That definitely makes sense. My recollection of that era was that the Six second presenter read the daytime summaries. So, it wasn't out of the ordinary for Jennie to have presented the newsflash. The One presenter may have already left and Jennie was the duty bulletin presenter at that moment. That would have allowed the Six main presenter to prepare for the Six.
Is it not also possible that the One team would routinely come off air and go straight for lunch?
I don't think it's the case that the Six presenter would do the daytime summaries, certainly in the eighties, because Richard Whitmore did them for the first few years and he never did the Six. Indeed it said somewhere that he knew his days were numbered at the Beeb because Nicholas Witchell fell ill one afternoon and couldn't do the Six, and Whitmore was in the building doing the daytime bulletins and volunteered to do it, and they said they didn't want him and dragged in Andrew Harvey from home. And in the eighties and early nineties it would be people like Lynette Lithgow and Lisa Davidson who never did the Six either.
Obviously things may have been different in the late nineties but I'm pretty sure it was usually a different presenter for the daytime summaries - it was quite a long shift, starting at 9am and going on until 4pm. It is the case that Jennie Bond was doing the daytime summaries and the Six that day but I think that was very much an exception (as mentioned, she certainly wasn't billed as doing the Six in the Radio Times).
In the virtual era it was most certainly the case that the daytime summaries would be read by the second presenter of the Six. The exception being in the early days of the virtual era when Anna Ford was the secondary presenter to Peter Sissons.
Moira, Jennie. Andrew and Jill would normally do the bulletins throughout the day on BBC1 and BBC2 and they would later join the lead presenter on the Six.
I would imagine it's no different to at the weekend now when there's a presenter on the news channel but someone else comes in to do the BBC1 bulletins.
However it's sad to say but there is still a degree of ageism in broadcasting, if you look at her contemporaries in TV they've a mixed bag of career paths. Would she have been a Carol Smilie and gone elsewhere then disappeared? Would she have been got rid of from her long running gig and then been just a contributor like Carol Vorderman? Or would she have left the public eye to raise a family and do other things, then come back in low profile gigs like Anneka Rice? The nearest person in terms of age and talents I can think of is Lorraine Kelly who has basically been doing the same thing for 30 years.
Personally I think she'd have done Crimewatch with a few odd factual series here and now she'd probably have a high profile radio gig, Desert Island Discs or lunchtime Radio 2 would be the two she'd have been best suited to, or Woman's Hour
Well, the current presenter of Desert Island Discs is Kirsty Young who are of similar ages and background, and I could imagine Dando doing something like that - especially as Kirsty Young does the Royal Weddings and things like that, and Dando was involved in things like the VE Day anniversary. As I say, I think someone like Fiona Phillips might be the nearest thing, doing various one-off docs and the odd series.
That's what Wikipedia says, although the
source article it cites for that 'fact' doesn't mention it at all. In any case, Genome suggests she wasn't down to present at all that week, and we know she'd stopped reading the news at that point anyway.
Yes, as mentioned she'd already stopped reading the news in February. Actually that obit does mention that at one point she was going to be part of the revamped news and potentially do the Six but some of the bosses weren't that sure about her being the lead presenter because she was too lightweight, so seemingly she decided that rather go through the process of having to do pilots and presumably all the gossip about who was and wasn't going to do it, she decided to just leave.