by Mark Austin
I walked along to the village hall, where I remember introducing myself to a Mrs Appleby who was unloading paper plates, cups and serviettes from the boot of her car. I asked whether she knew of any good local stories. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘My grandson is five today and we’re having a little party for him. Balloons and everything. Come and take some photographs, perhaps?’
I moved on despondently. Soon it was 5 p.m. and I had nothing to speak of – or, more importantly, to write about. I was in trouble. My career was no more than eight hours old, and it was dying a very sad death on a coastal road in Dorset.
I climbed a turnstile and walked for a while alongside Stanpit Marsh, an area of astonishing natural beauty and a haven for birds and other wildlife.
Then it happened. A woman walking her dog, a smile, a quick ‘good evening’ and then, ‘Sorry to ask this, but have you signed the petition?’ It’s a question I will never forget. Five simple words: ‘Have you signed the petition?’ A sentence that made my heart sing. A sentence that saved my job.
‘No, what petition?’ I asked. ‘My petition. I’m so fed up the council are allowing development on the marsh. It’s the beginning of the end and I think it’s an absolute disgrace.’
Within fifteen minutes I had the story. The following morning, I called the council and discovered they had indeed given planning permission for some new homes, and it would involve reclaiming a small part of the marshes. A few more calls, a few more angry quotes and the eight-hundred-word, double-page spread was taking shape. I had my story, and my first byline under the headline which I never quite understood:
STAMPIT STANPIT
My career as a journalist was up and running… Well, sort of. For the next few weeks, all I was entrusted with was rewriting readers’ wedding reports.
Every Tuesday morning I would be handed a huge pile of these reports, with accompanying photographs, and had to find something different to say about each of them. Not easy when they were all the same…
‘More than 100 friends and family attended the wedding on Saturday of Mr David Smythe and Ms Eleanor Crabtree at All Saints Church, Moordown. The beautiful bride, given away by her father, Roger, looked stunning in a layered lace dress with taffeta and satin. The sumptuous reception was held at The Dog and Pheasant in Winton… etc, etc…’ You get the drift.
I did a dozen a week, not because it was news, but because the families of the betrothed paid a fee to have the reports in the paper and the Echo needed every penny it could get to survive.
I rewrote accounts of dream wedding after dream wedding as best as I possibly could, if only to progress to reporting the meetings of the Bournemouth Philatelic Society…
The key to local newspaper reporting, it seemed to me, was to find a good local row or controversy that could run for days. The knack was to create the row yourself. Find the issue, make the calls to the right people who you know will be upset and – bingo! – a controversy in the making.
One of my first, and perhaps the best, was the ‘Cormorant Beak Bounty Scandal’.
A friend had told me that the Wessex Water Authority were offering £1 a beak in an attempt to cull the cormorants who were blamed for killing local trout, salmon and other fish. Dozens of the birds were being shot every month.
I tipped off the Dorset branch of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who were predictably ‘outraged by the wholesale slaughter of the cormorants’ and called for an end to the ‘horrific’ practice.
My story began: ‘Bournemouth bird lovers were horrified today by the revelation that scores of cormorants are being killed and mutilated for money…’
Then I went to the fishermen who were carrying out the cull, and they explained how the cormorants were pests that threatened local fishing stocks.
On day two, another page lead began: ‘A Mudeford fisherman today sprang to the defence of the cormorant beak bounty…’
Local newspaper journalism in a nutshell.
In many ways the daily trawl around council meetings, magistrates’ courts and the general stuff of life was, and remains, the rawest form of journalism. Getting out, knocking on doors, a chat over a cup of tea at the cop shop, a natter with the landlord of the local pub… that was the way local reporting worked. It was journalism at ground level, and it played a vital role in local communities. And, along the way, I learned so much about the trade – and quite a few of its tricks, too.
For years I had read the Bournemouth Evening Echo as a teenager and longed to be a reporter. It seemed to me a dream job. In those days, newspapers were still a thriving industry. I had read so many front-page stories carrying the byline of Pat Hogan or Roy Yeomans, the paper’s top reporters, and now I was sitting in the same office as them, watching them, learning from them. They would do the police, fire and ambulance calls each morning, which often produced the biggest stories of the day.
Pat and Roy always competed ferociously for the front-page lead, but what they wanted most of all was the story that could be sold on to the national, Fleet Street papers. They were always on the phone trying to flog their stories, usually to the Daily Mail or the Daily Express.
Roy, the chief reporter, was the master of the art of selling stories to the national press. He was a real operator. I remember once getting a story about dead rats being thrown onto the stage of the local concert hall during a punk rock concert. A friend was there and phoned me.
It was some sort of weird prank by followers of the band Radio Stars. I told Roy I was writing it up for the following day’s paper, and he said he’d like to see a copy of it when it was finished. In the meantime, he’d also phoned his mate who ran the concert venue and who’d confirmed to him that there had been an incident, but also volunteered the additional information that one member of his staff had reported that it was actually dead puppies that were hurled onto the stage.
By six o’clock that evening Roy had nicked my story, changed it from dead rats to dead puppies, got a quote from the local RSPCA office and sold four hundred words to the Express. Some other papers also ran it the following morning, with a predictable tabloid sense of outrage. I think he made £120 in all for that… around three times my weekly wage.
Then, at that morning’s editorial conference, there was the obvious questions to me about why my story had appeared in the national press before it had a showing in the Echo. I had to say I had no idea.
Of course, my story would now have to appear with the new ‘information’ and with the headline:
‘Claims Dead Puppies Thrown on a Bournemouth Stage’.
I was less than certain it was true, but didn’t want to upset Roy or ruin a good story. Later clarification determined that what had actually been thrown were certainly not dead puppies, and not even dead rats, but rather offal in a plastic bag covered in fake blood.
Still, by then Roy had coined it and moved on to his next earner: a local woman’s cat had been rescued from the high branches of a tree by the fire brigade, and then killed when the fire engine reversed over it leaving the premises. Another few quid in his pocket…
In truth, Roy was a seriously good reporter who made his career in local journalism in a way it is very hard to do now. He also taught me a great deal about the trade of newspaper journalism: how to flesh out the barest scrap of information or merest detail. And he made and cultivated his contacts with huge enthusiasm. He wined and lunched councillors, police officers and local businessmen. They liked him, and tended to repay him with information and stories.
How did I end up at the Echo at the age of just nineteen? It was a difficult decision. Most of my mates were off to university, but I was desperate to be a reporter. I just decided that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent but I needed to start somewhere, so I thought local newspapers would be as good a place as any.
My father, Mike, was clear in his advice: ‘If you’ve decided what you want to do, you’re better getting on and doing it than spending three years at univ
ersity.’
Although my mother, Jane, had been a teacher of infant children, mine was not a particularly academic upbringing. My father left school at fourteen and began work as a commercial artist, eventually joining Pontin’s, the holiday camp firm, where he worked his way up to become Fred Pontin’s right-hand man. He had done well without going to university. He thought I could and should do the same. Neither my sister, Sarah, nor my brother, Nick, went to university. We all chose a path and set off down it.
Incidentally, all three of my children have gone to university. Or at least my son, Jack, had a crack at it before succumbing to the temptations of professional football and coaching. It just seems the accepted thing to do now, but I am not convinced it is right. Ever since Tony Blair set an arbitrary target that 50 per cent of young people should attend university, we seem to have a glut of graduates with average degrees facing a dearth of graduate jobs. More youngsters would be better off being guided towards more vocational courses. There is no shame in it, and it should be encouraged. If actual courses can be tied even loosely to actual jobs offered by actual employers, then no one loses. But the current system is skewed in another way too, as many academically gifted children in state schools are missing out on university because of poor teaching and a lack of ambition at school and at home.
But, as I say, forty years ago things were very different. There were decent jobs in journalism for an eighteen-year-old with A levels. I took my father’s advice, scrapped plans to do English at Exeter, and enrolled in a nine-month course run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists in Portsmouth. It was a course that covered shorthand, law, public administration and writing, and after narrowly surviving scurrilous accusations that I had cheated in my hundred-words-per-minute shorthand exam, I passed and that led to the job on the Echo.
Within three years of joining the Echo, I moved to the BBC in London and never looked back. After a few months learning about foreign news and how to write radio scripts at the BBC World Service in Bush House, I managed to wangle a six-month contract at BBC Television News as a scriptwriter for the newsreaders on the lunchtime and the early evening news.
The switch from newspapers and radio was not easy. For a start, the style of writing is totally different. In television you have to imagine the spoken word, and you need to be spare and concise and stick to time. Three words a second is the golden rule, and in those days there were not many links that were longer than thirty seconds.
A ‘link’ is the introduction to a recorded videotape report compiled by a correspondent. And aged twenty-four, it was my job to write them for the likes of Jan Leeming and Sue Lawley. It was quite daunting but also quite enjoyable. Both women were very professional but also great fun. I have to confess to a crush on Sue. She was sassy, sexy and smart, and I was in awe of her.
Newsroom rumours swirled of some sort of romance; speculation that was, unfortunately, hopelessly wide of the mark. But never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Then some reptile in the office tipped off Private Eye.
A piece appeared in the Grovel column suggesting I was having an affair with Sue. I was flattered, she was furious. Sue wanted to sue. Charming, I thought. She was even more angry when the story was picked up by the Express…
Things then took a bizarre turn, with another appearance in the next edition of Private Eye:
Grovel’s exclusive about newscasterette Sue Lawley, 37, being romanced by Corporation minion Mark Austin, 24, caused some surprise among the friends of Alan Tomlinson, a flamboyant BBC World Service producer given to wearing tight-fitting trousers and silk shirts.
The Adonis-like Austin also used to work at the World Service and became so friendly with Tomlinson, 34, that the two shared a flat and were inseparable. However, the friendship ended when Alan departed Bush House in mysterious circumstances. He now lives in Honduras.
Now, ‘Adonis-like’ I can probably live with. But ‘minion’ really irked. And as for the suggestion of a relationship with Alan, it was laughable, not least because he was seeing an awful lot of a certain Bianca Jagger at the time. Hence, I suspect, his ‘mysterious’ departure to central America.
We were good mates, shared a huge flat overlooking the river in Putney, and had some cracking parties to which he often wore those tight-fitting trousers. I’m not sure he possessed a silk shirt.
Now I wanted to sue. But, eventually, Sue and I both saw the funny side of the whole thing. At least I think she did; Jan Leeming was certainly amused.
In truth, it was the most exciting thing that happened in that job. The problem was I didn’t really want to do it. I wanted to be a television reporter and a foreign correspondent, I had no doubt about that. So I came up with a plan. Although it nearly always pays to work really hard at being good at something, sometimes it can also pay to try your damnedest to be bad at something, or at least extremely mediocre.
My admittedly high-risk strategy was to be a second-rate scriptwriter, while all the time trying to persuade anyone who would listen that my real strengths lay as a reporter. In fact, it was so high-risk that one programme editor, a fearsome Yorkshireman called Derek Maude, became so fed up with me that he was on the verge of getting me kicked out.
Derek, a legendary figure at BBC News in the 1980s, wore a patch on his right eye, and a senior correspondent at the time, Michael Cole, offered what seemed like very good advice to a young scriptwriter in his first week at the BBC. He said that Derek had a very clear idea of where everyone should sit in his editorial meetings. The place for new young writers like me was slightly behind him on the right side, where he was spared ‘the chore of having to see you’.
Odd, I thought, but I was delighted such a revered figure as Cole seemed to have my back. I duly pulled up a chair on what was quite literally Derek’s blind side.
Of course, far from being his preference, it was the one thing that infuriated him. He absolutely had to be able to see everyone in front of him. It was his one hard and fast rule: be visible.
‘Austin,’ he said, ‘where are you? Get in fookin’ front of me where I can see you.’
It was not a great start to my relationship with Derek, a key man in the BBC newsroom.
Actually, sitting on his blind side was not the only thing that angered Derek. Overwriting was his other bête noir. He hated verbosity in news scripts, and had two sayings that stuck with me: ‘Son, the greatest story in the world was told in two words: Jesus wept’ and ‘Don’t use ten words when one will do. It’s what you leave out that fookin’ counts’.
Part of my strategy was therefore to throw in unnecessary adjectives at any opportunity, just to annoy him and to prove that I wasn’t cut out for scriptwriting.
Derek was a programme editor of wonderful news judgement and made clear decisions, unlike many editors. In the fast-moving news business, sometimes you just have to make a decision about stories and running orders and get on with it. Too many programme editors, it seems to me, vacillate and change their minds and seek advice from too many people. Derek wasn’t one of them. He made his decision, and that was that. To be fair, it is such a subjective business that quite often you can make a perfectly sensible argument for leading with one story over another. The decision is the important thing.
And the best decision he ever made was to tell me that I wasn’t going to make it as a newsroom writer, and to get out on the road where ‘I could make a nuisance of myself and be useful at the same time’. It was music to my ears.
Not only did he tell me that, but he also told the news editor at the time, John Exelby, a wonderful man with a wicked sense of humour and an unrivalled news sense. We got on well, shared a love of cricket, and I grew to like and respect him enormously. Before I knew it, at the age of twenty-five, I was a national reporter for BBC TV News.
Everyone needs their lucky break, and mine came because a very successful BBC News correspondent and presenter, Chris Morris, had a dinner date he didn’t want to miss. It
was late on a Friday afternoon, and word was coming in of a robbery at a jeweller’s in St James’s in central London.
I was a very inexperienced junior reporter at the time, but because I was on my own and everyone else was assigned, I was sent to the scene. I thought I would be news-gathering with the cameraman until a more senior reporter could get there. It was a big armed robbery, with staff held up at gunpoint by men in balaclavas and more than two million pounds’ worth of jewellery stolen. I did a couple of interviews with eyewitnesses and a senior police officer at the scene, and then my pager went off. It was Chris Morris asking me what I’d got and telling me he probably wouldn’t get there.
I was asked to do the report for the Nine O’Clock News and couldn’t believe my luck. I did a piece to camera and headed back to edit my first story for the BBC’s flagship programme.
Chris Morris later told me he could have easily got to St James’s, but thought I deserved a chance on the main programme. It was a great gesture and one I will never forget. I felt I was on my way in television news.
By far the biggest story I covered during my time as young reporter at BBC News was the miners’ strike of 1984–5. It lasted a year and was the most bitter and violent industrial dispute in living memory, without parallel perhaps anywhere in the industrialized world. On one side, thousands of workers, fighting for their jobs, futures and families and led by the radical unionist Arthur Scargill. On the other, a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, determined to crush the strike and prepared to use the police force to do it.
It was characterized by violent confrontations between flying pickets and police, and it was hugely unpleasant to cover.
It is the hatred I remember. The raw, visceral hatred on display every day. It was my first experience of a protracted industrial dispute, and I wasn’t at all prepared for what I was witnessing, what it was doing to the people caught up in it, on both sides, and what it was doing to the country.