When allowed to return, Rosenbluth changed his name to John Caryl Ross and joined the British Army’s Pioneer Corps; he became an officer in 1945.

[5] His paternal grandfather was Pinchas Rosen (born Felix Rosenblüth), who served three times as justice minister of Israel.

He was on the presenting team of a short-lived early-evening news programme Sixty Minutes which began in 1983, and was intended as a replacement for Nationwide, but proved an unwieldy format.

Crimewatch (based on a German prototype) began in 1984, and made him a household name in the UK and his regular sign-off, "Don't have nightmares, do sleep well", became a well-known catch-phrase.

[8] He presented A Week in Politics on Channel 4, then moved to cover BBC Two's live broadcasts of parliament in Westminster with Nick Ross.

The replacement presenter, Kirsty Young, was 21 years younger than Ross and the BBC were accused of ageism over these changes.

Ross was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting, charity and crime prevention.

[16] Away from broadcasting Ross has a wide range of philanthropic involvements, centred on medical ethics as well as promoting science and evidence-led health-care.

Ross has written several books including Crime, how to solve it and why so much of what we're told is wrong,[19] and is President of the British Security Industries Association.

Ross contributed the foreword to Edzard Ernst's 2013 book on complementary and alternative medicine, Healing, Hype or Harm?

[22] Ross spoke against the bill in a 2015 debate hosted by HealthWatch, saying that "Uncoordinated trial and error on individual patients will never cure cancer and even if it did we would never know because these aren't controlled conditions...There is a long roll call of dishonour where lack of systematic science did harm".

He was president of the Kensington Society 2011-2023[27] and a patron of Prisoners Abroad (a registered charity which supports Britons detained overseas), and a range of other charities including the Animal Care Trust, British Wireless for the Blind Fund, Heartbeat, the Jewish Association for the Mentally Ill, the Kidney Research Aid Fund, the Myasthenia Gravis Association, the National Depression Campaign, Missing, NICHS, the Raynaud's & Scleroderma Association, Resources for Autism, SaneLine, the Simon Community Northern Ireland, and Young at Heart.

His wife Sarah Caplin, co-founder of ChildLine, was Deputy Secretary of the BBC and also a senior executive with ITV, the British commercial television broadcaster.