Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  For my first few years at The World Tonight, I lived from month to month, waiting anxiously for the monthly rotas to be published to see how much work was coming my way. Eventually, a pattern was established, and after a few years I was even offered a formal freelance contract, guaranteeing me a minimum number of days’ work each year. When the Inland Revenue decided that the BBC’s team of freelance presenters were not really freelance after all, since few of us had significant amounts of work elsewhere (if only for the simple fact that the BBC took a dim view of us spreading our wares), it was suggested that we should set up our own companies, through which the BBC would then be able to secure our services.

  Fortunately for me, my accountant took a dim view of this proposal and, on his advice, I insisted that if the BBC no longer wanted to hire me as a freelance, it should take me on board as a staff employee. As a result, when the Inland Revenue decided a few years later to make a fuss about all the service companies with whom the BBC had signed contracts, I was in the clear.

  In 1993, Margaret Budy, the editor who had hired me on the basis of no more than a hunch and a lunch, was appointed editor of the drive-time PM programme. Her successor was Anne Koch, a Canadian of Dutch and Hungarian parentage with whom I had already worked a few times as a relief presenter on The World This Weekend. As any freelance presenter knows, a change of editor is a time of great danger, because the most obvious way in which the new boss can make a mark is by changing the presenter line-up. So, obviously, I was apprehensive about what she might be planning.

  Anne did make big changes but, to my relief, they worked to my advantage. My two long-standing presenter colleagues, Richard Kershaw and Alexander MacLeod, were both eased out, so, as David Sells had already left to concentrate on his work for Newsnight, I suddenly found myself as the programme’s main presenter. I have to be honest: I was very pleased.

  When Anne moved yet another step up the BBC management ladder to become the head of all Radio 4’s news programmes, a move that did not go down at all well with her fellow editors, The Guardian reported approvingly of how, during her time at The World Tonight, she had overseen ‘the transformation of a programme which always sounded as if the anchor had just returned from a claret-lubricated supper at his club to one predominantly presented by women’.106 This was stunningly inaccurate in so many different ways, not least because I was then presenting the programme at least three nights a week, was not a woman, did not drink claret and did not belong to a club. A correction was duly published.

  The first thing I did after Anne arrived at The World Tonight was ask if we could get rid of the presenter’s glass-walled inner office. I had never felt happy being isolated from the rest of the team: for one thing, it made me feel as if I was regarded as an unusually delicate flower, to be brought out only on special occasions; and, for another, I much preferred to be part of the bustle of the main production office, involved in the decisions that were being made and able, occasionally, to make my own contribution to the planning process.

  Within a few months of Anne’s arrival, several of the programme’s longest-serving producers and reporters also left. There were, shall we say, some personality clashes, and Anne was seen as representing a more Birtian approach than some of the team felt comfortable with. She was later named in The Independent as one of the women who might one day be running the country: ‘serious, considered, straight-dealing … Koch has successfully purged the programme of its fustiness while still maintaining its pedigree’.107

  I was happy to have passed the fustiness test, although I think the purging, if that is what it was, probably pre-dated Anne’s appointment. I now realise that my own arrival on the programme was probably part of a broader defustification process, even if I had no idea at the time of the deeper currents that were swirling around me.

  Fortunately, the new editor approved of my wish to continue reporting from overseas. In 1994, I was dispatched to South Africa in the run-up to the country’s first democratic elections, amid grave fears of an impending bloodbath as white extremists threatened to halt the transition from apartheid to majority rule. I remember meeting an Afrikaner pig farmer, whom we somehow ended up interviewing right next to his pigs. Their honking and snuffling offered a rich and atmospheric audio background to his contribution, but the result was not, perhaps, entirely fair to him. I also remember meeting a black South African who as a child had been forcibly evicted with his family from their land. He took us back to see the remains of the village and told us that he had already bought the bricks with which he intended to rebuild the family home. I have wondered many times whether he ever succeeded.

  When Anne Koch took maternity leave, her place was filled temporarily by an ambitious young deputy editor from the Today programme. His name was Rod Liddle, and it would be fair to say he introduced a new set of behavioural norms to The World Tonight. For one thing, he had unusually long hair (for a man) and wore a single earring, both of which marked him out from other male members of the team.

  He also was in the habit of presiding over editorial meetings while lying on the floor, and favoured a vocabulary that included many more words of Anglo-Saxon origin than we were used to. After several years with women editors in charge, we had to adapt to a more macho approach to programme-making. After he sprayed a torrent of computer-delivered editorial instructions at the team on his first day, I received a cryptic message via the internal email system from a colleague elsewhere in the building: ‘I see there’s a lot of willy waving going on today.’

  But hidden beneath that rebellious teenager exterior, there was a secret BBC bureaucrat playing the system. I was struck when I interviewed the then director-general, John Birt, that Rod surreptitiously removed his earring and emerged very nearly as a conventional editor. But he soon went back to his natural ways, phoning in to the studio from a pub where he was listening to the programme and berating the duty editor for a ‘fucking boring piece of shit’ and instructing him to find something more interesting to broadcast in its place.

  Among the freelance reporters whom he hired to contribute to the programme was a certain Rachel Royce, who later became his wife, and then, not long afterwards, his ex-wife. Rod and I had virtually nothing in common but for six months we co-existed well enough, even if I disapproved of his ill-concealed antipathy towards, and undermining of, some members of the production team.

  It was not until many years later that Rod revealed he had been given a solemn warning when he took up his temporary position at The World Tonight. Apparently, a senior BBC executive had, somewhat embarrassed, conveyed the message that although as a deputy editor, forming close personal liaisons with members of staff was tolerated, as an editor, such transgressions would be taken much more seriously. It was, said Rod, a ‘don’t shag the staff’ warning. All a bit pointless, he added, as ‘even back then I’d have drawn the line at Robin Lustig, much though I liked him’.108

  Rod’s eventual departure from the BBC, after he had begun to carve out a niche for himself as a deliberately provocative columnist in The Guardian, came as no surprise. He had admitted to me that his ambition was to become a famous controversialist, and there was no better way to kick-start the publicity machine than by engineering his semi-sacking after a spectacularly rude column about members of the pro-fox hunting Countryside Alliance.

  Although The World Tonight devoted a good deal of its attention to what was happening beyond Britain’s borders, it did not ignore the dramatic political, economic and social transformations under way at home. The end of the Cold War had set in train a rapid process of economic globalisation that caused substantial disruption to traditional industries. Margaret Thatcher was dethroned in 1990; Britain crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992, and the John Major government then limped like a wounded animal to its inevitable demise at the hands of a resurgent Labour Party under Tony Blair in 1997. These were turbulent times and, political junkie that I was, I adored being in the thick of it.

>   I also enjoyed going to the party conferences every autumn, staying in a succession of gruesome hotels in seaside resorts whose names began with B. Watching the Conservatives self-destruct in Blackpool beneath the baleful eye of a smouldering Margaret Thatcher was true drama, as was the ruthless re-invention in Brighton of the Labour Party under Tony Blair. At Westminster, the endless late-night debates over the EU and the Maastricht Treaty played perfectly for The World Tonight, and the entire production team would sometimes decamp to the BBC’s studios at Westminster so that we could be at the heart of the action as knife-edge votes were taken after 10 p.m.

  The attraction of the party conferences was that they offered an opportunity to meet, mix and gossip with senior politicians in a way that simply was not possible in the more formal, closely guarded atmosphere of Westminster and Whitehall. They also offered front-row seats at the best political drama available anywhere: John Prescott’s wholly unintelligible yet utterly wonderful speech in 1993 in support of John Smith and his ‘one member, one vote’ reforms to reduce the power of the trade unions in selecting parliamentary candidates; Tony Blair’s audacious pledge to abolish the Labour Party’s pro-public ownership Clause IV in 1994; and Michael Portillo’s ill-fated attempt (‘Who Dares, Wins’) to grab the Conservative Party leadership in 1995. In their own way, they were all moments of history and, for me, it was as thrilling to be in Blackpool, Brighton or Bournemouth as it had been to be in Berlin on the day of Germany’s reunification.

  But going on air at 10 p.m. at a party conference had one big disadvantage: it was a time when many of the most interesting people were either at dinner or at the bar, not always entirely sober, and not often prepared to break off from their social engagements to make their way to a dingy studio somewhere in the bowels of a conference centre. (At one time, the temporary BBC studios were erected in an underground car park, which even by BBC standards was less than salubrious.) In Brighton one year, I was reduced to broadcasting from the pavement outside the Grand Hotel, so that I could conduct live interviews with senior political figures without them even having to put down their champagne glass.

  Over the years, there was growing controversy about how many people the BBC sent to party conferences, and as the conferences themselves became more tightly scripted and progressively less newsworthy, it became increasingly difficult to justify sending a separate World Tonight team. By the time I left, the habit had been discontinued, and I now suspect that there is little good reason for anyone to bother reporting them. Like the noise of a tree in the forest that crashes to the ground with no one there to hear it, would the conferences even exist in the absence of any reporters?

  My weakness for political drama means that I have always had a special love for election nights. Uncertainty, suspense, personal anguish, historic shifts in the political landscape: how can anyone possibly go to bed before the last result is declared? Before the invention of Radio 5 Live in 1994, I anchored several of Radio 4’s local election results programmes, which was roughly equivalent to commentating at a football match in what used to be called the Conference League. You knew no one was listening, but it had to be done, and someone had to do it.

  One year, we went on air without the designated Labour Party representative in the studio after an angry stand-off over his insistence that he must be allowed to bring his pager in with him so that he could receive all the essential prompts from party headquarters. On another occasion, Charles Kennedy fell asleep in the studio at around 3 a.m. and had to be gently nudged awake. (I shouldn’t mock: I fell asleep once while on air – and I was presenting the programme.)

  It was also Charles Kennedy who, during a lengthy recitation of the results from Wales, read by a colleague in Cardiff, started madly scribbling on a sheet of paper in front of him. When I raised a quizzical eyebrow to inquire what he was writing, he silently held up the paper to show me. It said: ‘Who gives a fuck about Wales?’

  Once the BBC had launched Radio 5 Live as its dedicated news and sport station, I was spared any more all-nighters on the local election results. But in 1997, I was asked to anchor the World Service’s all-night British general election results programme, the first of four that I presided over, from the ‘new dawn’ of the Blair triumph of 1997 to the ‘no one won’ confusion of the coalition-generating poll in 2010.

  But the establishment of 5 Live offered me a new opportunity: together with my old friend Ivor Gaber, who was now somehow managing to combine the roles of practising journalist and leading media academic, I set up an independent production company to bid for commissions from the new network. As both Ivor and I lived in the shadow of Alexandra Palace in north London, from which the first BBC TV images had been transmitted in 1936, we called the company Palace Radio Productions. We won a bid to produce a regular Sunday morning programme profiling a major figure from the week’s news, brought on board a freelance producer, Jan Haworth, and for the next five years, having briefly regained my Saturday freedom after leaving The Observer, I was back to weekend working.

  It was Jan who did all the hard work on Spotlight, finding people to interview about each week’s profile subject, encouraging them to be entertainingly indiscreet in front of a microphone and then editing their contributions so that I could write the script. We soon found that the best interviewees were either family members or former schoolteachers, and I enjoyed the more informal tone that I was allowed by 5 Live.

  On Tony Blair, the newly elected leader of the Labour Party:

  Suddenly the smile was everywhere. It was dazzling and it seemed so bright that the world of politics was blinded by the Blair glare … He is one of those instantly likeable people whom some people can’t stand … living proof that the dolls Barbie and Ken did have sex: he’s plastic, too perfect, too smiley.

  On Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke: ‘Whenever things get tough in Parliament, Ken Clarke turns into a serial giggler. It’s a most peculiar sound, halfway between a billy goat and a machine gun.’ (His car salesman younger brother was also deliciously rude about the Chancellor’s taste in motor vehicles.)

  And Hello! magazine:

  … probably the worst-written magazine in the English language. It has developed a style uniquely its own, in which celebs invariably ‘welcome us to their lovely home’, ‘speak frankly about their love’, and, most dangerously of all, ‘celebrate many happy years together’, which often means that they’re on the point of splitting up.

  When the brat-Brit artist Damien Hirst hit the headlines with his exhibition of pickled animal carcasses encased in glass boxes, I began our profile of him with a line written while visiting the show: ‘I am standing in the middle of a cow.’†

  I thought it might attract listeners’ attention on a Sunday morning.

  Every week, I worried about how the subject of our profile would react. Once I even got up in the middle of the night to drive back to Broadcasting House and re-record a sentence that I feared might bring us a libel writ. But only once did I hear directly from someone whom I had pilloried on air: it was the very grand Cabinet Secretary Sir Robin Butler, whom I had described as looking as if he had been born wearing silk pyjamas. When he phoned me the day after the programme was broadcast to say how much he had enjoyed it, I was both flattered and annoyed. Obviously, I should have been much ruder.

  It was fun working for 5 Live, although Spotlight was always something of an anomaly as a recorded, scripted programme on a network that boasted of being neither. Its more natural home would have been Radio 4, and after a decent interval following 5 Live’s decision to kill us off, Radio 4 introduced a weekly Profile slot that bore an uncanny resemblance to Spotlight. Neither Palace Radio Productions nor I was involved in its making.

  Radio 5 Live had been born out of the Scud FM experiment of 1991. The force of nature that was Jenny Abramsky – the head of radio news who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it – had overcome fierce internal opposition to the idea of an all-day news network at the beg
inning of the Gulf War and, following on from its success, had developed and launched 5 Live.

  Jenny had joined BBC radio in 1969, when, in her words, it was ‘hierarchical, intellectual, pulsating with creative energy and full of people at war with each other’.109 It was little different when she started her own war against its most senior figures more than twenty years later. In fact, it is a pretty accurate description of the BBC even today, where, like in any large organisation, executives can too easily be sidetracked into defending their own bailiwicks rather than focusing on the only thing that really matters: the programmes.

  After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, I knew that if a US-led coalition went to war to force him out again, I wanted to be able to play a part in reporting it. After all, the Middle East was the one region of the world where I could claim to have some real knowledge. But, as I was now a presenter, I also knew that I was not going to be sent to the war zone, so as soon as I heard that there was likely to be an all-war radio news network, I was first in line to volunteer. Scud FM went on air three days after the first missiles were fired in January 1991, and it stayed on air, seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, until 2 March. I notched up countless hours in Studio 4A of Broadcasting House during that period, many of them in the company of the writer, historian and broadcaster Christopher Lee, a former BBC defence correspondent who became the perfect ‘presenter’s friend’ – someone to talk to in those long, tedious hours that have to be filled when nothing is happening. On at least one occasion, we found ourselves chatting aimlessly like cricket commentators when rain has stopped play, musing on the delightful cakes that thoughtful listeners had sent in to help us survive our lengthy stints at the Rolling Bollocks coalface.