In 1979, Chris won a choral scholarship to Oxford, where he read Philosophy and Theology.

Sustaining himself through three years of abstract thought, on early English choral music and port, he scraped a second.

The BBC seemed a natural spiritual home, and in 1982 he joined the corporation as a trainee studio manager.

As a child in Trinidad, West Indies, Chris and his family had listened as a matter of daily routine to the BBC World Service.

So, when his traineeship ended, Christopher first worked as a producer in Bush House.

As he is half Indian, he then moved to the World Service's Eastern Service as a reporter, and between 1986 and 1989 he worked in most of the countries in the Asian region.

Kuwait invasion

In 1990 Christopher was posted to the United Nations in New York as the BBC correspondent.

Within weeks of his arrival, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the UN was suddenly reborn.

Gunness reported for all domestic radio and television outlets on the Iraq crisis, as well as the deployment of UN forces in the former Yugoslavia, which fell to pieces just as the new world order was happening.

After New York in 1992, he worked as a BBC news correspondent for domestic radio and television and spent six months reporting on Newsnight.

Christopher then had a break from the corporation between 1994 and 1995, as spokesman for the UN in the former Yugoslavia - a PR brief from hell, given that a quarter of a million people died under UN auspices.

Since returning from the Balkans, Christopher has presented daily current affairs programmes for the World Service, and several of his documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service have won awards.