Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  My diary for that time consists of little more than a series of numbers, indicating when I had been booked to be on air: 1815–2200, 0900–1300, 1400–1700. Sometimes, after I had come off air at the end of The World Tonight, I would be asked to stay on to read the midnight news as well, so that the editors could incorporate live interviews with correspondents if there were any new developments. Given the time difference with the US, it was not unusual for announcements to come from Washington when much of Europe was already fast asleep. BBC radio news was determined not to be caught napping, although the tension between the rigidity of the evening schedules and the uncertainties of war was never far from the surface.

  That tension burst into the open on the evening of Monday 25 February. A few minutes before the end of The World Tonight, it was reported that Baghdad Radio had announced that ‘orders have been issued to our armed forces to withdraw [from Kuwait] in an organised manner to positions they held prior to 1 August 1990’. Saddam Hussein was surrendering and, as I read out the news flash in the programme’s closing headlines, producers were already begging the Radio 4 bosses to allow us back on air. It took until midnight for all the relevant people to get their respective acts together (no one would dare touch Book at Bedtime), but we did take over the midnight news and produced an hour-long special programme.

  When it was all over, Gillian Reynolds of the Daily Telegraph, the doyenne of Britain’s radio critics, led the chorus of approval for what Scud FM had achieved.

  Its tone of voice lacked television’s pomposity. The listener became part of a privileged dialogue, a serious, informed, experienced and seasoned discourse upon available information. The counterweight of expert opinion came to balance the increasingly evident management of the news. Listeners learned to differentiate between fact and opinion, objectives and perspectives.110

  But was all this endless war news what listeners really wanted? The evidence suggested that it was: by the end of the Scud FM experiment, more than a million people were listening to it regularly, and more than two-thirds of Radio 4’s regular listeners had tried it.111 It was the dawning of the age of real-time news, a foretaste of things to come. I realised that it was not only news junkies and men with a weakness for war who were tuning in when I picked up my children from school and many of the mothers at the school gates told me that they had heard me on air.

  As Jenny Abramsky recalled ten years later:

  The country’s forces were at war for the first time in ten years, as part of a large allied army … The BBC, as the public service broadcaster, had a duty to keep the families and friends of the 30,000 British army informed … [and] to keep its licence payers informed, as part of the democratic process.

  She, just like Julius Reuter more than a century earlier, understood that people do want to know what is going on in the world, and they want to know as soon as possible. But the emphasis on what became known at the BBC as ‘The Now O’Clock News’ did create problems: first because speed and accuracy are not always compatible, and second, because the demands of an all-news network can sometimes distort news priorities to the detriment of the rest of the output.

  In May 2007, for example, Lebanon was engulfed in the most serious fighting since the end of its civil war in 1990. Several hundred people were killed and there was a series of bomb attacks in Beirut. But the BBC’s news operation was focused on a different part of the world entirely: southern Portugal, where a four-year-old British girl called Madeleine McCann had vanished from her family’s holiday apartment. No prizes for guessing where TV news anchor Huw Edwards was sent…

  For a programme like The World Tonight, this prioritising of the needs of TV rolling news could be frustrating. Often, a correspondent who might have been expected to be available to tell our listeners about a new development would instead be feeding the voracious appetite of the TV news channel, even though the viewing figures suggested that it was being watched by barely 1 per cent of the potential TV audience, compared to the 20 per cent of the evening radio audience who were tuned in to The World Tonight.

  Perhaps this is a good place to say something about news audiences and lay to rest the widespread impression that, worthy as it may be, hardly anyone listens to The World Tonight. On the night of the Brussels bomb attacks in March 2016, for example, about 750,000 people were listening to the programme, substantially more than the number who watched Channel 4 News (670,000), and a far higher number than those who were watching Newsnight on BBC2 at about the same time (470,000). Those figures are not untypical (in 2015, Newsnight’s average viewing figure was reported to be around 540,000), but because television, by its very nature, is a much more visible medium than radio, it is often assumed that it must have much bigger audiences.

  Radio usually tends to stay below the radar, unless the full might of the BBC’s marketing department swings into action. During my time there, the Radio 4 priorities were Today and The Archers. Nothing else counted, which is why every time a new editor arrived at The World Tonight and swore that they would raise its profile, they failed. Two examples: when ITV moved its evening news bulletins away from 10 p.m. (the BBC TV evening news at that time was at 9 p.m.), I suggested to Tony Hall, then head of BBC News, that we should run a marketing campaign along the lines of: ‘There is still News at Ten. The World Tonight on Radio 4.’ He liked the idea, but the marketing department thought differently. There was no campaign.

  And when all Radio 4’s news programmes moved from Broadcasting House in central London to TV Centre in the wilds of White City, The World Tonight was the first of the programmes to head west. I suggested that I could write a diary for The Guardian’s media pages about how it all went – but the press office said no. They wanted to wait until the Today programme moved and then get one of their presenters to do it.

  Did we have a chip on our shoulders? Of course we did. But the former director-general Greg Dyke succinctly explained why radio – and especially late-night radio – seems so often to be the BBC’s Cinderella service. When I asked him shortly after he arrived at the BBC why he had said absolutely nothing, either in public or to BBC staff, about its radio output, he replied: ‘Radio’s not a problem. I don’t need to waste my time worrying about it.’

  Radio 4’s news programmes represent the spine on which the network’s other programming depends. Look at a ratings chart and the figures peak for every news programme and then dip immediately afterwards. (The exception, of course, is The Archers.) On BBC2, the opposite applies, which is why our Newsnight colleagues always found themselves off air over Christmas and the New Year. A former head of Radio 4, Tony Whitby, put it well: ‘In the realm of ideas, radio operates with uncluttered lucidity: in the realm of the imagination, it soars where other media limp.’

  I have been known to express the same thought but much less elegantly: ‘Radio is television for grown-ups.’

  After Anne Koch left The World Tonight, it was decided that the time was right to try an experiment: two job-sharing editors were appointed who would work three days a week each. (They overlapped on Wednesdays.) Prue Keely joined us from Channel 4 News, having never previously worked at the BBC, and Jenni Russell came from Current Affairs. It was a brave experiment, and one met with great suspicion both at The World Tonight and beyond. One very well-known Radio 4 presenter made the mistake of sounding off at a BBC reception about the utter idiocy of the idea to Sir Howard Davies, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, not knowing that Sir Howard happened to be married to Prue Keely.

  His response was suitably frosty: ‘I think you’ll find that my wife will be able to cope.’

  Prue and Jenni told the team at the outset that they were well aware of the potential dangers. ‘Do not think’, they warned us, ‘that you can behave like children do with their parents and try to play us off against each other.’ It was easier said than done, and it would be hard to claim that the experiment was a total success, despite their best efforts to make it work.

  For t
he last ten years of my time at The World Tonight, the programme’s editor was Alistair Burnett (not to be confused with Alastair Burnet, who was one of Britain’s best-known TV news broadcasters in the 1970s and 1980s). I already knew Alistair well by the time he took over – he had worked on the programme before as a young producer and had then been in charge of World Service news programmes before returning to Radio 4. We were an odd couple: he was Scottish, shy and intensely serious, whereas I was none of those things. Yet we worked well together for over a decade, united in an obsessive curiosity about the global changes under way following the end of the Cold War and a preference for talking to interesting people with interesting things to say instead of always chasing a new headline from the latest politician to be caught in the media headlights (although I did occasionally enjoy chasing headlines as well).

  Alistair tended to be more interested in ideas than in people, and when he sent me overseas on reporting trips, whether it was to Brazil to look at its rapid economic growth, or to China to report on its emergence as a world power, the challenge was always to find someone, somewhere, who would be able to help us turn the interesting idea into interesting radio.

  When I was in the US in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Alistair decided that he wanted a report on America’s growing concerns that it was becoming less innovative and losing ground in the global competition to stay ahead of the game. Thanks to an invaluable American innovation called Google, my colleague Dan Isaacs and I stumbled across a specialist innovation research centre at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

  So we phoned them. ‘Do you have anything that makes a noise and that we could record for a piece about US innovation?

  ‘Sure we do. Come on down and we’ll show you around.’ Which is how we met a robot called Shimon, which was able to play improvised jazz on a marimba to match the style of a human jazz pianist. It made an unusual introduction to our report, and was one of the very rare occasions when you could hear jazz (even if it was robotic jazz) on The World Tonight.

  The secret to a successful reporting trip is a talented and hard-working producer. BBC radio reporters usually travel alone, but presenters, because they tend to be older, more decrepit and can rarely be trusted to find their own way out of the door, are usually accompanied by a producer whose task is to take them by the hand and keep them out of trouble. Some producers have been known to refer to their presenter companion as ‘the gob on a stick’, which you may think suggests a regrettable lack of respect for wisdom and experience. (You may think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.)

  Craig Swan was my producer-companion in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Cambodia and Somalia. He is extremely tall, whereas I am not, so when we stood side by side, we looked like a comedy music hall act. We shared a weakness for what we called ‘dusty places’, countries where mod cons were not universally available, where danger was never far away, but where there was usually a good story to be told.

  When we went to Bosnia in 1996, after the war had ended, we flew first to the Croatian capital Zagreb, where we were to meet up with a Serbo-Croat-speaking colleague from the World Service, Pierre Vicary, who had been based in Zagreb for many years and knew his way around, which we did not. It was only a year after our young colleague John Schofield had been killed in Croatia, so the BBC had equipped us with bulky flak jackets. They had not, however, provided us with bags in which to carry them, and they do not easily fit into a suitcase. The only solution was to wear them as we made our way through Heathrow and boarded the plane. Not surprisingly, a lot of people looked at us very strangely.

  I have never forgotten our drive south from Zagreb to Sarajevo. As soon as we crossed the border into Bosnia, we started to pass through village after village, all of them abandoned, many with Cyrillic graffiti scrawled on the walls of the houses where Serb fighters had forced the residents to flee. Many of the houses looked relatively undamaged except for a large hole in the roof. The Serbs’ technique had been to place a gas canister on the ground floor of a house and then shoot at it, causing an explosion powerful enough to blow a hole in the roof and render the house uninhabitable. It was a frighteningly simple way to enforce the ‘ethnic cleansing’ policy that Serbian leaders Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić hoped would enable them to create a purely Serbian state.

  In Sarajevo, we met a former Bosnian fighter who had spent much of the war holed up in a sniper’s nest overlooking a bridge across the river Miljacka. His instructions were to shoot anyone who tried to cross, and he took us to see the exact position from which he had gazed out across that bridge, day after day, month after month. The experience had clearly left him deeply traumatised.

  ‘When you come back here now, and you look out at that bridge,’ I asked him, ‘what goes through your mind?’

  He did not speak much English but his reply was eloquent.

  ‘What do I think now? I think, “Who gives a fuck about a bridge?”’

  But could we broadcast the word ‘fuck’ on Radio 4? As it would be transmitted well after 10 p.m., the answer was an unhesitating Yes.

  There had been an earlier occasion when we had had to seek advice about graphic language on The World Tonight. It was a report from Amsterdam about the red-light district, and it included a recording of a pimp touting the services on offer, in English, outside one of the city’s brothels. I remember the words exactly.

  ‘Sucky fucky, licky dicky…’

  We did what all BBC people are so good at: we referred up. The verdict was quintessentially Radio 4: ‘It’s fine – most days we run much worse than that on Woman’s Hour.’

  In June 1997, Craig and I were part of a sizeable BBC contingent dispatched to Hong Kong to report on the historic handover of the territory to China. My responsibilities were to provide live commentary on the World Service of all the formal handover ceremonies, read the Six O’Clock News on Radio 4, and then present The World Tonight at 5 a.m. local time. It required careful planning, copious amounts of coffee and a strong bladder.

  The ceremonies overran, as ceremonies tend to. There was also a torrential downpour as Prince Charles made his solemn speech to mark the occasion, standing in the open air with the rain falling so noisily onto the peak of his admiral’s cap that it almost drowned out his words. With the planned timetable going badly awry and my commentary becoming increasingly incoherent, I ventured to ask via my studio talkback button what was going to happen next.

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’ was the reply from a harassed producer. ‘No one tells me anything.’

  It was not what a presenter needs to hear when floundering badly with no script and no guidance.

  Because of the overrun, I began to fret that I might not be able to wrap up the commentary in time to switch hats (and studios) to become a Radio 4 newsreader. We made it with less than five minutes to spare: I was handed a sheaf of news scripts and ushered into an adjoining studio just as Big Ben was preparing to strike 6 p.m.

  As far as I know, it is the only time in Radio 4’s history that its hallowed Six O’Clock News bulletin has been read in its entirety from an overseas location. I felt the spirit of Peter Donaldson hovering above me – it was my proudest moment on air, and a fraught one. But it passed off successfully.

  Having waited just long enough to ensure that the People’s Liberation Army was not intending to invade Hong Kong the moment it had passed out of British hands, Craig and I made our way to Cambodia, where there were reports that the former Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, who had been in hiding for eighteen years, had been arrested by some of his former colleagues. We thought that as we were in the neighbourhood, it would be worth having a sniff around.

  Kevin Connolly, the BBC man who had been holding the fort in Phnom Penh, just in case Pol Pot turned up, greeted us warmly, assured us that we were on a wild goose chase, and jumped on the next plane to Paris, taking all his equipment with him. Not for the first time, Craig and I found ourselves ask
ing that most useless of reporters’ questions: ‘Whose idea was this?’

  Our fixer-translator was a gentle, kindly man who spoke only rudimentary English, one of the very few Cambodians who knew a foreign language and had survived the horrors of the Khmer Rouge era. We asked him, in some desperation, to take us anywhere where he thought there might be sounds that we could record. A visit to a workshop for men with disabilities was not fruitful: it was closed. Likewise a trip to a military gun club, where we had thought there was a chance we would find army officers perfecting their shooting skills. It was deserted.

  While we were there, however, we heard the distant rumble of thunder. ‘Not thunder,’ said our fixer. ‘Artillery. I think we go now.’

  We thought so too. Back at the hotel, with many apologies, our fixer explained that he feared bad things were about to happen, that he needed to be with his family to make sure that they were all right, and that he would no longer be able to work with us. It was the only time in my entire time as a journalist that a fixer had walked out on me – and I had every sympathy with him.

  He was right about bad things happening. The artillery barrage had been the opening shots in a coup by one of the country’s co-Prime Ministers, Hun Sen, against the other, Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Each of them commanded their own section of the national army, and for several days there were violent clashes between the rival factions.

  Some of those clashes took place directly outside our hotel. Craig carefully hung a microphone out of his window, pressed the record button and recorded hour after hour of gunfire. Telephone lines were down, we were unable to leave the hotel, and I had succumbed to food poisoning. We were stuck.

  It was extremely frustrating. We were the only BBC men in town; we had a great story and no way of communicating with the outside world. Eventually, we ventured out, found our way to a nearby hospital and recorded some more sound. With no translator, our options were severely limited. And then the phone rang in my hotel room: London had managed to get through, even if we could still not call them. I described as best as I could what we believed what was happening and we set in place an agreed schedule of calls for the next few hours.