He was then a training apprentice with the Outward Bound Sea School and left home to work as a deckhand in the merchant marine.

After two years of national service, he moved to Fleet Street to work for the Daily Mirror, becoming a foreign correspondent in the New York bureau.

In 1960 Wilcox moved to television as a reporter on ITV's This Week current affairs programme, where he stayed for five years until joining the BBC.

He later formed the Man Alive Unit as well as providing the distinctive voice-over in the weekly current-affairs programme TEMPO directed by Mike Hodges.

During this first marriage he had an eight-year affair with television presenter Esther Rantzen, and in 1977 he married her after obtaining a divorce from Patsy.