So I made my decision and, on the basis of that non-promise from Jenny Abramsky and a sense that it was time to be reckless, I jumped ship. So confident was I that somehow I would be able to make it as a freelance broadcaster that I turned down an approach from Ian Jack and Sebastian Faulks at the not-yet-launched Independent on Sunday to join their new adventure. I liked the idea of living on my wits as a freelance, and had had enough of Sunday journalism. Producing just one paper a week left far too much time for people to sit around complaining.
For the next twenty-three years, I juggled the demands of both Radio 4 and the World Service, never sure which of them would decide to dispense with my services first. I cast my net wide because, as all freelances know, it is the only way to insure against penury. I did occasional presenting stints for such now long-forgotten Radio 4 programmes as Newstand and Stop Press, and I gained invaluable experience as a radio reporter out in the field by making documentaries for File on 4.
(I still remember the words of a File on 4 producer as we walked through the Gdansk shipyards in Poland, crucible of eastern Europe’s anti-Communist uprisings. She stuck a microphone under my nose, pressed the record button on her tape machine and barked: ‘Tell me what you can see.’ The radio reporter’s job boiled down to just six words.)
One of my fellow reporters on File on 4 was Helen Boaden, who later took over as editor and demonstrated a gimlet-eyed approach to editing her former colleagues’ scripts. In the years that followed, she rose steadily up the BBC executive ladder, becoming head of Radio 4, director of news, and then head of all BBC radio. She was often spoken of as a potential candidate to be the BBC’s first female director-general, and was a staunch defender of – and listener to – The World Tonight, unusually among top BBC executives, almost all of whom tend to regard television news as the only thing that really matters. (I was told on very good authority that most evenings at 10 p.m., she would watch the TV news with the sound muted, while listening to The World Tonight at the same time. It struck me, if true, as an admirably even-handed way of meeting the impossible challenge of being responsible for all BBC news output on radio, TV and online.)
In 1989, all of the BBC’s radio news programmes were based in Broadcasting House, where the ghost of Lord Reith stalked the long corridors of a building that always looked to me like an uncomfortably beached ocean liner. The World Tonight’s offices were on the fourth floor: one office for the production team, with a glass-walled internal office in which the presenter was expected to sit, out of harm’s way, and another down the corridor, for the editor, deputy editor and reporters. That was the room where, every night, a bottle of whisky would be opened even while the programme was still on air. Quite rightly, the tradition came to an end as Auntie’s financial corsets were gradually tightened; these days, you would be lucky to find a potato crisp and a salted peanut at a farewell party.
With the impeccable sense of logic of which only the BBC is capable, the studio from which the programme was actually broadcast was one floor below the offices, entailing much dashing up and down stairs as the transmission time approached. Conducting interviews having just leapt down a flight of stairs is not exactly best practice, but somehow we managed not to break limbs or twist ankles, and – usually – the programmes went on air without mishap.
We were, in truth, a motley crew. Among the programme’s reporters was Sally Hardcastle, daughter of Bill Hardcastle, a newsman of the old school who had been editor of the Daily Mail and then the first presenter of The World at One. Sally was a smoker and a drinker with a voice to match and one of the filthiest laughs I had ever heard. Another of the reporters, Michael Vestey, was cut from very different cloth: tall, languid, almost patrician, with political views several notches to the right of centre. He was on loan from the newsroom, but they seemed to be in no hurry to claim him back and he settled into the nocturnal rhythms of The World Tonight with consummate ease. He was one of the many victims of the Birtian revolution that followed John Birt’s appointment as director-general of the BBC in 1992, and left to become a spectacularly acerbic radio critic for The Spectator. As his fellow Spectator columnist Rod Liddle, another former BBC staffer, wrote after his death in 2006: ‘He had worked for the corporation for more than a quarter of a century and had come, in an almost affectionate way, to utterly and completely loathe it.’105
From my very first day at the BBC, I had decided to give the impression whenever possible that I was utterly confident that I knew what I was doing. My experience as a child from a home without television had trained me well in the dissembling arts, and I came to believe, rightly or wrongly, that my colleagues had no idea how thin was the ice on which I was skating. My twenty years’ experience as a journalist helped, admittedly, and I soon worked out that in order to ask intelligent-sounding questions, it is by no means necessary to know the answers. This means that most interviews can be conducted from a starting position of total ignorance by asking just three all-purpose questions.
I may be risking expulsion from the National Union of Broadcast Interviewers by revealing them, but here they are anyway.
Question One: ‘How significant do you think this is?’
Question Two: ‘Why has it happened?’
Question Three: ‘So what do you think will happen next?’
There is a fourth, equally useful, question that was originally formulated by my friend and co-presenter Claire Bolderson. It worked especially well on the World Service when news broke in a country that we had never heard of.
‘But what is happening in the north?’
I had been in love with radio as a listener ever since my childhood in the days of comedy shows like The Navy Lark and The Men from the Ministry. Now I fell in love with it as a broadcaster. I discovered that it is the most direct and intimate form of communication available between two human beings: my voice, your ears, and nothing in between.
Radio excels at telling stories. It uses the human voice to create a link between people who have never met and who may live on opposite sides of the planet. It also, of course, enables millions of people to enjoy the music of their choice – and music is perhaps the most potent of all art forms. Thanks to downloads and podcasts, listeners can now enjoy that music wherever and whenever they want. Whenever I travel on the London Underground and I see all my fellow passengers with earpieces attached to their iPhones or their iPads, I find myself wondering: ‘What on earth did we use our ears for when we were travelling before the invention of earphones?’
That is another of radio’s great strengths – its portability and its flexibility. It is the ideal medium for busy people, perfectly suited to the era of multi-tasking. It is hard to read a book while you are doing something else, and it is never advisable to watch a TV show on your iPad while driving to work. But radio? Radio while you are working, radio while you are cooking, radio while you are out jogging. Radio is the perfect companion for the modern age.
In journalism, as in politics, timing is everything. I had left The Observer at the end of October 1989 to live on my wits as a freelance writer and broadcaster. Less than two weeks later, on 9 November, the Berlin Wall was breached and the Cold War ended in dramatic fashion. By sheer good luck, I was filling a gap in The World Tonight presenter rota that night: history was being made and I was able to play a part in writing the very first draft.
As we went on air, crowds of East Berliners were already surging towards the wall and streaming through to the west, unhindered by border guards, following what we now know was an unintentionally garbled announcement that travel restrictions were being lifted with immediate effect. The pickaxes had not yet appeared as I tapped out a script that I feared might be a touch too purple-prosey for Radio 4.
Tonight’s announcement from East Berlin must surely spell the end of the Berlin Wall. How long, I wonder, before the bulldozers move in to tear down that ugliest of eyesores which has disfigured Berlin for the past twenty-eight years? Perhaps it’s all too much to take
in – the changes have come so fast that it’s hard to keep up with the new realities of an eastern Europe in which a forty-year-old political dam has finally burst.
I remember feeling as I spoke the words that perhaps I was over-egging it a bit – I did not really believe that the bulldozers would soon be moving in and that the wall would be literally torn down. Little did I know…
But the extraordinary scenes in Berlin were only one part of the global drama that was being played out that year. In June, the Chinese army had brutally suppressed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. In August, eastern Europe’s first non-Communist government since the end of the Second World War had taken over in Poland, and in October, the Hungarian Parliament had voted to hold multi-party elections.
Then came the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia, the collapse of the Communist regime in Bulgaria, and the violent end of the Ceauşescu regime in Romania. And although hardly anyone had noticed at the time, in March that year, a British scientist called Tim Berners-Lee had presented a document to his colleagues in Switzerland called ‘Information Management: a Proposal’ in which he outlined his thoughts on how documents stored on computers could be searched for and shared via special links known as hypertext links. His proposal became the World Wide Web and it changed the world.
1989 was definitely a good year to become a BBC news broadcaster.
Sitting in studios broadcasting to the masses was all well and good, but I wanted more. At heart, I was still a reporter, and I wanted to be out where the action was. I argued, I hope with some justification, that listeners liked it when news presenters reported from the field occasionally, because it added a sense of drama and a different perspective to the coverage. I understand the objections of those critics who say that flying presenters around the world is an unnecessary expense when there are plenty of perfectly competent correspondents available, but I still believe that there are some occasions when presenters can bring an extra element to the coverage of a major event. I also understand the objections of the correspondents themselves, who too often find themselves being ‘big-footed’ by London-based colleagues who swan in to mop up all the glory. I did try, whenever I could, to share the glory with resident correspondents, but I know that I was often guilty of exactly the kind of behaviour to which I had objected as a Reuters correspondent many years earlier. And when my conscience got too troublesome, I persuaded myself that I had earned my moment in the sun and that my unhappy colleagues’ moment would also come in due course.
My first presenter-in-the-field opportunity was in Berlin in October 1990, the day that Germany was reunified. I was chaperoned by Max Easterman, a highly experienced, German-speaking producer and reporter who had every right to expect that he would be covering the story himself. But if Max resented having to look after me, he hid it well, and he arranged for us to broadcast from the revolving restaurant at the top of the television tower in Alexanderplatz, in what had been East Berlin.
It was a good idea in theory: we would gaze down over the newly reunified city, slowly revolving as we did so, in the company of eminent commentators from both sides of the now non-existent Iron Curtain. But there was just one problem: several hundred Berliners also thought it was the best place to be that day, and the restaurant was so deafeningly noisy that we could barely hear our own voices. I doubt that World Tonight listeners heard much either above the excited chatter and clattering crockery, but I have never dared to listen back to a recording. It took several more similar experiences trying to broadcast from restaurants and bars around the world (producers love them because they provide ‘atmosphere’) before I finally put my foot down, having developed a particular antipathy towards hissing espresso machines.
Although the Berlin programme had not been an unalloyed success, thanks to all those celebrating Berliners, I knew that broadcasting live from unlikely makeshift studios overseas was something that I could easily get a taste for. So, when the Soviet Union started to crumble in 1991, I lost no time in plotting to get myself to Moscow so that I could be on hand as it was consigned to the history books.
The assumption was that the moment of its death would be formally recorded as midnight on 31 December. By another of those strokes of luck on which my broadcasting career seemed to depend, midnight in Moscow that year would be 10 p.m. in London, so The World Tonight would be going on air at the precise second that the USSR was declared dead. How could anyone resist the opportunity to be live in Moscow at such a historic moment?
Approval was given, and plans were made. Deputy editor Justin Phillips was put in charge of the project and sound engineer Simon Calder, later to become one of Britain’s best-known travel journalists, was given the task of making it work technically. As we flew to Moscow on Boxing Day to prepare for the historic programme, we hoped no one had noticed that the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had defied expectations and resigned the previous day. To all intents and purposes the Soviet Union was already dead and buried by the time we took off from Heathrow.
It was too late for second thoughts. What had been planned could not be unplanned at such short notice, so we carried on undaunted. The programme was a triumph, thanks to meticulous planning by Justin Phillips and the technical wizardry of Simon Calder. We installed ourselves in the monstrously ugly, 3,000-room Rossiya Hotel overlooking Red Square (it has since been demolished), erected a giant satellite dish on the balcony of Simon’s room, and stripped the beds of their mattresses so that we could line them up against the walls to create something like the sound of a studio.
The BBC’s Moscow correspondent Bridget Kendall was stationed among the crowds in Red Square and we were all set. The bells of the Kremlin struck midnight (we had also recorded them the previous night just to make sure) and we were off.
Bang. There was a deafening explosion just as Bridget was describing the scene. Then another one. It was only four months since a group of anti-Gorbachev Communist diehards had tried to launch a coup against him – could this be another last-minute attempt to reverse the tide of history?
Bridget extemporised brilliantly. Perhaps it was the Kremlin cannon firing to mark the New Year? The uncertainty was nerve-racking – until we saw the fireworks. Then the penny dropped, and we were able to breathe again. Not a coup after all. The following day, we were told that the unscheduled firework display had been arranged by the US TV network CNN to liven up their coverage – I never discovered if it was true but it certainly added to the drama of the night. After we came off air – I ended the programme with the word Dosvedanya, the Russian for goodbye, and the only Russian word I knew – Justin and Simon told me that for the last ten minutes of the programme they had lost all contact with the studio in London and had no idea whether we were still on air.
In fact, we were, and the programme was later awarded a gold medal at the New York Radio Festival. From then on, there was no stopping me, and over the next twenty years I was to present live news programmes from every continent on the planet with the exception of Antarctica. (If anyone is up for it, I am still keen to fill in that last remaining gap.)
Broadcasting live from overseas in the days before Wi-Fi was not for the faint-hearted. The working assumption always had to be that if something could go wrong, it would – and there is an account of some of my more hair-raising moments in Chapter 15. But, at their best, outside broadcasts deliver a sense of both place and drama: outside party headquarters on an election night for example, or on the streets of Hong Kong as the territory was handed back to China in 1997. News reporting has to be more than a bald recital of facts: it has to engage listeners, arouse their interest, and, just as importantly, keep them listening for more than half a minute.
A news presenter’s job is never quite as simple as many people think. The derisive term ‘autocutie’, as applied to television presenters, displays such deep ignorance of what the job actually entails that it may perhaps be worth spelling out exactly what it does involve.
First, you ne
ed to make sure that you are up to date with all the news at home and abroad, so that when a producer suddenly appears at your desk and says, ‘We’ve got the Prime Minister of Crisisland on the line, but we have to do the interview right now’, you have some idea what has been happening in Crisisland, and, preferably, the Prime Minister’s name as well. (In the pre-internet era, my regular reading encompassed four daily newspapers – the Daily Mail, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the International Herald Tribune – plus The Spectator, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books and Granta.)
Second, you have to be ready to absorb huge amounts of complex information at speed, often while running into a studio, and then challenge the person who has just spent five years writing the report from which the information has been taken.
Third, you should be able to write intelligible cues, or introductions, that tell listeners what they need to know about each item in such an enticing fashion that they will feel compelled to keep listening.
And fourth, you have to make it sound as if all you have done is pick up a script that someone else has written for you and read out the words in approximately the right order.
Easy.
All presenters depend on the teams with whom they work: the researchers who dig up the stories, and the producers who track down the interviewees and write the briefing notes (if there is time) that provide the essential background for the interview. As my producer friend and colleague Craig Swan once put it: ‘If an item sounds good, it’s because the presenter is brilliant. If it doesn’t, it’s because the producer is crap.’ I think he was joking. Half-joking, anyway.
Is Anything Happening? Page 30