by Mark Austin
The series was a success and the decision was made to take the reports further. Deborah called me into her office and said, ‘I want to send you to the Antarctic. I want us to be the first TV news programme to anchor live from there.’
It was typical Turness. The result was a week-long special in January 2007 called ‘The Big Melt’. During the week, Lawrence McGinty and I would travel around the continent to measure the retreat of the ice in one of the coldest, most remote places on earth. It wasn’t easy, and just getting the satellite dish to Antarctica was an adventure.
The main dish − weighing 650 kilograms and measuring 2.4 metres in diameter − was flown on a Hercules by the RAF into Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands. The plan was for HMS Endurance − the Navy’s icebreaker − to collect it and transport it to Antarctica.
But another important piece of kit for the dish was travelling to the Falklands by air, via Chile. Unbeknown to us as we left the UK, it was offloaded at Punta Arenas and never made the flight to Stanley.
It was a disaster. The only way the equipment could get to Antarctica was on HMS Endurance. We decided we needed to charter a plane to get the thing to the Falklands in order to meet the ship. But then the weather closed in and the charter couldn’t take off. Our week of special reports was days away, and everything now hinged on this piece of satellite dish kit, a charter company that was losing interest, the weather in Chile, and a ship in the Falklands that was about to leave. It didn’t look good.
Somehow we managed to get the equipment to a Chilean Antarctic base, and we persuaded the Endurance to make a detour to pick it up. We then jumped on a British Antarctic Survey Dash-7 plane for the five-hour flight into their base at Rothera, which was to be our home for ten days.
As we descended through the light cloud, it was utterly enchanting to see the Antarctic for the first time. Just endless sunlit whiteness below us: pristine, beautiful and largely untouched by man. It was breathtaking natural beauty. We were at the bottom of the world, where humanity − despite its best efforts − had been unable thus far to do its worst, and it lifted the spirits. It was a wonderful moment. There were just four of us in the team: McGinty, myself, cameraman Eugene Campbell, and the crucial man, satellite engineer Steve Gore-Smith.
I say crucial… and he was. Our problems were not over. After mandatory safety training − which involved roping ourselves into and safely out of a crevasse − Steve had to start building the dish, and then he had to somehow find the satellite. ‘Not easy,’ as he indelicately put it, ‘from the arse end of the world.’
And it wasn’t. Steve was struggling. For fourteen hours he battled, through howling winds and temperatures that plummeted to minus 20 degrees, to find a wretched signal. I’m tempted to say ‘day turned into night’, but of course it doesn’t in January in the Antarctic. It is always day; there is no night.
Fuelled by regular cups of tea from Eugene, Steve eventually made a successful transmission at 5 a.m. on our first day of broadcasting. The opening programme went without a hitch, and I managed to conduct a live interview with Tony Blair in Downing Street. Even he was impressed.
McGinty was in his element, and did a fascinating report about how scientists measure temperatures in the Antarctic going back thousands of years. He filmed a research team drilling down into ice sheets in some of the remotest parts of the southern wilderness. They would extract cores made of ice that had fallen as snow hundreds of thousands of years before.
One of the scientists, Rob Mulvaney, explained the next step: ‘Trapped in the ice are tiny bubbles of the atmosphere. Now this is the real actual atmosphere of the past. We can take out the air from those bubbles, measure the air for greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, and measure how it has varied through time.’
It was utterly fascinating. The analysis showed there have been eight ice ages in Antarctic history, and each was followed by a big melt. ‘The levels of carbon dioxide today suggest we are in for another,’ claimed Mulvaney. ‘In the last hundred years, we’ve put the same amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as we’d expect in the difference between an ice age and a warm period. That’s a lot of carbon dioxide.’
The week went well. Bizarrely, Princess Anne turned up at the base on one day and gave us an interview. She was out there with her husband on a trip related to a charity linked to the explorer Ernest Shackleton. We’d had no idea she was coming.
I loved every bit of the trip. Although I did nearly die.
I was filming on a small rigid inflatable boat (RIB) among the giant, stunning icebergs floating close to the base, and I was doing a piece to camera very close to one that towered over us. Halfway through my piece about melting ice shelves, we heard a frightening, very loud creaking sound. The boatman swung the RIB around. He knew what was coming. Suddenly, and before we could escape, massive chunks, the size of cars, began falling off the iceberg. They crashed into the sea, a hundred metres or so from where we were. The boatman did well, and so did Eugene, who kept filming as it happened. It was dramatic TV, though it could very easily have been my last-ever piece to camera. But I suppose if you’re going to die, die in Antarctica. It really is − crashing ice boulders aside − the most tranquil, idyllic and wonderful place.
I am conscious that I began this chapter by saying how simple newsreading is. Well, it is, until things go wrong. Then you earn your crust. And when you’re on location, there’s a lot that can go wrong.
It did in Beijing, when I was presenting News at Ten live from a position overlooking Tiananmen Square. It had taken weeks of hard work to get permissions and everything set up. The communist regime doesn’t like Western news organizations broadcasting live from the square. The memory of the 1989 massacre coverage still haunts them. It is still incredibly sensitive. I have been arrested on that square more times than I can remember.
Anyway, all was set. Until, that is, I got the ‘three minutes to air’ count in my ear. We were still printing out the scripts from our laptop, but I had a small teleprompter that was working so I was relaxed. Suddenly, there was a spark from the power supply, a small bang and everything went off. Autocue, lights, printer… nothing was working.
‘Two minutes to air,’ I heard in my ear. Two minutes to disaster, I thought to myself. The top of the programme was complicated and pre-planned with a specific grab that I had to describe precisely. I had to get the script right, but I didn’t have one. Nothing. The producer, Alex Chandler, was on the phone to London; the engineer, Kelvin, was trying to at least get the light back; and I was consumed with a gathering panic that was not conducive to addressing the nation sensibly.
Alex was furiously handwriting the opening script. Good lad, I thought, we’ll be fine. We should have been, but I can safely say he has the worst handwriting on the planet. I could barely read it.
The News at Ten music sounded. Deep breath. Alex talked me through the script; I was still jotting stuff down as we went on air. Mercifully, the headlines were recorded. When they cut to us, I smiled and said, ‘Good evening from Tiananmen Square in Beijing’… then tried desperately to come up with a reasonably coherent introduction.
It is odd. So often in the field, you do not have scripts and certainly not a teleprompter. And you talk with ease and from memory and it all works smoothly. But when you think you have scripts and an autocue and then suddenly you don’t, it befuddles your brain. Anyway, we got through it… just.
There was also the night I drenched Sir Trevor McDonald live on air. It was in Hong Kong when I was Asia correspondent for ITV News, and the handover of the British colony to China was the climax of a thoroughly enjoyable assignment. Our coverage on the night of 30 June 1997 had been long planned, and I will never forget it. Not only because of the historical nature of the event itself, but also because it very nearly ended in catastrophe for ITN.
As resident correspondent and bureau chief, it was really down to me to ensure it all ran smoothly. Trevor, then presenting News at Ten, was to anchor pr
oceedings live from Hong Kong, and I had found the best-possible vantage point for him. The roof of Hong Kong’s best hotel, the Mandarin Oriental − with its magnificent views across the busy harbour − was to become our open-air ‘studio’ for the big night, giving the programme a spectacular backdrop.
However, the one thing I hadn’t planned for was the tropical monsoon. There was no cover up on the roof, and the storm was fast approaching. Cristina Nicolotti, the producer, started barking orders about someone getting hold of some sort of shelter. Eventually, a flimsy canopy was erected and I breathed a sigh of relief. But as we went on air, it soon became clear it was about to give way under the sheer weight of rainwater that was pooling on top. Trevor did his best to ignore the chaos around him, and during a break in the programme I tried to push the water off the canopy. Unfortunately, I only succeeded in soaking Trevor and his scripts. As we went back on air, the wind picked up and the rain was now driving into us. As a result, Trevor was unable to read the autocue through his splattered glasses. Somehow, he battled through, I managed to deliver my live summing-up at the end of the programme, and a possibly career-ending disaster was averted.
It was an unforgettable night in many ways, and particularly memorable for me, because my youngest daughter Beatrice was one of the last British babies born in colonial Hong Kong. Happy days.
On another occasion, I almost missed a news programme altogether. I was in Beirut covering the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006. Cameraman Eugene Campbell and I had gone to film a bomb-damaged hospital in a Hezbollah-controlled suburb of the city. It was a quick trip before I had to present the lunchtime news from our hotel terrace. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out as we planned. While we filmed the hospital we were detained at gunpoint by Hezbollah fighters. They were upset because the hospital was still being used to treat a number of their wounded fighters and they didn’t want them filmed. We had no idea that was happening.
We were taken into the building and led down some dark stairs into the gloomy basement. It was all very unsettling. They were hostile and aggressive and they wanted Eugene’s camera and tapes. I was beginning to think we could be in serious trouble. Would we get kidnapped, or worse? All sorts of ghastly scenarios rush through your mind.
It was pretty tense for a couple of hours. But Eugene, a tall, likeable and very genial Irishman, gradually took the heat out of the situation and persuaded them we were there to film what the Israelis were doing to Beirut. I suddenly realized I had about forty-five minutes until the programme. Eugene explained my predicament and told them they could keep him, if they let me go to present the news. It was a courageous and generous offer, which they accepted. I didn’t like leaving him there, but he insisted I took the driver back to the hotel. ‘Just make sure you send him back… and if I’m not back by tonight, fly in another cameraman.’ That’s why I love the Irish. He was released an hour after me.
Newsreading also catapults you into the strange world of a kind of B/C list celebrity. You become famous simply by dint of appearing on people’s televisions every night. Most of us have precious little talent that is deserving of anything approaching celebrity status. We can’t act, we can’t sing, we don’t do stand-up and we don’t, as far as I know, tackle the great scientific challenges of our age or discover life-changing medicines. None of that stuff. We just read the autocue. It’s an underserved, unwarranted and slightly embarrassing fame. And if you’re not careful, it can also lead to trouble. That happened to me when the Radio Times asked for an interview in 2008.
One consequence of becoming a face on the telly, particularly a newsreader, is that for some reason your opinions and views hold more weight or are deemed more interesting than people in other jobs. I’ve never quite worked out why. There are plenty of folk in many walks of life who have far more interesting views than me.
This is complicated, and made even more inexplicable, by the fact that you’re not really allowed to have views due to your position. You have to be impartial and uncontroversial and essentially dull. But, despite all that, your views are sought, as indeed mine were by the Radio Times. It did not turn out well.
Near the end of the interview the journalist suddenly asked me about recent controversial comments made by the news presenter Peter Sissons, who’d said that many newsreaders had not ‘earned the right’ to do the job.
All my alarm bells sounded and all my instincts said, ‘deflect this one’, and yet in I waded. I told her that I knew what he meant and that I thought a number of newsreaders were chosen mainly for their looks and lacked a proper reporting background.
Here is what I said: ‘I do think there are a number of pretty young women and handsome young men without a solid journalistic background reading the news nowadays, and I think it’s a shame for them.’
The interviewer then asked whether I thought you have to have covered wars to be able to read the news. I answered: ‘No, of course you don’t have to have been to a war zone to read the news, but it probably does help.’
The interview was seized on by the newspapers. The Daily Mail headline screamed ‘Top ITN newsman Mark Austin blasts TV autocuties’. It then listed and showed the pictures of five women presenters who they said were ‘possible targets for his criticism’. The list included two friends, my News at Ten co-host Julie Etchingham and the Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, both of whom are, it goes without saying, television journalists of the highest quality. I was mortified.
The whole tone of the piece was that I was being sexist and I should be taken to the stocks and pelted with rotten tomatoes. The Mail, the Guardian and The Sun all pointed out, too, that I had recently been voted the ‘Sexiest Newsreader Ever’ in a Sun online poll; an award I obviously put above most others but which, incidentally, was greeted with hysterical laughter by my wife and two daughters. But the point was made. I was not only sexist, but a hypocrite as well…
The papers had their fun, but predictably they completely missed the point I was making. What I was trying to say was that young presenters, both women and men, were too often going straight into presenting and not bothering to go on the road as reporters, which is good experience and immensely enjoyable.
It wasn’t a sexist point but a general, non-gender-specific one about becoming a news presenter without reporting experience. I even had to go on Woman’s Hour to explain myself to a mercifully understanding Jane Garvey.
It was much ado about nothing, but it was a salutary lesson about newspaper interviews and about engaging at all in the TV sexism debate.
And, of course, it is a debate that still rages, and quite rightly. There is no question in my mind that women in TV news – particularly, but not uniquely, presenters – have to put up with much more nonsense than men. I have seen it over many years. They are viewed in a different way, judged in a different way and treated in a different way, and it is frankly lamentable.
In my early days at BBC News and at ITN, it was obvious pretty quickly that both were essentially run by men for men. There was an almost laddish culture in the newsrooms, built around war stories, sport and the pub. It must have been excluding and intimidating for women trying to make their way in the profession. One of the few women in any position of power when I joined ITN in 1986 was known to her face as ‘Stiletto’. She was a very tough, very impressive foreign editor, but she must have found it undermining. In fact, I know she did; a female colleague of hers has since told me so.
The culture was deeply ingrained when I started, so it was easier, I suppose, to just accept it than to challenge it. It is no excuse, but that was what I, and many other young male journalists, did. It was a culture that not only tolerated unacceptable behaviour but almost made it an ‘accepted’ part of the job that young women had to put up with. I didn’t give it as much thought as I should have done, and I don’t think many men did. And therein, to be honest, lies much of the problem. In retrospect, I think my generation should have spoken up about what was clearly not right. We didn’t
.
My former ITN colleague Mary Nightingale told me stories of ‘sexist nonsense’ that became routine. She’s written about the news editor who superimposed her face on a Page 3 pin-up and plastered it all over the newsroom. ‘Where’s your sense of humour? I’m only having a laugh,’ she was told when she complained. ‘It’s just the way things were,’ she said.
Some years ago a senior TV news executive told me – only half joking – that the key for male presenters was that women viewers wanted to sleep with you and male viewers wanted to have a pint with you. And if you presented alongside a woman the ideal was that viewers suspected you may be sleeping with each other! I kid you not.
It was the sort of thinking that almost encourages predatory behaviour in the workplace.
For women, appearance is made part of the job in a way that it is not for most men. I’ve heard women presenters being asked to change clothes, or to wear a certain hairstyle or different make-up. I’ve heard (male) managers discuss how to approach a female presenter about wearing sexier, less boring tops: ‘She needs to liven things up a bit.’ I was even asked whether I would raise the issue with a colleague myself. I said I wouldn’t, and left it there. I should have made more fuss. I regret not doing so.
Superficiality is the stock in trade of television news, and not least when it comes to presenters. For a female TV presenter the right look is a job prerequisite that is deemed every bit as important as her ability to write scripts or conduct interviews, perhaps more so. It is a beauty standard not required of most male presenters. And if women fall short, their usually male bosses – and, sometimes, newspaper columnists – will let them know about it. Their appearance is public fodder.