24 Feb 1946 - 21 Sep 2025 (79 years)

John Martin Stapleton was an English journalist and broadcaster. He was known for his work as a presenter and reporter on ITV breakfast television (TV-am, GMTV and Daybreak) in addition to hosting Nationwide and Watchdog for the BBC. He also hosted the ITV morning talk show The Time, The Place and presented the Sunday morning programme My Favourite Hymns.

Stapleton won the Royal Television Society's News Presenter of the Year award for 2003. He was married to the presenter Lynn Faulds Wood. They presented Watchdog together between 1986 and 1993.

Stapleton met his then teacher wife Lynn Faulds Wood in 1971 while she was working in her second job as a barmaid in a Richmond public house. They lived in St Margarets and were married for 43 years until her death in 2020 from a stroke aged 72. The couple had a son, Nick, born in 1987, who works as a documentary producer and is best known for being part of the team on BBC One's Scam Interceptors.

He had only one kidney that functioned properly. In April 2008 he revealed in a report for the BBC's The One Show that when he was younger he suffered from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa.

Stapleton was a supporter of Manchester City for more than 60 years, ever since his father took him to see Stanley Matthews play for Blackpool against City at their old Maine Road ground in the 1950s.

In October 2024 Stapleton announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, having made a Radio 4 Appeal for the Parkinson's Disease Society in 2009. As part of the 2009 campaign, Stapleton — along with Jane Asher and Jeremy Paxman — pledged to donate his brain to Parkinson's research following his death. Stapleton's mother had died of Parkinson's. He died in hospital on 21 September 2025, aged 79, following complications from pneumonia related to his condition.