Jessel resigned from "The World at One" in 1972 to join BBC 1's nightly TV current affairs programme, "24 Hours". On this and its successor programmes, he reported on stories from around the world including successive United States presidential elections in the 1970s, exposing atrocities in Honduras and Nicaragua in the 1980s and natural disasters such as the Friuli earthquake in Italy. In 1973 he and his BBC film crew were able to film one of the first areas openly controlled by Vietnamese communist forces following the 1973 truce with the United States.