With no recognised batsmen left, the West Indies had one final ball to face and needed four runs to win. The tail-ender Andy Roberts looked a bit like James Packer at Cranbrook as he faced that final ball. No tears, but real fear in his eyes. But unlike James he took an almighty swing and somehow the ball sailed over the fence for six to win the game. The crowd went crazy.
The director David Hill came running over and told me to get into the West Indies dressing room immediately and get shots of them celebrating. This, plus the final ball, would define the doco. I was as enthusiastic as the unbelievably excited West Indians. Inside the dressing room I went in search of something to climb on, to get some shots that weren’t just looking up the noses of these giants, when in walked that other giant, Kerry Packer. He strode straight up to me and said, ‘May I ask as to where you are from?’
‘Yes, Mr Packer, I’m from Channel 9 Sydney.’
‘Then, from that answer, can I assume that I am your boss?’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled.
‘Then fuck off out of here now!’
There was no more dialogue from me. I was outside in a flash where I ran straight into David who said, ‘Get back in there now!’ For a split-second I wondered what to do. But it wasn’t really a difficult decision. One of those two paid my salary and it wasn’t David Hill. I gave him the camera and told him to be my guest.
In David’s doco there are no images of the victorious West Indies team celebrating that six—the single magical moment that brought World Series Cricket to life.
3
It Could Have Been the End
After six years as a news cameraman, I was invited by executive producer Gerald Stone to join his brand new current affairs show 60 Minutes. I felt I’d made it. Kerry Packer had given the top job to Gerald, saying, ‘I don’t give a fuck what it takes. Just do it and get it right.’ My brief was to travel the world in search of beautiful pictures. And I did that for 30 years.
So on April Fools’ Day in 1979, I was on my first-ever overseas assignment with 60 Minutes, and under the table I was discreetly but firmly exploring my gonads, hoping the table shielded me from the sight of everyone else in the restaurant. The waiter noticed, but I guessed he’d probably witnessed far worse.
I was feeling for any lumps, the kind that tell the tale of cancer or infertility, though I wasn’t exactly sure how those lumps were meant to feel. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Will I be able to father children?’ I knew I could be overreacting, but what if ... I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’d lose my will to live, but this was heavy. I tried not to let those gloomy thoughts put me off my dinner. I was starving, having not eaten since arriving in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, early that morning.
Two days earlier in Sydney, just home from the laundromat, I answered the phone, and maybe shouldn’t have. It was supposed to be my day off. I was interrogated by the 60 Minutes chief of staff. Where the hell had I been for the last two hours? Why wasn’t I answering the phone? He told me there’d been an accident in a nuclear generating power station on Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and that I was to catch a plane to New York in three hours. I’d heard sketchy details on the news throughout the day, each broadcast becoming more and more hysterical. Harrisburg, the nearest town, was being evacuated. The authorities had issued orders that no one should enter the town. So of course the world’s press had flooded in.
We hit Honolulu at 2 a.m., cleared US customs then fanged our way to Los Angeles for the next leg to New York. But there was a strike in LA and most airlines were not flying. Along with producer Andrew Haughton and soundman Peter Fragar, I was travelling with journalist Ray Martin on our first 60 Minutes assignment together. Ray had just spent ten years in New York working for the ABC. He had now crossed to the dark side by joining the enemy—commercial television. He was virtually unknown on the commercial scene but he was about to conquer it.
Ray’s ten years in the US had given him plenty of time to do what journalists do best—enjoy lunchtime boozing sessions and build a network of contacts by grovelling, charming and/or threatening. But most of all by shouting drinks. So now, with us stuck in Los Angeles, it was a good time to put those ten years of hard work to good use.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll get us to New York,’ he said, and disappeared into the mass of disgruntled travellers filling LA airport.
He was good! Having promised numerous expensive drinks and his first-born to anonymous airline staffers, Ray had the four of us winging our way to New York and on to Harrisburg.
•
In Harrisburg we arrived buggered and badly in need of deodorant, but immediately set off to get radiated. We headed straight to the river where we were told we would get the best view of the Three Mile Island power station and its cooling towers. And that was as close as anyone could get. The security was everywhere.
I shot the cooling towers with a long 300-mm lens from every available angle. Which turned out to be a total of two. I was trying desperately, but not succeeding, in making it look ominous, like the world was about to end. With nothing else to film, we headed back into town to talk to some locals, hoping they’d be running down the street with all their possessions, hysterically shouting that the end is nigh. We finally found a couple of spotty teenagers who told us ‘they thought they were a little bit worried’. A little bit! The Harrisburg story was perfect for the press, but for television it was a struggle. TV is pictures, pictures, pictures, and we had none, none, none. But before we had time to panic we were told there’d be a press conference in the town hall at 3 p.m.
I had never seen such a vast number of media personnel. Hundreds of press photographers pushing each other out of the way, film crews from all round the world jostling for the perfect position to place their tripods, and a gaggle of journos, pencils at the ready, all there to report on the end of the world, or at least the United States.
All we got was a small bookish man with huge glasses who walked earnestly onto the stage and told us there had been a partial ‘core meltdown’ in Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station. ‘But,’ he announced to the desperate news gatherers, ‘all is under control.’
There was a lot of twitching and murmuring and I got the feeling that no one believed him. We knew the place was awash with radiation. He then pretty much confirmed this by adding that women and children should leave Harrisburg immediately.
With jet lag and the fact we hadn’t stopped for 36 hours, I didn’t feel worried, I felt extremely shat off. Or maybe that’s the feeling you get when you’re radioactive.
The unconcerned expert went on to say that somehow the emergency water in the cooling tower had been cut off and that had sealed the fate of the reactor. The temperature had reached 4300 degrees Fahrenheit. If or when it hit 5200 degrees, it was called The China Syndrome.
China Syndrome? That rang a bell.
Two weeks before we arrived in Harrisburg, Hollywood had released a movie starring Jane Fonda called The China Syndrome, about a core meltdown in a US nuclear reactor. In the movie Fonda speaks to an expert who tells her such a meltdown could make an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable. We were temporarily inhabiting Pennsylvania, but hoping to have permanently departed before life imitated art, or Hollywood at least.
Finally, with heads spinning from lack of sleep, we headed to our hotel to unpack and eat for the first time that day.
As we walked into the hotel restaurant, I pointed out to Ray that legendary reporter Mike Willesee from Channel 7 was sitting over near the wall. Ray, who’s blind as a bat, didn’t believe me. Willesee, hiding in the darkest corner, slid slowly under his table to hide from his Channel 9 rivals. But Ray finally recognised him and went over for a chat.
‘Hi, Ray,’ Willesee said, ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t see me.’ And then he explained how he’d been there for eight hours and had no idea where his film crew was. Last seen in Honolulu. The real shame, he said, was that before he left home he’d recorded a stack
of first-person promos for his show, speaking of the devastation and how he’d be reporting nightly from the most dangerous place on earth, and what’s more, the promos had already gone to air.
After pretending to feel sorry for him, we moved to our table to gloat. There was always a concern with 60 Minutes being a weekly show that there’d be nothing new to say after the weekday shows had flogged a story to death night after night. With Willesee conveniently out of the picture and no other Aussie competition, we had nothing to worry about.
Well, not nothing, I thought as I slipped my hands under the table for a quick lump check. Who knows with radiation, just one day could be enough.
The next morning while filming women, children and some very smart men getting out of town, we noticed Willesee’s crew disembarking from an incoming flight. They were both good blokes I’d known for years and both looked very sheepish. I got a few shots of them for a laugh, then we chatted.
They’d been trapped in Honolulu for two days and finally got on a flight, but their equipment didn’t. If Willesee thought he was buggered last night, wait till the boys delivered that little piece of news.
Finding a phone anywhere in Harrisburg was extremely difficult, and often when we did manage to find one the whole system was jammed, mostly due to journalists hogging every phone in town for hours on end as they relayed their copy home. Every call they made sounded more and more like the Fonda movie, beautifully designed to create maximum fear in their readers, listeners and viewers.
With all this radiation around, Ray and I had our own maximum fear. Andrew and Peter both had kids. Ray and I were still hoping we’d be fathers one day. I didn’t ask Ray if he, too, was doing daily testicle checks, I just assumed he was. But we did both wonder whether or not we should somehow be investing in lead underpants and trying to gauge our chances of suing Kerry Packer for our infertility.
At the next press conference, we were told the town was too big to be evacuated, and anyone who couldn’t get on the single departing flight each day should stay indoors as a precautionary measure. This created a rush on the banks, with many people withdrawing all their money then driving, hitching or walking out of town.
Staying behind were the hundreds of foreign journos, photographers, cameramen ... and me, still checking my testicles and wondering what the future might hold. Assuming there was going to be a future.
After another three days of fear and lack of pictures, we were told the probable reason for the power station disaster had been a misdiagnosis of the relief valve. It had remained open long enough for major damage to occur. The plant was now seriously contaminated, but nowhere else. The US was safe, Pennsylvania was safe, and even Harrisburg was safe.
So the media relaxed, then the world relaxed. Even Ray and I relaxed. Not only were we safe, we were lump free. Well, I was. Ray didn’t say and I didn’t ask, but he was smiling more.
•
But what if the bearer of good news was lying and cunningly tricked us all into going home before symptoms appeared? What if I had picked up some of that radiation and it didn’t come out in testicular lumps, or any other obvious signs? It would be a great story to tell the grandkids, providing they were born with ears.
Fact was, despite the dangers to my fertility, I was lucky to have the job at all. It had been only six weeks before the Three Mile Island trip that 60 Minutes had premiered on Channel 9, with excitement all round. Not only were we the best cameramen, journalists and soundmen in the universe, we were about to change that universe.
For the grand premiere we had all assembled at the house of fellow cameraman, Phil Donoghue, to watch our handiwork.
Tick tick tick tick tick ... a loudly ticking stopwatch filled the screen, followed by short clips of each of the stories for that night. Then, the convert to commercial television, Ray Martin, pronounced, ‘Those stories and more, tonight on 60 Minutes.’ We sat mesmerised, looking forward to patting each other on the back and pissing in each other’s pockets.
The first story, which I shot, was an Ian Leslie piece, cutely titled ‘Buttleggers’, about smuggling cigarettes across the border from Queensland into New South Wales to evade tax. Ho hum. Next came a Ray Martin story on the future of ‘two way’ cable TV. Yawn. And finally a George Negus yarn about primal therapy, where people eased their troubled minds by going berserk, screaming and bashing anything within arm’s reach. Exactly what we all wanted to do as the credits rolled.
The first-ever 60 Minutes was a shocker. Everyone was stunned. There’d be no pocket-pissing tonight, just lots of piss drinking to ease that unemployment feeling and to help resist the temptation to beat all others to the phone to ring Mike Willesee at Channel 7 and beg for a job.
There was incoming fire as well. That night Kerry Packer rang Gerald Stone, our executive producer. ‘You’ve blown it, son,’ he bellowed. ‘You better fix it—fast.’
And to his credit, Gerald certainly did.
Still today, 60 Minutes is regarded as the place to work in TV current affairs. With generous budgets, and the world as your canvas.
4
Great Pubs
60 Minutes struggled in the ratings for most of that first year, but by August the show was gaining respect and the ratings picked up. We were working our bums off and enjoying every minute of it. We had an open cheque book to go wherever, whenever. Back then there were no Discovery or National Geographic channels. We were it.
The audience was now keen to see where Ray Martin, George Negus and Ian Leslie would be this week. But luckily they couldn’t do it on their own, so we cameramen, soundmen and producers tagged along. We were constantly on the lookout for that amazing story. Our brief was to get outstanding pictures and make the reporters look good. It wasn’t really hard. They were great journos with a passion for work—and we were all young. Everyone under 35, some of us not yet 30.
A few years later a 24-year-old Jana Wendt joined the reporting team. It was great to have a woman on 60 Minutes at last, especially one so super smart, feisty and very funny. She was a dream to work with. Apart from one memorable story on abortion at a pre-term clinic in Sydney, which helped to cement Jana’s reputation as a journalist, I did very few stories with her. She fell in love with, and married Brendan Ward, a fellow cameraman. And from then on they worked almost exclusively together. They were quite a team.
Ray, George, Ian and Jana were all great reporters, and even greater talkers. It was as if words had a use-by date, and that’s tomorrow, so all words must be used immediately. Their job was to talk, they were paid handsomely to talk, and practice makes perfect. These perfect talkers were always interesting and fun to travel with, but sometimes 30 seconds silence would have been nice.
Producer Warren McStoker preferred minutes of silence. Which was rare when travelling with George, who was always writing a script then reading it aloud to everyone. One day while we were driving through the beautiful Redwood forests in California, George found himself suddenly lost for words, and a script. Warren had grabbed the script pages, hurled them out the window and shouted, ‘George, shut the fuck up!’ And, he did, for the 30 seconds we all craved, then away he went again.
Ray was an even better talker. We’d all assume our listening positions, and off he’d go. There was no shutting him up. And he spoke so quickly it was impossible to keep up.
The best restaurants and classiest hotels became our number-one priority. We were on a Kerry Packer expense account, living as if each of us was Kerry, just as long as he didn’t find out. Gerald Stone, the original and best executive producer, was well aware of this but turned a blind eye to most of the excess, figuring it was worth it for crews who often worked twenty-hour days. So the system worked well, we discovered some outstanding establishments that even Kerry didn’t know existed, and no one had cause to complain. Perhaps Kerry would have, but Gerald kept us all well-insulated from above.
Our hotel of choice in Paris was the Hôtel de Crillon. One simply must stay there. One can’t
stay anywhere else. It was extraordinary. Total opulence, built in 1758, filled with Louis XVI furniture and amazingly delicate and colourful seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tapestries. Marie Antoinette regularly had her piano lessons at the Crillon. Woodrow Wilson and the entire US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 stayed there. More recent luminaries who frequently dropped into their favourite home away from home were Joe Kennedy, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Liz Taylor, and of course Skeet, Phil, Fang, Leso, Ralph, Bruce and me.
There was even one occasion in 1980 when all of us plus Ray Martin and a few others checked in. Two 60 Minutes crews in Paris at the same time! The poor Crillon was aghast, but our credit card was good.
After a good day’s work in Paris and a few grogs in the bar, we decided to dine in. Wandering into ‘Les Ambassadeurs’, the hotel’s 18th century rococo-style restaurant, the producer Bruce Stannard, dressed splendidly in coat and tie and a few metres ahead of us, was met by the gushing maitre’d. When Bruce requested a table for eight, the gushing came to an abrupt halt. The problem? He’d set eyes on the rest of us. T-shirts and jeans were de rigueur for 60 Minutes crews whether it was Paris or The Alice. Eyes firmly back on Bruce, the maitre’d pronounced, ‘Oh, non non non.’
After heated words between them, Bruce asked us to flash our room keys, all eight of them. Then we waited patiently while the maitre’d, obviously knowing he couldn’t knock back hotel guests, issued hurried orders to assorted flunkies, none of which we understood, then announced that we were to follow him. As quickly as possible, so as not to put fellow diners off their foie gras, we were led to the very back of the huge restaurant and pointed to our table. Through gritted teeth he helped us with our seating then deftly placed a bamboo room divider around our table. Beautifully done, we were no more to be seen, and the well-heeled would no longer be in danger of choking on their canard.
All This in 60 Minutes Page 4