Vincent Leo Martin Hanna (9 August 1939 – 22 July 1997) was a Northern Irish television journalist known for his coverage of United Kingdom by-elections.
[1] Hanna's freelance journalism was noticed by The Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, who offered him a job as an industrial relations correspondent.
At Darlington in March 1983, Hanna's broadcasts helped to destroy the campaign of SDP candidate Tony Cook, who had been the early favourite to win.
[citation needed] Such was Hanna's identification with by-elections that in 1987 he was a guest star in Blackadder the Third, reporting on S. Baldrick's victory at the rotten borough of Dunny-on-the-Wold in the episode "Dish and Dishonesty" (and credited as "his own great-great-great-grandfather").
By this time, however, Hanna had left the BBC to set up his own freelance production company which specialised in trade union issues and mainly worked for the public service television station Channel 4.
He led a strike at the BBC in 1985 when the Governors, bowing to Government pressure, suppressed a documentary called Real Lives: At the Edge of the Union which covered the home life of Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin and Gregory Campbell of the Democratic Unionist Party.