Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  As the funeral cortège made its way down Whitehall, one of Radio Four’s most plummy presenters handed the commentary baton over to one of the football correspondents, who felt compelled to quote from another Diana. Should we not remember the words of the American songstress Diana Ross, he suggested, before quoting the first two lines of ‘Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)’. Then, presumably hoping to make the world an even better place, he reprised it again.

  As he, in turn, handed over to another pukka presenter, listeners must have thought the BBC was suffering some terrible identity crisis. But it perfectly captured the confused national mood, where populist and emotive forms of expression had crowded out more traditional ideas about decorum and self-control. A nostalgic imperial culture was vying with a celebrity culture and even a football culture, that other great outlet for mass emotionalism. It seemed at times that we were witnessing a nationwide rendering of the Liverpudlian response to the Hillsborough stadium disaster eight years earlier, with its flowers, anthems and mass ceremonials. Our coverage merely reflected this messy incoherence.

  The assignment of reporters and presenters that day could be read like an unofficial ranking of BBC talent – a global one at that, since some of the finest international reporters had been flown home especially for the occasion and stationed at key landmarks along the funeral route. Kensington Palace, Hyde Park Corner, Buckingham Palace, Clarence House.

  Lesser lights, like me, were pushed to the suburban fringes of north London, where Diana’s hearse would travel on the way to her final resting place at Althorp, her ancestral home in Northamptonshire. I found myself on the upper reaches of Finsbury Road, an arterial route lined with fried-chicken joints and bargain-basement travel agents, which locals had tried to spruce up by tying purple bows to the lamp posts and traffic bollards. The prose that I had prepared for my commentary was an even deeper shade of purple, but the words never made it beyond my notepad.

  As the hearse moved out of central London, it travelled at such a hurtling pace that it flashed by in a matter of seconds. Reporters had been spaced out at 500-metre intervals to commentate in relay, but hardly anyone got to utter a single word. Rendered mute, all we passed up the route was gossip: the news of a string of meltdowns, full-on hissy fits, from senior correspondents closer to central London who had been denied the chance to grieve on air.

  At that stage of my career, I was way too junior to have yet achieved tantrum status, although it was something I clearly aspired to in the future. And, if anything, I packed away my microphone that morning thinking it was probably just as well that I never got to broadcast my sentimental mush to the rest of the world. In any case, the rhetorical bar had been raised so very high so very early in the week that by the day of the funeral there was simply nowhere left to go. It had become like listening to an athletics commentator covering the latter stages of a middle-distance race, who had reached the uppermost pitch of his voice with 400 metres still remaining.

  All that week, I had struggled to get into the full emotional swing – I had even gone to watch a romantic comedy at the movies and, about 40 minutes into the film, breached the prohibition on laughing out loud in public – but I would hate to make it sound as if I were completely immune to the feelings of my compatriots. I even admit to a few moments of moistness. Rather embarrassingly, my very own outpouring of grief came when Elton John started singing ‘Goodbye, England’s Rose’. By the end of the first line, I was a quivering wreck, although on air, at least, I managed to keep any stray feelings in check.

  Just as Britain changed that week, so, too, did British journalism. Still novel then, the internet firmly established itself as the home of far-fetched conspiracy theories, offering crackpot counter-narratives to official versions of events. The tabloids reconsidered their use of telephoto journalism, though the paparazzi were not banished for long. We also saw the first full flowering of what might be called ‘How do you feel?’ reportage, where feelings were harvested almost as assiduously as facts. Even within venerable journalistic institutions such as the BBC and Daily Telegraph, a new premium was attached to tears and watery secretions. On stories that involved death or any form of loss, no longer was it acceptable merely to get a quote. The words had to come with sentiment. We not only took the pulse of the public but also felt their pain.

  The vocabulary of news started to change as well. Words such as ‘cathartic’, ‘epiphany’ and ‘closure’ began to litter our coverage. The mental distance between interviewer and interviewee also got narrower, and sometimes even vanished. As well as deploying the language of therapeutic care, some reporters started to dabble in pop psychology, while others assumed the air of full-blown psychotherapists. Through this couchification of journalism, the aim was not merely to elicit emotional reactions but also to probe the psyche.

  Charles and Diana were again integral to this process, especially when their disintegrating marriage started being retrospectively viewed more as a psychodrama than a news story. Over at Westminster, as well, some of the same techniques came to be applied to help make sense of the tortured relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Call it what you will – the couchification or the Oprafication of news – but journalism was starting to reward emotion-gatherers as well as news-gatherers.

  As a postscript to Diana’s death, it is worth recalling the mood the following year, when an embarrassed reticence hung over the anniversary commemorations. They ended up being a lot more emotionally subdued than most commentators expected. Noticeably more self-conscious, it was almost as if Britons now felt ill at ease, ashamed even, with the binge-grieving of 12 months earlier. Yet it could hardly be described as a return to pre-Diana normalcy, for the Britain of the past has never since managed to reassert itself.

  ‘Comfort has come to the streets of Belfast.’ The words were lyrical enough to have come from the lips of one of Northern Ireland’s great poets, a Seamus Heaney, say, or perhaps Van Morrison, Belfast’s most celebrated balladeer. But they were uttered by a kindly landlady as she showed me to my room in a bed and breakfast three weeks after the IRA had announced its first ceasefire in August 1994.

  I was just about to join the BBC and had travelled to Belfast partly out of curiosity and partly because I thought, precociously, that I would soon end up being assigned there. Back then, Northern Ireland was the nursery of Correspondentland, and most of the reporters who had gone on to cover wars abroad had started by covering our very own war at home. So this had the feel of pre-school.

  By day, I would do the sights: the Belfast terror tour, making sure to swap taxis from a Catholic firm to the Protestant one as I went between the Falls Road and Shankill Road. In the evenings, I would drink pints of Guinness in a bar near Queen’s University and read Tim Pat Coogan’s monumental history The Troubles. In the morning, my landlady would cook me an Ulster fry, with bacon, eggs, sausages, white pudding and soda bread – one of the world’s great breakfasts.

  There would be a neatness in the narrative had I recalled that gentle woman 17 months later as I dashed out of the pub, leapt into the taxi, shouted at the driver to head towards Canary Wharf and sprinted the last mile through the cordoned-off streets of London’s Docklands. Alas, an IRA bomb had just shattered the comfort she had spoken of so expectantly. At 5.28 pm on Friday 9 February 1996, a man using the well-known nom de guerre ‘P. O’Neill’ had dictated a message from the IRA Army Council to a reporter from the Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ, announcing that its ceasefire would end at six o’clock. Then, at 5.54 pm, another man using the IRA codeword ‘Kerrygold’ rang the switchboard of the Irish News in Belfast to warn that a ‘massive bomb’ was about to go off beside South Quay tube station in Docklands. Did the man say Kerrygold, the woman asked. Just like butter, came the blank reply.

  Shortly after seven o’clock, the IRA detonated a half-tonne bomb that killed two people and turned a corner of London’s new financial hub into a scene of ruin. Mirror-glass office buildings were complete
ly gutted, standing like giant filing cabinets that had been ransacked in a robbery. The streets were strewn with rubble, broken glass, fragments of office furniture and once neatly filed papers. Then there was the usual posse of reporters that had converged on the scene like a flash mob. Never before had I witnessed first-hand the destructive power of explosives – in this case a blend of ammonium-nitrate fertiliser and fuel oil. Nor had I experienced that peculiar feeling, at once thrilling and unnerving, of running towards danger when virtually everyone else was heading fast in the opposite direction.

  Soon, I was heading over to Ireland. Nine days after the Docklands bomb, a 21-year-old Irishman blew himself up on a double-decker bus on the Strand when the bomb he was transporting across London exploded prematurely. The dead bomber, Edward O’Brien, had grown up in Gorey, a prosperous market town south of Dublin in County Wexford, and I travelled there, along with an Irish colleague, to find out why he had signed up as an IRA volunteer.

  The clues were easy enough to find. The site during the 1798 uprising of an attack by rebels on British Crown forces, Gorey was steeped in Republican mythology. The insurrection had been memorialised in stone. Rebel songs were sung still in the pubs. Nobody wanted to speak, however, about why O’Brien felt motivated to continue waging a fight that the vast majority of people in Gorey had relegated to the past.

  Faced with this wall of silence, my Irish colleague knew precisely what to do. First making sure we had a hefty supply of cigarettes, he arranged for us to meet the local priest. A gaunt, fidgety chain-smoker, with small flints of dandruff dotted on the shoulders of his black suit, the priest came straight from central casting. But he listened sympathetically as we made our pitch, and he signalled, through a fug of cigarette smoke, that he would help.

  Instantly, Gorey opened up for us, and my colleague even managed to speak to the elderly IRA veteran who used to stand outside chapel on a Sunday morning, with young O’Brien at his side, selling copies of An Phoblacht, the Republican movement’s propaganda sheet. Back then, the lame joke whenever coming in to land at an Irish airport was to make sure that you readjusted your watch by at least 200 years, but occasionally it doubled as useful advice. As we soon discovered, young Edward O’Brien’s imagination had indeed been fired by an insurrection that had unfolded nearly two centuries before his birth. From the 1798 uprising to a botched bombing on the Strand, the historical thread was unbroken.

  More happily, many of my journeys over the Irish Sea in the coming years were to cover fresh rounds of political talks rather than fresh bouts of violence. Then there was the marching season, which fell somewhere between the two. Once a two-month festival of noisy though largely trouble-free parades, it had become a proxy battleground for the venting of sectarian tensions.

  As in Gorey, it was like disappearing through a wormhole of time. Covering it could be a thoroughly dispiriting experience, but there was also a certain charm in driving through some of the most beautiful countryside that the British Isles have to offer, en route to towns and villages that for most of the year were tranquil and obscure.

  By the time we would arrive, the opposing sides had usually taken up their positions, like medieval armies in observance of ancient rites. The Orangemen would be gathered at one end of town, with their bowler hats, tangerine V-shaped collarettes, folded umbrellas, white gloves, dark suits (acrylic in the main), Union Flags, Boyne Standards and wall-sized Lodge banners emblazoned with images of William of Orange. The fife and drum bands would be warming up with scales and arpeggios, their tunics decorated with epaulets, ribbonry, badges and insignia bearing grand, if self-protective, names: Red Hand Defenders, Pride of the Hill, Mourne Young Defenders. Even babies were adorned with Loyalist paraphernalia, such as bibs reading ‘Born on the Twelfth of July’.

  Catholic protesters, carrying placards featuring the silhouette of an Orangeman with a no-entry sign superimposed, would have assembled at the other end of the main street, or have been hemmed in on side roads so they could not assault the marchers.

  Playing their own part in this pageantry, the police would be occupying the middle ground, clad in black riot gear and standing alongside their battleship-grey Land Rovers parked bumper to bumper to form a barrier. Then, at the appointed hour, the bands would strike up to the pounding beat of a huge Lambeg drum, while the protesters would hurl abuse and missiles. In one country village, it was Lucozade bottles. In another, at the sound of a high-pitched whistle, protesters hurled hundreds of golf balls, most of which were eagerly scooped up by the policemen, who presumably planned to tee off with them as soon as the marching season was over, and with it their ban on leave. Along the most contentious parade routes, it was Molotov cocktails and occasionally gunfire.

  Of all the sectarian interfaces, none was angrier than Drumcree. Contentious parade routes normally skirted predominantly Catholic neighbourhoods, but here it passed right through the middle. Held on the Sunday before the traditional 12 July celebrations, which marked King William’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne, Orangemen set out from their fortress-like lodge in the centre of nearby Portadown. Then they marched out of town to the steepled church at Drumcree set in rolling hills that evoked the music of Elgar and Vaughan Williams rather than the high-pitched squeal of the piccolos and flutes.

  After holding a service to commemorate the Battle of the Somme, the Orangemen returned to the centre of town via the Garvaghy Road, which was lined on either side by Catholic housing estates. It was there that trouble usually flared, and by the mid-1990s the Garvaghy Road had become Northern Ireland’s most active sectarian fault line. In 1995, the police banned the parade, only to back down when thousands of Orangemen amassed on the hills around Drumcree and threatened to hammer through the army barricades using a bulldozer and petrol tankers.

  My own Drumcree initiation came two years later, in 1997, shortly after Tony Blair had taken office, when the new Labour government indicated to the local Catholic residents’ group that the parade would again be banned. With another stand-off certain to ensue, BBC safety advisers issued us with hard-hats, protective goggles, fire extinguishers and even flameproof underwear. For fear of identifying any of our Irish colleagues as Protestant or Catholic, we were also warned not to use their Christian names. A careless ‘Seamus’ or ‘Billy’ uttered on the wrong side of the battlelines could put them in real danger.

  That weekend, we all expected serious trouble, but there was still something shocking about the outburst of violent fury from local residents when police Land Rovers screamed onto the Garvaghy Road in the pre-dawn hours to pave the way for Orangemen and formed an impregnable phalanx of armoured vehicles on either side of the parade route. Calling it the ‘least worst option’, the government and security forces had decided the Portadown Orangemen should be allowed to march, whatever the backlash from the local Catholic community.

  It was fearsome. After the parade passed by, and the police and soldiers beat a hurried retreat, they were chased down the Garvaghy Road by hundreds of youths hurling rocks, petrol bombs and what we later found out were bottles filled with sulphuric acid. One of our cameramen thought he was standing in a puddle of water. Then his shoes started to melt. Through the melee of exploding Molotov cocktails and fizzing baton rounds, the Orangemen could be seen in the mid-distance marching beneath a ceremonial archway bedecked with Loyalist colours that marked the line of demarcation between Catholic Portadown and Protestant Portadown. The raucous cheers that greeted them could just be heard above the din.

  True to the fault-line effect of Drumcree, aftershocks spread throughout the province. Still wearing our flameproof undies, we headed to Londonderry – in keeping with the BBC rule, I will call it Londonderry first, then Derry thereafter – where trouble was sure to flare. Parking a short walk from the Bogside, so as to avoid having our car hijacked by rioters, we walked down to a patch of land near the famed ‘Free Derry’ sign, where Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator and an IRA leader in Derry on Bloody
Sunday, was addressing a crowd of supporters. ‘The place to be demanding justice is on the streets confronting your opponents,’ he yelled, which was an invitation for absolute mayhem. A new Battle of the Bogside erupted soon after and raged through the night.

  At the front, teenagers sprinted down the street like javelin throwers, straining for every extra yard, and hurled petrol bombs at the police and army. In the rear, small boys, some as young as nine or ten, carried milk crates full of ready-made Molotov cocktails up to the main battlelines. But the ringmasters were the IRA men disguised in woollen ski masks, with holes for the eyes and mouths, who turned the violence on and off like a stopcock.

  Away from all the rioting, there was fun to be had during the marching season and especially at Drumcree. At times, it took on the feel of a journalistic folk festival, a sort of Glastonbury for trouble-seeking correspondents, who set up camp on the nationalist side of the barbed-wire fences erected by the Royal Engineers, close to the local Gaelic football club. Knowing they could end up there for a week or so, news teams arrived in campervans or pulling caravans, well stocked with beer, whisky and other, more illicit, forms of recreational entertainment. Though Portadown became for weeks the focus of a massive security clampdown, from the journalists’ mobile homes it was common to hear the sound of laughter and sniff the faint whiff of hash.