Baroness Bakewell is president of Birkbeck, University of London; she is also an author and playwright, and has received a Humanist of the Year award for services to humanism.

Bakewell was born on 16 April 1933 in Heaton Moor, Stockport, Cheshire, England, and moved to Hazel Grove before she was three.

[1] Both her grandfathers were factory workers: the Rowlands branch stemmed from the lead mining villages of the Ystwyth valley, in Wales.

Joan Bakewell began her career as a studio manager for BBC Radio, before moving into television.

Frank Muir dubbed her "the thinking man's crumpet"[6] during this period and the moniker stuck, but Bakewell herself dislikes the epithet.

Bakewell co-presented Reports Action, a Sunday teatime programme which encouraged the public to donate their services to various good causes, for Granada Television in 1976–78.

[8] In 2001, Bakewell wrote and presented a four-part series for BBC Two called Taboo, a personal exploration of the concepts of taste, decency and censorship.

The programme dealt frankly with sex and nudity and in some cases pushed the boundaries of what is permissible on mainstream television.

She watched a couple having sex while they were making a pornographic film and read out an "obscene" extract from the novel Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.

[9][10] Taboo was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions by the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, then headed by John Beyer.

Following the complaint, Bakewell faced the nominal prospect of being charged with blasphemous libel after she recited part of an erotic poem by James Kirkup concerning a Roman centurion's affection for Jesus, "The Love that Dares to Speak its Name".

Topics covered included changes to divorce law, the death penalty, the legalisation of abortion, the Race Relations Bill, the partial decriminalisation of homosexual acts (using editions of the documentary series Man Alive) and the relaxation of censorship.

[citation needed] In 2017, Bakewell was one of the minor hosts of the Channel 5 documentary series Secrets of the National Trust.

Why else sexualise the clothes of little girls, run TV channels of naked wives, have sex magazines edging out the serious stuff on newsagents' shelves?

"[20] In August 2014, Bakewell was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.

[25][26] In April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bakewell said that the Government should stop treating the elderly like "a crazy old people's club" and allow them to make their own choices on how best to ensure their personal safety.

Bakewell's autobiography, The Centre of the Bed, was published in 2003 and concentrates on her experiences as a woman in the male-dominated media industry.

[36] In 1975, she married Jack Emery, a British director, writer and producer for stage, TV and radio, who was 12 years her junior.