being stuck in “community affairs”, and demanded more.
In 1998 the BBC launched its digital channel, BBC Choice (later called BBC Three), and Tazeen was hired as a reporter. From 2001 to 2005 she presented the flagship news programme 60 Seconds. During that time she began making investigations for Dispatches, which she continued until last year, covering, among other subjects, the gender pay gap, exposés on the world of fashion, credit cards and marriage between cousins.
In 2010 Tazeen went through a rigorous selection process to be hired as a correspondent for NBC, and she at last felt certain that she had been chosen for her ability, not just to tick a box. But going live late one night in 2012, from near Tower Bridge, she went blank before the US channel’s peak-time audience of millions. After 10 long seconds, producers cut away.
Tazeen was mortified, but the incident proved a turning point. In a TedX Talk in 2015 she revealed that as a result of a major trauma she had experienced years before, she had been left with dissociative amnesia – sudden, unaccountable blanknesses. From then on, she wrote everything down, on paper or the back of her hand.
Determined to share what she had learned from that experience, she trained in psychotherapy and counselling at Regent’s University, London, in 2014. It was during this time that I got to know Tazeen, as a fellow journalist who has also extended into teaching and mentoring. She founded a business consultancy, EQ Matters, that provided individual and group coaching and training programmes, largely to corporate clients.
This summer, knowing she was dying, she had her memorial filmed in advance by a Dispatches colleague, with sound from a BBC radio producer. She said she would turn this into her last broadcast, but it remains unfinished.
Tazeen is survived by two sons, from a marriage that ended in divorce, her mother, and her brothers, Nadeem and Faheem.
• Farah Tazeen Ahmad, journalist and author, born 13 October 1971; died 6 November 2019
