It was not the ideal way to report a story, but it was the best we could do. I stayed close to the phone – and the bathroom – while Craig made periodic forays into town to see what was going on. Each evening, we transferred the best of his material onto a tape cassette and I wrote an outline script, just in case we found a way of getting it out of the country.
The Royal Thai Air Force came to our rescue. Although Phnom Penh airport was still shut because of the fighting, the Thais flew in a couple of transport planes to evacuate their citizens and fly them back to Bangkok. Our hotel had become a centre for terrified Thais, and we were able to persuade one of them to take our cassette to Bangkok and arrange for a BBC colleague to meet them at the airport and then transmit our material on to London. It was a long shot, but it worked. The technical term was ‘pigeoning’ the material out, and it took me right back to my days at Reuters, which had, after all, at one time used real pigeons as news carriers.
Having successfully informed the world – or at least listeners of The World Tonight and the BBC World Service – of the dramatic events to which we had been witnesses, there remained just one further task: to get ourselves back to London. Word reached us that a private charter flight out of Phnom Penh had been arranged for Western business executives whose employers had expensive insurance policies that covered such emergencies – and we would be allowed to join it provided we could each stump up $1,500, in cash, before take-off.
The BBC can be very resourceful when it needs to be, and when a colleague flew in from Bangkok to relieve us, he had with him enough cash to enable us to make our escape. It was all high drama at the time, even if no one now remembers The Great Cambodian Coup of 1997. (Hun Sen was still Prime Minister at the time this book was written nearly twenty years later.)
For the next few years, BBC trainees were sometimes played our report from Cambodia as an example of how to make something out of nothing. The entire report contained not a single interview: just a lot of dramatic sound and a script, beginning, after a dramatic burst of gunfire recorded from Craig’s bedroom window, with the words: ‘The sound of an army at war with itself…’
When Craig and I reported from Kosovo in 1999, after NATO had intervened to prevent the expulsion of ethnic Albanians by Serb forces, we based ourselves not in the capital, Pristina, but in Prizren, an ancient city not far from the border with Albania. Craig arrived a few days ahead of me, and I was instructed to fly first to the Albanian capital, Tirana, to pick up an armoured vehicle that the BBC had purchased and take it, with a locally hired driver, into Kosovo for the use of the team of BBC correspondents who were already in place.
The vehicle turned out to be an ancient Ford Granada, formerly owned – or so I was told – by the Turkish ambassador to Albania. A man from the BBC’s finance department, accompanied by an armoured car specialist, had also flown out to inspect the vehicle before the sale was completed, and then, if they were satisfied, hand over a substantial wodge of bank notes. I declined to be part of the transaction, which eventually took place in a grubby café in the Tirana suburbs where two men in black leather coats were waiting to trouser the cash. The man from the finance department said he had never been so terrified in his life.
The following day, I was introduced to the driver who had been hired to take the car – and me – into Kosovo. Now it was my turn to be terrified. He looked exactly like the kind of man you would expect Central Casting to come up with if you had asked for someone to play an Albanian mafioso. But he was delighted to discover that I spoke Italian, which, like many Albanians who had been reared on a diet of illegally accessed Italian TV programmes during the tyrannical rule of Enver Hoxha, he also spoke. He assured me that we would soon become the closest of friends.
The road north from Tirana to the border town of Kukës, where we were due to spend the night, was narrow, potholed and mountainous. The driver decided to use the Ford’s supposedly automatic gearbox as if it was a manual version, crashing through the gears at every hairpin bend, with just one hand on the steering wheel while regaling me with endless anecdotes in a totally unintelligible Italian accent. To add to the joy of the journey, we very soon discovered that the car’s armour-plating had made it so absurdly heavy that its engine could barely cope with the mountain roads. The temperature gauge rose alarmingly, and we ended up pouring vast quantities of expensive mineral water into the radiator to stop the whole thing from blowing up. My BBC colleagues in Kosovo would have to make do without the water.
There was already a BBC advance guard in Prizren; they had found a friendly house owner prepared to let us sleep in his spare room and provide us with food and, as he was a Muslim, with carpet slippers for us to wear after we had removed our shoes when we entered his house. Craig decided to photograph me one night, broadcasting live from the man’s balcony, microphone in one hand, notebook in the other, and a fetching pair of tartan slippers on my feet. It made me look alarmingly like Grandpa Lustig and conveyed, so I like to think, an entirely inaccurate impression.
A couple of days after I arrived, a group of BBC colleagues turned up from Pristina, claiming to be desperate refugees from the heart of the war zone. Relations between the various TV news stars who were competing for airtime had apparently deteriorated so badly that their colleagues had decided to make a break for freedom and seek relative safety in Prizren. Apart from anything else, they had heard that we had access to a functioning shower. With hot water.
It is easy to forget in the aftermath of the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq that in the late 1990s, Western military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were widely welcomed by local people. Tony Blair and the then British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook were local heroes – and as I, like Cook, was called Robin and had a beard, I was occasionally warmly embraced by Kosovo Albanians who on hearing my name mistook me for their saviour.
Craig and I had had a less friendly reception in Pakistan in 1997 when we were reporting on a general election. We had gone to Karachi, then as now a turbulent, unpredictable and violent city, to report on the fortunes of the MQM party, which represents Muhajirs, Urdu-speaking Muslims who had fled to Pakistan from India at the time of partition in 1947. Party officials offered to take us out campaigning with them, and we joined a convoy, escorted by police vehicles, into one of the poorest parts of the city.
It soon became clear that this was not MQM territory. Someone started hurling stones and rocks at the motorcade, and then we heard the sound of Kalashnikovs. We had no way of telling who had opened fire, but when the windows of our car shattered and I suffered a nasty head wound from the flying glass, we ducked down into the foot well behind the front seats and suggested to our driver that he should put his foot down.
It was as we were careering out of the area on squealing tyres that I noticed Craig rummaging in his bag. He extracted a microphone, stuck it in front of my face and gave me a one-word order.
‘Talk.’
It made a dramatic bit of radio, but I could have well done without it. Our car, which had been provided for us by our hotel, looked a total wreck when we returned it, as did our poor driver, whose working day normally consisted of no more than driving hotel guests to and from the airport. We told the hotel that the BBC would of course pay to have the car repaired, but they would not hear of it, and instead were full of apologies for our most unfortunate experience. The following day, we received another apology, indirectly, from the group responsible for the ambush. If they had only known that the men from the BBC were in the convoy, they said, they would of course not have attacked. In its way, it was comforting to know.
I found that the best way to get approval for foreign reporting trips was to persuade an enthusiastic producer to put forward a proposal rather than doing it myself. Successive editors seemed to suspect that my ideas were sometimes born of a desire to visit a country that I had not yet travelled to, rather than on strictly journalistic grounds. Their suspicions may – occasionally – have been no
t entirely ill-founded, but I will always insist that my reporting trips were also wholly justifiable in terms of the material they generated. In fact, because for the whole of my time at the BBC I was working for both Radio 4 and the World Service, I usually ended up reporting for both networks on the same trip. (And in case you are wondering, no, I was not paid separately by each network.)
In 2006, the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal was rocked by protests. It was five years after the heir to the Nepali throne, Crown Prince Dipendra, had shot dead nine members of his own family, including his parents, the king and queen, before turning his gun on himself. For the previous decade, a Maoist insurrection had resulted in the deaths of at least 13,000 people, and by 2006, the rebels were estimated to control 80 per cent of the country. Nepal was in turmoil and it looked as if the protests could result in the overthrow of the monarchy. To me, it was a fascinating story that The World Tonight should certainly take a closer look at.
Craig had left the programme by this time, taking with him another of my travelling producer-companions, Bernadette Duffy. They had decided to get married and relocate to the Scottish Highlands, which left me searching for a new comrade in arms. (Craig and Bernie had kept their relationship secret for more than three years, and although I had travelled extensively with both of them, I had no idea what they were up to behind my back. When I eventually found out, it severely dented my faith in my own powers of observation.)
Enter Catherine Miller. Like Craig, she was a Scot and, like him, she also had a taste for travelling to exotic locations. She agreed with me about Nepal, and not only because her brother was a British diplomat in Kathmandu at the time. (My son Josh was also living there.) We both had good reasons, both personal and professional, to want to go – and Alistair Burnett agreed that it was worth a trip. To make it more cost-effective, we suggested to the World Service that if we also travelled to Bhutan, Nepal’s Himalayan neighbour, which was as tranquil and stable as Nepal was turbulent, we could produce a half-hour documentary as well, focusing on Bhutan’s unusual government policy of prioritising a growth in gross national happiness instead of gross national product. We were confident that we could offer good value for money to licence fee-payers.
Little did we know that within days of our arrival in Nepal, the Parliament would in effect abolish the monarchy and the Maoist rebels would declare a unilateral ceasefire. Our hunch had paid off, and we were on the spot to report on a major political shift in one of the world’s poorest countries.
Bhutan is weird. It is often portrayed as some kind of fabled Nirvana, a land of soaring, snow-covered peaks in which people live simple lives, bolstered by their Buddhist faith and true to their centuries-old traditions. It is also a country to which obscenely wealthy celebrities like to flee to be pampered and pummelled in luxury hotels and spas costing well over a thousand dollars per night. Its citizens are expected to wear national dress whenever they are out in public or visit government premises: the men wear ghos, a form of white-cuffed kimono, and the women wear sarongs called kiras.
The scenery is undeniably spectacular. Who can argue with the Himalayas? And Article Five of the constitution specifies: ‘The government shall ensure that, in order to conserve the country’s natural resources and to prevent degradation of the ecosystem, a minimum of 60 per cent of Bhutan’s total land shall be maintained under forest cover for all time.’ The most overused word in any article about Bhutan is ‘pristine’, so Catherine and I immediately resolved that we would ban the word in all of our reporting.
If you like Singapore or Switzerland, you will love Bhutan. There is a regimented orderliness to it that gives it a slightly Disney-like air. It protects its reputation jealously, and we were closely chaperoned throughout our visit by the king’s British-born foreign media adviser, who had previously been a schoolteacher at the English boarding school to which the king had been sent before he ascended to the throne.
Television was introduced into Bhutan as late as 1999, but when the authorities discovered that the two most popular channels were World Wrestling and The Fashion Channel, they were both quickly taken off air. We knew there must be more to the place than beautiful scenery and beatific Buddhists, so Catherine surreptitiously asked our local guide’s young assistant what he and his friends did for fun on Saturday nights.
Duly armed with the addresses of a couple of clubs, we gave our minder the slip and set off to explore the subterranean nightlife of Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital. In the first one we found, and this was in a country where the sale of any tobacco products is punishable by up to three years in prison, everyone seemed to be smoking. They were also drinking copious amounts of beer and the music was deafeningly loud. It was not my kind of place, and Catherine later said she had never seen a grown man look as utterly miserable as I did. But at least we satisfied ourselves that, given half a chance, the people of Bhutan were not all that different from anyone else.
The British media are notoriously selective about the parts of the world that they regard as interesting. Anywhere that used to be coloured red on a map because it was part of the British Empire usually qualifies, as does anywhere favoured by British holidaymakers. So Zimbabwe and southern Spain feature regularly, whereas Mozambique and Bulgaria do not. The US is always interesting, because we watch their movies and listen to their music, but Central and South America rarely make it, unless there has been a military coup, an earthquake or a new spate of drug-related massacres. Given that ever since I had applied to VSO as a schoolboy, I had been waiting for a chance to get to know Latin America, I had high hopes that I would eventually be able to persuade my colleagues at The World Tonight that it was a region crying out for our attention.
Alistair Burnett shared my enthusiasm, and when both Brazil and Mexico began to emerge as significant economic powers, we seized our chance. A new young producer had recently joined the programme: Beth McLeod spoke fluent Spanish, had spent a year studying in Mexico, and was as keen as I was to do some reporting from a region that rarely figured in BBC news bulletins. So was our Catalan-born producer Eva Ontiveros – so, for a while, our listeners were unusually well-served with reports from Latin America.
In Mexico, Beth slyly arranged for us to visit a gentlemen’s outfitters that specialised in the sale of bulletproof clothing. She had hoped that the owner would demonstrate the efficacy of his products by shooting at me while I was wearing one of his jackets, but fortunately neither he nor I, nor the BBC’s health and safety team, thought that this would be a good idea. Beth had to be satisfied with recording the sound from a demonstration video.
On another trip, however, she did manage to get me slipping and sliding down a muddy hillside in the Peruvian Andes, on our way to inspect a clandestine coca plantation. She also insisted that I had to buy a bag of coca leaves on the streets of a town with the delightful name of Tingo María. In fact, Beth became something of a specialist in finding bizarre experiences for her long-suffering presenter colleague, all in the interests, of course, of producing good radio. In Qatar, she found a private museum where we were suddenly faced with a macabre shrine to Saddam Hussein, featuring the clothes he was wearing at the moment of his execution, while in Colombia she persuaded a regional governor to lend us his helicopter to fly into what had been one of the most dangerous towns in the entire country.
The relationship between a presenter and a producer while they are on a foreign reporting trip is always a delicate one. From breakfast till dinner, they are rarely out of each other’s sight, harnessed by a length of microphone cable and a shared despair at the inadequacies of their colleagues back in London. (On the next trip, of course, one of those hopeless colleagues may well be the travelling producer, at which point the sentiments remain unchanged even if the individuals have swapped places.)
On one occasion, I had to arrange emergency medical treatment for Bernie Duffy in Japan when she developed an agonising eye infection – fortunately, we were due to visit a US military base, where she was imme
diately treated in their hospital. (When I phoned the BBC’s health department in London to seek advice, they were reassuringly relaxed: ‘A US military hospital? She’ll get the best treatment available anywhere in the world.’)
As the years rolled by, however, I became increasingly conscious that while the producers were getting younger and younger, I was not. On one of my trips to Mexico, it dawned on me that the producer and sound engineer who were travelling with me were exactly the same ages as my son and daughter. And then, on my return to London, a senior executive rubbed it in by asking me: ‘So how was your holiday with the kids?’
Usually on an overseas reporting trip, the producer will have done all the preparation: tracking down likely interviewees, drawing up schedules and booking the translators and drivers. They will also have put together a briefing pack for the presenter: why we are going, where we are going, whom we are meeting, and why. The presenter’s job is to do what he is told, carry the equipment and buy the drinks.
And make the whole thing work.
At some point, there will be a moment of truth. The producer says: ‘Do you think we should start putting this together?’ And that is when the hard graft begins. How will our report start? Which bits of which interviews will we use, and in what order? Which snatches of natural sound that we have so painstakingly collected along the way – traffic noise, church bells, factory machinery – will we be able to make use of?
And, most difficult of all, who will make all those decisions? I was lucky: I got on well with all the producers I worked with at The World Tonight, and we rarely disagreed about anything. Only once, in my early days making documentaries for File on 4, did I have such a fundamental disagreement with a producer that, after a whole day of arguing, I finally decided to go to bed and let her decide on her own how to put the programme together. I then got up at 5 a.m. and wrote a script around the audio clips that she had selected, but it was not the best way to make a radio documentary and we never worked together again.
Is Anything Happening? Page 33