Helen Rollason Helen Rollason Helen Frances Rollason, MBE ("née" Grindley: 11 March 1956 – 9 August 1999) was a British sports journalist and television presenter, who in 1990 became the first female presenter of the BBC's sports programme "Grandstand". She was also a regular presenter of "Sport on Friday", and of the children's programme "Newsround" during the 1980s. Born in London, Rollason studied to become a PE teacher before entering radio broadcasting in 1980. After directing sport related content for Channel 4, where she helped to bring American football to British television, she anchored coverage of the 1987 World Student Games and
Grandstand (TV programme) results as they came through, with the characters in each result appearing one by one. Remarkably, only two people regularly read out the classified results on "Final Score" when it was part of Grandstand: the Australian Len Martin (from the first programme until his death in 1995) and Tim Gudgin (from 1995 until Final Score was separated from Grandstand in 2001 – he continued to read the classified results until 2011). For twenty years (1965–1985) "Grandstand" faced competition from ITV's "World of Sport", but by the end of the 1980s ITV had stopped broadcasting Saturday afternoon sport in favour of