Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  In the days of magnetic tape, we would always have to carry a portable editing machine with us, on which a producer – or, if we were very lucky, a sound engineer – would cut up the reels of tape into short chunks with a razor blade and splice them together with sticky tape, each chunk separated by a length of yellow tape to mark where one clip ended and the next began. It was slow and cumbersome, and no one complained too much when digital editing on laptop computers was introduced and we could bid farewell both to razor blades and to reels of tape.

  Digital audio editing is like using a word processing software package: relatively straightforward until the whole thing goes pear-shaped. Sometimes you cannot save the work you have done; sometimes it disappears without trace into the computer’s innards. And sometimes it just freezes. Usually, five minutes before you are due to go on air. On one occasion, we recorded an entire 45-minute programme in Washington, edited it with minutes to spare, and sent it to London just as the pips of the Greenwich Time Signal were playing at 10 p.m. Our computer said the entire data file had been successfully sent. The BBC’s computers in London thought differently, and our standby team in the studio suddenly found they had to fill a whole programme with no material at all from us. It is on such occasions that you begin to wonder if there might be a better way to earn a living.

  Radio 4 used to have a phone-in programme on Tuesday mornings. It was named, unimaginatively, Tuesday Call, until it assumed the name of its presenter and became Call Nick Ross. When Nick and the programme parted company in 1997, what to call it became something of a problem; a couple of stand-in presenters were hastily drafted in and the name changed from week to week: one week it was Call Ed Stourton, and the next week it would be Call Robin Lustig.

  I enjoyed the roller-coaster nature of hosting a phone-in, because you never know who your next caller will be or what they will say. But it emerged over time – quite a long time, in fact, as I also presented a similar programme on the World Service for eight years – that it is not what I am best at. If a caller said something that I knew to be untrue, I had an irresistible urge to put them right, which tended to make me sound like an irritated schoolteacher. Radio 4 listeners are not accustomed to being treated like dim students.

  This was the time when UK broadcasters were forbidden by law from broadcasting the voices of representatives of various Irish political and paramilitary groups, including Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA. Most broadcasters got round the ban by hiring Irish actors to read the words of banned spokesmen, but for phone-in programmes it was a nightmare, and I was under strict instructions to cut off anyone who claimed to be speaking on behalf of a banned organisation.

  What no rules can prevent, however, is simple human error. On one programme, dealing with proposed changes to the law on abortion, my studio guest was a representative from an anti-abortion group who had a tendency to try to dominate proceedings to the exclusion of anyone else. The programme’s producer felt that I was not being firm enough with her and instructed me through my headphones: ‘She’s ranting. Stop her.’

  Alas. Instead of pressing the button in the control room that enabled him to communicate solely with me, he pressed the button that relayed his voice both to me and to my guest. She did not miss a beat.

  ‘I am not ranting, and I won’t stop,’ she announced, on air, without pausing for breath.

  The producer’s apology at the end of the programme was abject.

  As all presenters of phone-in programmes know, the best callers are those who have a personal story to tell. I have never forgotten a caller who, during a programme in which we were discussing the ethics of antenatal genetic screening for potential disability, said he had been born with very severe disabilities: ‘I wish my mother had been screened, because if she had been, I would never have been born.’

  On another programme, my studio guest was the then boss of Radio 4, James Boyle, who had sparked the closest thing Britain had seen to a popular uprising in several centuries by daring to introduce some minor changes to the network’s schedule. The furore had reached such intensity – there was even a protest march to Broadcasting House – that he decided to face his critics directly by responding to them on his own network.

  One caller spoke for the nation: ‘Mr Boyle,’ she said, ‘I have just one thing I want to say to you – you have ruined my life.’ His crime? Moving the start time of The Archers.

  * I discovered over the years that presenters’ colleagues enjoy making them look like idiots. They seem to think that because it is for radio, it doesn’t matter.

  † Hirst had split the carcass of a cow down the middle and encased each half in a separate box, placed side by side. I stood in the space between the two boxes.

  CHAPTER 13

  LAHORE, LAGOS AND LOUISVILLE, KY

  Perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world this century.

  UN SECRETARY-GENERAL KOFI ANNAN, DESCRIBING THE BBC WORLD SERVICE IN 1999

  IT WAS DURING MY year living in Uganda in the mid-1960s that I had first dreamt of working for the BBC World Service, so it should have come as no surprise that when I finally made it through the grand doors of Bush House more than twenty years later, I was utterly awestruck. I often used to remind myself of the days when I would fiddle with the dial on my shortwave radio, twisting the aerial in all directions to try to pick up the strains of that oh-so-authoritative voice cutting through the crackle.

  ‘This is London.’

  Even today, in the raucous, overcrowded media world of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the rest, the words still pack a punch.

  Newshour, which became my main World Service home, is an hour-long news programme broadcast twice a day around the world and, for more than two decades, I was one of its team of presenters. Although it is a very different kind of beast from The World Tonight – faster, more varied, less structured – the basic task of presenting it was no different: get the facts straight, explain what is going on and interview the people at the centre of the story as well as the experts who can (perhaps) make sense of it all. In my constant quest for cost efficiency, on the days when I presented both Newshour at lunchtime and then The World Tonight in the evening, I would sometimes stuff a reel of tape into my bag and offer a World Service interview with a foreign potentate to my colleagues at Radio 4. Sometimes, although by no means always, they were suitably grateful.

  On a good day, Newshour can claim to be the best global news programme on earth. Because the World Service brand is so well known, foreign leaders will often talk to the BBC before they talk to anyone else. To take just one example: when serious political unrest exploded in Thailand in the mid-2000s, I found myself interviewing in quick succession the two men at the centre of the protests, Abhisit Vejjajiva (who despite his name is British-born and Eton-educated) and Thaksin Shinawatra. The then head of the World Service, Peter Horrocks, sent me a note suggesting that it sounded as if I was personally trying to negotiate an end to the crisis.

  News events in Thailand, like news events in Sri Lanka or Fiji, always present a special challenge for broadcasters: how to pronounce people’s names. The names of the two men named above, for example, are pronounced ah-PEE-siht way-CHAH-chee-wah and TAHK-sihn shih-nah-WHAT. The BBC has a special department staffed by very clever people who specialise in pronunciation advice, but there is not always time to consult them, and my nightmare used to be a late-breaking story involving the leaders of Sri Lanka, Fiji and Thailand.

  If Wijeyananda Dahanayake of Sri Lanka had ever met Jona Senilagakali of Fiji and Abhisit Vejjajiva of Thailand, I would have been in real trouble. But the World Service prides itself on getting these things right, and I tried not to let people down. On one occasion, when I was given sufficient advance warning of a planned interview with the then Secretary-General of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who is Dutch, I had time to phone his secretary beforehand to ask for help with the pronunciation of his name. (I was rewarded at the end of the recording when he said: ‘By the
way, congratulations on getting my name right.’ Honour was satisfied.) If you want to try it yourself, it is YARP de HOPE SKHE-ffer (KH as in loch).

  For obvious reasons, no broadcaster was amused when Mount Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland in 2010 (try saying AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl) and, for similar reasons, the Radio 4 newsreader Neil Sleat basked in the boundless admiration of his colleagues in 2013 when he read, faultlessly, a news item about a woman in Hawaii that included – twice, because the newsroom was in a particularly sadistic mood – her family name: Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele.

  At least she never tried to climb that volcano in Iceland.

  I remember endless anguished discussions at the World Service about the correct pronunciation of awkward names. When Yugoslavia fell apart in the early 1990s, Bosnia-Herzegovina soon started making regular appearances in news stories. But was it Herze-GOV-ina or Herze-gov-EE-na? The authorities were divided, and when I finally got to Sarajevo in 1996 and asked around, I was told: ‘Oh, we use both pronunciations.’

  Another problem was the name of the former Argentine foreign minister Guido di Tella, who had been in office during the Falklands War. In Spanish, his first name would be pronounced Geedo, but he was of Italian origin (hence the di in his family name, rather than the Spanish de), and in Italian, his first name would be pronounced Gweedo. Did it really matter? I thought it did, on the grounds that the one thing everyone cares about is their own name.

  But it was not only names that presented linguistic challenges. The BBC’s reluctance to use the word terrorists has been widely discussed (and criticised) over many years, although I never had any difficulty in finding acceptable alternatives that carried less of a political value judgement and were equally accurate: killers, attackers, gunmen, bombers, kidnappers all worked perfectly well. But I did try to avoid the word militants that was favoured by some of my colleagues, as I felt it usually failed to describe adequately the nature of their activities.

  Words often carry value judgements even when they are entirely accurate. In Zimbabwe, for example, a spate of attacks by men described as war veterans (in itself, a troublesome description, as we had reason to doubt its accuracy in some cases) resulted in the deaths of several farmers. The victims were of European origin, so they were routinely described as white farmers, a description that carried the clear implication that they were killed on racial grounds. Some of them, however, were also opposition activists, so it would have been perfectly legitimate to suggest that they were targeted for political, not racial, reasons. We had no way of knowing, but had to make a choice anyway.

  The biggest audiences for the World Service’s English-language programmes are in Nigeria and the United States. In Nigeria, the listeners are mainly young, well-educated, and upwardly mobile; in the US they tend to be middle-aged and liberal. Putting together a news programme that interests, intrigues and informs both those very different groups of people is no easy task. But there can be no doubting the programme’s popularity, and in both the US and Nigeria I have been treated like a visiting film star when introduced to people as ‘Robin Lustig of the BBC’s Newshour programme.’ That is why, when I signed off from Newshour for the last time before I left the BBC, I specifically mentioned listeners in both Lagos and Louisville, Kentucky, two cities where I had met some of the most devoted BBC loyalists anywhere on the planet. (I included Lahore simply because it was another city with a name beginning with L. I have never actually been there.)

  The people who work at the World Service are an eclectic bunch from a bewildering variety of ethnic, national and cultural backgrounds. Many began their BBC careers in one of the language services and then moved across to English programmes to allow us to make use of their specialist knowledge. On the day of the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan, China in 2008, when an estimated 80,000 people were killed, the editor of that day’s edition of Newshour was himself Chinese, and was immediately on the phone to his sister, who lived in the affected region. Long before the news agencies had begun to reflect the scale of the tragedy, we knew that it was huge.

  When Russia and Georgia went to war just a few months later, I was able to interview the ‘foreign minister’ of one of the breakaway Georgian republics with a Russian-born BBC producer at my side providing a simultaneous translation. So if Newshour was able to report the world to the world from a truly global perspective, which it was, it was in large part because its producers are themselves global citizens. I probably learned more about the ways of the world presenting Newshour than I would have done studying for any number of Masters’ degrees in international relations.

  When I started at the World Service in 1989, it still had the feel of an outpost of empire, devoted to the old ways that had served it so well in the past and suspicious of new-fangled ideas emanating from Broadcasting House less than two miles away across central London. When John Birt was appointed director-general in 1992, he set about bringing the hold-outs of Bush House into line; senior managers were shunted out of the way and replaced with appointees who – shock, horror – had no World Service background. World Service lifers had a deeply ingrained belief in their own superiority: they were the BBC gold standard, holding fast to a tradition of excellence that had, sadly, been abandoned by their colleagues elsewhere. Or so they said. Sometimes they were right; more often, I discovered that they were as fallible and as human as everyone else.

  Once, after yet another Birtist diktat had been issued from Broadcasting House, I asked a senior World Service executive what it all meant. ‘I haven’t a clue,’ he replied. ‘I feel like a minor provincial official in China at the height of the cultural revolution. I know there is great upheaval far away but I have no idea what it means for me.’

  When Mark Byford arrived as the new head of the World Service in 1998, you could hear the sharp intake of breath from the denizens of Bush House. Not only had he never worked at the World Service, his previous job – could you believe it? – had been as director of the BBC’s regional broadcasting. He might possibly know where Leeds was (after all, he was a Yorkshireman), but he had almost certainly never been to Lagos or Lahore.

  I was, and am, a Byford fan, despite the ordure that was heaped upon him when he left the BBC in 2010 with a reported pay-off of close to a million pounds. He was one of the very few senior BBC executives who retained the curiosity and excitement about events that had propelled them into the business in the first place. When a major news story was breaking, he would turn up in the studio control room to encourage the production team. On one such occasion, after he had bounced in (he is a big man, with a personality to match) while the team were frantically trying to keep up with events, a harassed producer responded to his words of encouragement with a simple, if ill-advised, inquiry.

  ‘Who the fuck are you, anyway?’

  I made a similar mistake when my phone rang moments before I was due in the studio at the start of a marathon four-hour programme in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

  ‘I just wanted to wish you luck, Robin.’

  ‘Sorry, who is this?’

  ‘It’s Mark.’

  ‘Mark who?’

  After he fell on his sword following the corporate nervous breakdown caused by the death of the government biological warfare expert David Kelly and allegations that the BBC had erroneously reported that the government had ‘sexed up’ a dossier on Iraq’s weapons capability, Byford became a byword for all that had gone wrong at the BBC. He had become acting director-general when Greg Dyke quit, and his first appearance in the media spotlight had been a disaster. After his departure, however, it became clear that in his role as the BBC’s head of journalism he had been an invaluable trouble-shooter – and there were many BBC journalists who could be heard muttering ‘If only Byford was still here’ as the corporation succumbed to another nervous collapse in the wake of the Jimmy Savile row and an erroneous report that a senior Conservative, who was later identified elsewhere as Lord McAlpine, had been the subject of allega
tions of child sex abuse.

  Radio is a uniquely intimate medium, and listeners, wherever they are, quickly come to believe that their favourite broadcasters are talking only to them. World Service listeners, especially in some of the world’s poorest countries, regard the BBC as their lifeline, a window onto a world they can only imagine, bringing them news and information about places they can only dream of visiting. Many listeners teach themselves English by listening to the BBC, among them the award-winning, Iraqi-born journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who, when I presented him with the Orwell Prize for journalism in 2014, said he was especially pleased to receive it from me, as I had taught him English while he was growing up in Baghdad.

  During the mid-1990s, Newshour had an editor, Nic Newman, who seemed to be obsessed with something called the ‘information superhighway’. It was going to change the world, apparently, and he commissioned report after report to explain the potential of this new medium of communication to our global audience. I was deeply sceptical (I probably would have doubted the usefulness of the wheel if I had been around at the time of its invention), but Nic was insistent that what we now call the World Wide Web was definitely worth our attention.

  Inevitably, there came a time when he instructed me to ask our listeners to send us something called an email. We received a response within moments of me reading out Newshour’s new and exciting email address; it was from Kazakhstan, and I was duly persuaded. Life was never the same again.