All This in 60 Minutes

by Lee, Nicholas

  To get him on side, our first meeting was just small talk and a few quick shots of him meticulously naming and numbering fossils, some no bigger than a nail head but obviously very important. He was charming and happy to do everything we asked. With the light fading we thanked him then headed back to our camp for dinner. Our three drivers/cooks had not moved from their deck chairs and looked as though they weren’t planning on doing so. Nothing had been prepared.

  We set up the gas fridge. It didn’t work. We set up the gas stove. It didn’t work. Nor did Mo, Curly and Larry. It was clear if we wanted to eat we’d bloody well better get cooking.

  Using a few of the failed tent pegs we lit a fire, and Reporter Chef and Producer Chef mixed tomatoes, onions, canned peas and carrots with pasta and when it was ready the Stooges left their seats and strolled across to dine. Micky and I then did all washing and cleaning up. Our workers were way too full to move.

  Bedtime. Inside the tents it was a furnace, so it was an under the stars night. There were no ants but we made up for that with mozzies. Jennifer’s bed and my bed were missing legs so we were lying on the ground. Well, not totally. We did have camp bed hessian the thickness of graphene between us and the earth, and though graphene is a full one atom thick, I still didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Warren, being over six feet tall, had a choice of having either his head or feet on the ground, without the added protection of graphene, but Micky’s bed was just right and after what he’d pulled off that day he deserved it.

  Up at 5 a.m. ‘The best part of the day,’ said Leakey. I tried hard to pretend it was, but obviously not hard enough. It was pitch black, my eyes were gritty, I felt grubby, and my back was killing me.

  I showered under a hessian bag strung over the branch of a dead tree. Privacy did not come into it. The shower was smack-bang in the middle of nowhere and Jennifer was one of the boys. All female reporters on 60 Minutes are tough. Camping is difficult when you also have to work, but the girls not only pitched in to help but had the added burden of having to look amazing. Not from vanity but from an expectation of bosses and viewers. The bloke reporters could get away with looking grubby with a three-day growth. They looked rugged and people loved it, but the girls had to look immaculate at all times, not easy when camping out in Africa, Afghanistan or Central Australia.

  After a breakfast (made by Warren) of eggs, coffee and burnt toast, we headed off with Leakey in search of his obsession, bones that finally show where and how mankind branched off from apes. To the rest of the world, it’s the missing link. Leakey refused to use that term, and told us in great detail why. He needn’t have bothered, we had no idea what he was going on about, and nor would our audience.

  The harsh, inhospitable landscape took on a new look at dawn. It was so beautiful. The long shadows and pink light had a Monet feel. But it didn’t last long.

  We followed Leakey’s every move while he uncovered animal footprints a million years old and bones even older. With what looked like a child’s toothbrush, Leakey and his students slowly and methodically brushed away dirt from their finds. It was so slow I figured it would take me another million years to finish shooting the scene. Where did these people get their patience and stamina? But the good thing about the intense heat—close to 50 degrees Celsius—meant bone hunters didn’t work between eleven and three. Which suited me just fine.

  Back in camp at the end of that first full day, I was desperately in need of a beer, but no one was keen to make the 50 kilometre trip to Ludwa. I finally coerced one of the drivers into taking me. It wasn’t easy. Their bums were permanently glued to their deck chairs and none of my crew was keen to come either. I’d have driven myself but was planning on having a few. On that one-hour trip I tried desperately to engage Mo in conversation, to no avail. He did take up my invitation to come and join me in the bar, but he didn’t drink. I wasn’t sure if he was a Moslem or just a really conscientious designated driver.

  That first beer was the best I’d ever had. The second and third were almost as good as the fourth. I then ordered ten coldies to take back for my colleagues and myself. It’d be pointless taking any more, the gas fridge had as much of an aversion to functioning as its Kenyan workmates, and I hate warm beer. I jettisoned thoughts of a fifth beer and requested my takeaways. There, on the bar, the ten were now twenty. When I pointed out his mistake. the barman told me my mate had ordered the other ten. How, I have no idea. Sign language, I presumed. Guess who paid? Boy, these Stooges were good, and obviously not Moslems.

  The next morning after our eggs, coffee and burnt toast, Leakey informed us he was going to Nairobi and he’d be back in a few days. We had about one-hundredth of a story in the can. Diplomatically, Warren and Jennifer tried to point out how far we had come and how much we had spent to get there and was there any way he could give us one more day.

  ‘Nope,’ he said and walked off.

  Back in our camp, sitting under what resembled a toothpick for shade, Warren contemplated our future while Jennifer and I both brought out our diaries. To relieve the boredom we decided to read a page or two of each other’s. I was a little embarrassed. She’d been a journalist since she was sixteen, had an insatiable appetite for books, and would soon have her own book show on the ABC. She had written of the charming silk-like feeling of the early morning warmth on her skin as she contemplated what it meant to her to be writing of the evolution of the human species in what was most probably the cradle of mankind. I had written, ‘Got up, had eggs. Bad sleep, too hot. Stooges giving me the shits.’

  In fact, most of my entries started with, ‘Got up, had eggs.’ Warren said that if ever I wrote my memoirs I should call it, ‘Eggstracts of My Life’, and in the same breath said, ‘Shit, what are we doing here? Let’s get back to Nairobi.’

  So we did. Hot showers, room service, cold beers and, most importantly, a real dunny. The morning ritual of wandering from camp with trusty shovel and searching for privacy behind a toothpick tree was no fun at all, not that I think a flush dunny is fun, but it certainly made life easier, as did the absence of Mo, Curly and Larry. They weren’t too happy at having to stay behind to mind the camp. It meant they had to learn to cook pretty fast or starve to death.

  In Nairobi we did more than just eat and drink and use a nice dunny, we got shots in the local museum, skeletons, fossils, etc., most of which were Leakey finds. We even interviewed Leakey’s mum, a charming pukka Pom who looked and sounded every bit the colonial and who would not have been out of place in Karen Blixen’s book Out of Africa.

  At the end of each day we settled into the best restaurant in Nairobi. I made the most of the food and grog, knowing for the next three days I’d be eating boiled vegies and rice in sand and heat. But at least when it was all over there’d be a quick trip to Belfast then home!

  As if. On our last night in Nairobi, after yet another fine meal with expensive wine, Warren told us he’d just been informed that after Belfast we were off to Iran. A little bit of bad news I wasn’t expecting. Iran was in the middle of an unbelievably uncivilised war with Iraq. Suddenly Ludwa, the Kenyan bush and the Stooges seemed nice and civilised.

  Curly met us at Ludwa airport with a big smile, and when we got back to camp the other two were just as pleased to see us. I could understand why. They all looked kilos lighter and our tents, though not totally destroyed thanks to Micky and his whittling prowess, had been badly ripped by the wind. The kero lamps were completely empty, which suggested the Stooges had sat in the dark for at least two days.

  The more I thought about a trip to Iran, the more I enjoyed our tinned spaghetti, tinned meat, tinned peas, expensive wine, and cheap plonk stolen from our hotel rooms. Even the shovel-shitting took on a whole new meaning.

  Meanwhile, the Stooges were amazed at how once again we had light.

  Next dawn, no missing link, but we did find a rhino head that was 16 million years old. The anthropologists, archaeologists, students, helpers and Leakey were delirious. I was unmoved. Maybe I�
��m the missing link, but I couldn’t bring myself to be caught up in their enthusiasm. I know 16 million years is amazing, but they were looking at a tiny square inch of something that may or may not have been part of a skull, and were slowly dusting away dirt with tiny child’s toothbrushes and dentist’s picks, if ants had dentists. It was amazing to watch, but it didn’t make for good television. We could smell it and see it up close, so we sort of got the picture, but the audience at home wouldn’t. A special kind of determination and stamina drives these people. They dust away hour after hour, day after day, year after year.

  After a few more days and a few more tiny ‘finds’, the Stooges drove us to the airport. Anticipating more bureaucratic stonewalling, we arrived in plenty of time to get our $50,000 deposit back. It was all going according to plan until the officious top banana with three stripes came over and asked for our receipt for the importation of the film. The $3000 fee we thought we’d cleverly avoided by buying off the customs bloke for 800 bucks. We told him we’d lost it, but that didn’t help. He said we weren’t leaving the country until he saw it, so what were we going to do about it? Angrily I said, ‘Absolutely nothing, mate.’ Not smart. But he was annoyingly bombastic. Warren stepped in front of me to placate the little man, and apologise for my behaviour. He was right, of course, there was $50,000 riding on this. Guess who then decided for a small fee he might be able to see a way around our problem? Now I was really mad. There were signs all over the airport saying ‘Please No Tipping’, so the poor porters who actually did some work missed out (but not from us), while these uniform-wearing upstarts got away with daylight robbery. Warren, with his superb negotiating skills, somehow got him down to $70 and the deal was done. Let’s hope he never got to hear about his colleague’s $800. Then again, let’s hope he did.

  •

  The new look Belfast appeared to have calmed down a lot since the Bobby Sands story, and the Europa Hotel no longer had barbed wire around it.

  Appearances can be so deceiving. I thought this’d be a simple story with a bit of R & R before the craziness of Iran, but nothing had changed in 400 years, so why was I thinking otherwise? The Protestants still hated the Catholics and vice versa. Northern Ireland wasn’t too keen on the Republic of Ireland. The local cops hated the British cops and British army. There were feuding factions within the IRA and amongst the Protestants. Conservatives hated Labour and everyone hated Thatcher. The Anglo-Irish Agreement had just been signed and nobody was happy. The whole thing was as popular as gonorrhoea. The agreement between the UK and the Republic of Ireland was aimed at ending the ‘Troubles’. Fat chance.

  The Republic now had an advisory role in Northern Ireland and Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), had proclaimed, ‘Where do the terrorists come from? The Irish Republic! Where do the terrorists return for sanctuary? The Irish republic! And yet Mrs Thatcher tells us that the republic must have some say in our province. We say, “Never, Never, Never!”’

  And smarty-pants us were going to explain all that in fourteen minutes.

  Meanwhile, I filmed it all and left the cerebral stuff to the others. I couldn’t fully figure out what was going on, but every day I’d read the paper to try to comprehend some of it, and now I wished I hadn’t. On the day before we left for Iran, Irish news was pushed aside and the big news for the day was ‘Iraqis bomb Tehran for three days’. No one could understand how. Up until a week ago, they didn’t have the capacity to get anywhere near Tehran. I was not happy.

  After a quick British Airways flight with bad food and bad service to Frankfurt, we dashed to Lufthansa check-in to find our flight had been cancelled due to ‘political problems’ (German for ‘too many bombs in Tehran’). Now I was happy.

  Conscientious producer Warren disappeared for twenty minutes then returned.

  ‘You want the bad news, the badder news, the baddest news, or the really mean news?’ he said.

  A really bad set of options. I tried not to panic, knowing Warren had in the past been known to play games, though come to think of it, not all that often.

  ‘Hit me with the bad news,’ I said.

  ‘The bad news is ... we’re still going to Iran.’

  ‘Bugger.’

  ‘The badder news is we’re flying Iran Air.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘The baddest news is ... we’re flying economy.’

  ‘Are you fucking kidding?’

  ‘The really mean news is ... the plane doesn’t leave till 8 p.m.’

  It was ten in the morning. I was speechless with all that bad news. Before Kenya we’d done a couple of stories in the US, and this was our 21st airport for the trip. I was about to die in an Iraqi bombing raid and my final memories would be nothing but airports.

  Typically there is nothing to do in airports but drink, so we did. Which was a good thing because the flight was like a bad dream. And to think I knocked British Airways.

  Seeing is not believing. How they managed to squeeze so many seats into our plane, I have no idea. I doubt Iran Air was a member of any international air safety organisation, but if they were they hadn’t read the manual. The plane looked like it was stuck together with used Band-Aids. How and why we defied gravity was a mystery and I suspected the pilots were equally perplexed. The seats were made of spider web, the food was made of shit, there was no alcohol and ... there wouldn’t be for the next ten days.

  •

  Day one in Tehran, Jennifer stayed in the hotel to do research while Micky, Warren and I headed to the press office for local media passes. We handed over all the relevant paperwork and Polaroid headshots and were told to wait. And wait we did. Laminating was obviously a new science to the Iranians. Five hours and hundreds of dollars later, we were handed our very important, very shiny plastic laminated press passes, and the three of us busted a gut laughing. Jennifer was now wearing a hijab painted not so deftly with black texta. She looked like something between a WWI fighter pilot and a Japanese Kabuki performer.

  That picture was the happiest she was going to look for the next ten days. When she got her media pass, she hit the roof, assuming we’d decided to have a little fun at her expense. Everything for the next ten days was at her expense.

  Iran was a dumb place to bring a female reporter. It was not Jennifer’s fault, of course, she was a mega-bright journo, but there was no way she was going to be able to prove that here. But I guess that’s why she was on the story. The disconnect would help make great television.

  Our first morning in Tehran, Jennifer and I were heading for breakfast and were stopped by a hairy man who told Jennifer to go back to her room and dress properly. Scarf, long sleeves, legs covered, including ankles. Jennifer was quite prepared to comply with dress regulations out in the street, to do otherwise could mean a severe reprimanding, or worse, she could be beaten up by fundamentalist Moslem men. But we were staying in a hotel that accepted only American dollars from the only Western guests, so she started berating the clothes cop. Her protests fell on deaf ears. I don’t speak Farsi, but I think she got told, ‘Stiff shit.’ For the rest of our trip Jennifer wore a long black coat and headscarf at all times.

  We were not allowed to go anywhere or film anything without permission of the government minder assigned to us, and he said no to everything. My diary entry for Tuesday, 17 February 1987: ‘We asked the minder if we could shoot the American Embassy and he said we’d have to apply for permission and that would take two weeks. Here I am in my hotel room in Tehran wondering what I did to deserve this. This is the sort of place you should go to at the beginning of a trip, not after a month on the road.’

  The frustration for Warren and Jennifer was immense. We needed a story and nothing was happening. We were stymied by red tape and stubborn bureaucrats. A week after applying for an interview with a government spokesman, we got the word we might be able to interview the assistant foreign minister. ‘What good is the assistant foreign minister?’ I said to Warren. ‘Better than the minister
for agriculture,’ he said. We were not wanted in this town.

  Finally, though, we had an interview. A local woman, Mrs Katagini, was to tell us of life for women in Iran. ‘And she speaks English as you requested,’ boasted our government-supplied minder.

  As I set up the lights, a woman arrived and sat down in front of the camera. I asked if she’d mind moving her chair a few inches. She said fine, but where would you like Mrs Katagini to sit. Surprised, I asked the woman who she was.

  ‘The interpreter,’ she replied.

  Warren went off. ‘I was told Mrs Katagini spoke English!’

  But after half an hour there was no compromise. It was this or nothing. So we did the interview with Mrs Katagini. Sort of. Actually, we did what in TV film parlance is called a ‘strawberry’. We went through the motions of an interview, we lit it, we set up mics, we even rolled the camera, but there was no film in it. And a bloody good job too, as every answer was excruciatingly boring and half an hour long.

  All the men in Iran are ugly, but the women, the ones who are game enough to show their faces, are unbelievably beautiful. I’m sure there’s a reason but I can’t think of it. Apart from the clothes we soon realised there were other problems with having a female reporter. On one of our long monotonous drives to places we couldn’t film, Jennifer looked out the window.

  ‘What’s that building over there?’ she asked the driver.

  Silence. Again she tried, ‘Excuse me, what is that building over there?’

  More silence.

  ‘I am speaking to you!’ Jennifer said furiously. It was as if he was alone in the cab.

  So I said, ‘Hey mate, what was that building we just passed?’

  ‘Oh that’s the Ministry for Information,’ he said happily. This was going to be a fun week.