Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  Journalism had traditionally consisted of one group of people, journalists, telling another group of people, the listeners, viewers or readers, what they had found out. The digital revolution transformed this one-way communications channel into a two-way street and, for the first time, listeners to the BBC World Service were able to contribute in real time to the network’s output, adding their comments, reactions and knowledge to what we were pumping out from Bush House.

  (We had always received letters from listeners, but they tended mainly to be from Nigerian ‘students’ begging for help with paying their school fees. I remember one in particular that came from a ‘schoolgirl’ who enclosed a topless photograph of herself. I suspect some of the letters were genuine, but it was impossible to distinguish the true from the false, so I always sent a polite reply but no money.)

  Emails were one way for listeners to communicate with us while we were still on air (‘… and we’ve just received this email from Jonathan in Nairobi…’) but the real revolution came with the launch of Facebook in 2004. Thousands of mainly young listeners sent in comments and information via the BBC’s Facebook pages, closing the gap between them and us yet further. For the World Service, it was another revolution: we could use Facebook to trail ahead to forthcoming programmes and publish photographs of locations from which we were broadcasting and even photographs of the presenters.

  Amina (not her real name) was a young student in Baghdad. She had grown up under Saddam Hussein, lived through the US-led invasion of 2003 and was now trying to complete her studies while her country fell apart. For her, Facebook was truly a window on the world, a way to find new friends outside Iraq and get to know the people behind the voices she listened to endlessly on the BBC.

  Like my colleagues, I replied to her Facebook messages, and after a while we started interviewing her on air. She spoke faultless English, was unusually articulate and gave our listeners an invaluable insight into what it was like to be a young Iraqi living in fear in the turmoil of post-Saddam Iraq. When the World Service celebrated its eightieth anniversary in 2012, we invited Amina to come to London to participate in some of the special programmes that were being planned to mark the occasion.

  She had never been out of Iraq and had never travelled on a bus or a train, let alone been on an international flight. She accepted our invitation (‘I am scared, worried and excited’), but asked if she could stay at my home while she was in London instead of in a hotel. (My then 26-year-old daughter Hannah was almost exactly the same age as she was.) Of course, I said yes.

  Amina was a hijab-wearing Shia, immensely proud of both her religion and her country. Travelling abroad as an unaccompanied, unmarried young female was hugely problematic, but she was determined to do it. Even getting an Iraqi passport was a major challenge and just days before she was due to fly to London, she sent me one last request: could I find out which direction Mecca was from our home, so that she could pray while she was with us?

  With the help of an iPhone app, I was able to meet her request, and we were even able to provide a prayer rug that I had brought back from one of my many forays in the Middle East. I drew an arrow on a Post-it note and stuck it to the rug, pointing in the right direction. On the day of her flight, a BBC driver took Amina from her home to Baghdad airport – it was the first time in her life that she had seen it – and we sent a London-based Egyptian female journalist to meet her in Cairo, where she would have to change planes, and escort her to London and through UK immigration.

  It all worked, and Ruth and I were at Heathrow to greet her on her arrival. She stayed with us for a week, was interviewed endlessly on the BBC, got to know London’s buses and Tubes (they terrified her) and took a boat ride down the Thames. The highlight, however, was a visit to the Emirates stadium in north London, to see her beloved Arsenal play Tottenham Hotspur. (Arsenal won 5–2.)

  The BBC World Service must have changed millions of lives over the years; few, I suspect, were changed as much as Amina’s.

  As the World Service woke up to the new opportunities offered by the digital revolution, Nic Newman decided to capitalise on the possibilities by developing a new interactive programme that would combine listeners’ phone calls with their emails. It would be produced not by the World Service but by the BBC’s online team and would be transmitted both on the World Service and online in video. I was its first presenter, and soon it was on BBC World TV as well.

  The programme started life as Newstalk, was then rebranded as Talking Point and ended up as Have Your Say. For a while, it competed for airtime with another World Service programme called World Have Your Say, which was virtually indistinguishable in both title and content and had been developed as a result of some ludicrous inter-BBC rivalries that ended with Have Your Say being killed off. I had bowed out by the time the programme was put out of its misery, but it had for a while been genuinely innovative (‘distinctive’ in the current jargon) and I was proud to have been a part of it.

  Talking Point was the BBC’s bastard child. Because it was produced by the online team, there was a deliberate decision to make the point that emails and live online streaming were at the heart of what it was offering, and, despite the enthusiastic support of the World Service’s boss, Mark Byford, the programme came to be regarded as an unwelcome cuckoo in the Bush House nest. But it deserves its place in the BBC history books for how it enabled World Service listeners to talk directly to their own leaders and to some of the world’s most influential policy-makers and thinkers, in a way that had previously been impossible.

  Under the leadership of Vicky Taylor, we netted an impressive bag of guests over the years, including several Presidents – among them Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela – and such other luminaries as Tony Blair, Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela. (I was especially impressed when, in 2003, we managed to book the actress and Aids campaigner Gillian Anderson, who gave me a kiss at the end of the programme.)

  Important guests – ‘big beasts’ as we called them – required careful handling. Or, to be strictly accurate, their flunkeys required careful handling. In general, the big beasts themselves were perfectly reasonable, even human, and once they were in the studio, they did everything we asked of them.

  The first of our presidential guests was Thabo Mbeki, who was in London on a state visit. We were broadcasting at the time from an ancient studio in a Bush House basement, with two tiny video cameras on flimsy tripods to transmit pictures to the website and a rudimentary backdrop to make it look just a little bit like a television studio. Given that both Mbeki and I were wearing headphones, it ended up looking like a radio studio pretending to be a TV studio, which, after all, is exactly what it was.

  Mr Mbeki is a small man, and at first I failed to notice that he had arrived in the studio. All around him was a phalanx of much larger security people, his and the BBC’s, and a ridiculous number of flunkeys and protocol people. Fortunately, I eventually spotted him in the middle of the scrum. ‘Mr President,’ I said as convincingly as I could. ‘Welcome to Bush House.’ Like me, he had been a student at Sussex University, so I was able to break the ice by making inconsequential small talk about the joys of the Sussex countryside.

  Things were a lot less straightforward when we tried to pin down Hugo Chávez. He was on a European tour – but not stopping off in London – so there were several weeks of half-fixed, constantly changing appointments in different European capitals. ‘The President may be able to do the interview on Monday in Rome, or perhaps it’ll have to be Tuesday in Berlin.’ We finally caught up with him on Wednesday in Paris. An early-morning Eurostar to the French capital, a taxi to his hotel and then some hasty rigging of a makeshift studio in one of his suites.

  We were all ready to go when the President’s security people ordered us out and told us to wait in an adjoining room while they went through all our equipment, including the earpieces, to check for hidden explosives. I
had been warned that his regular TV show Aló Presidente, which aired every Sunday, frequently lasted six hours, and that at a press conference, he had once taken an hour to answer a single question. Somehow I was going to have find a way to shut him up and, as interrupting heads of state is not generally regarded as good manners, I decided to be frank with him.

  ‘Mr President, I know you sometimes like to give very full answers to interviewers’ questions,’ I said. ‘But we have had more than 3,000 questions sent in by our listeners and our programme lasts only one hour.’

  ‘Three thousand?’ he smiled. ‘I don’t know if we’ll manage 3,000. Let’s go for 2,500.’ He did pretty well; we probably managed fifteen.

  In the Nigerian capital, Abuja, where we were due to meet President Obasanjo, one of the very few political leaders who have ruled both as a military dictator and then, twenty years later, as a democratically elected President, we were kept in suspense until the very last minute. He was chairing an important meeting, we were told, but he would break off to meet us and then return to matters of state as soon as we were finished.

  I was not confident.

  But he kept his promise and, exactly at the agreed time, he breezed into the room where we were waiting, resplendent in flowing white robes and raring to go. The callers were coming in thick and fast – Nigerians are the New Yorkers of Africa, and they love talking – when I heard the frantic voice of our sound engineer in my earpiece.

  ‘His mic has slipped down inside his robes. You’re going to have to do something.’

  Do something? Do what? ‘Excuse me, Mr President, may I just slip my hand inside your robes to retrieve your microphone?’

  But fortune smiled on me. Before I had worked out how to resolve the crisis, the President resolved it for me. Without saying a word, he retrieved the mic himself and clipped it back in its proper place with a smile. I have felt a special affection for him ever since.

  Interviewing foreign heads of state is not quite the same as interviewing other political figures. In their own country, they are regarded as a symbol of nationhood, to be treated with the sort of deference and respect that we Brits reserve for the Queen, who, let us not forget, has never consented to be interviewed by anyone, foreign or otherwise. On the other hand, coming from outside, and with a flight back to London already booked, the foreign interviewer is probably able to adopt a slightly tougher approach than a domestic broadcaster would feel comfortable with.

  No matter how nervous I was, and no matter how fluttery the butterflies in my innards, I always tried to make it clear, by tone and body language, that interviewees, however grand they were, had come on to my territory and would have to play by our rules. ‘This is a BBC programme, I am a BBC broadcaster, and you have agreed to do this. So you are going to do it on our terms.’ I would constantly remind myself that the President was just an ordinary human being, acting the part of being a President, just as I was another ordinary human being, pretending to be a broadcaster.

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players;

  They have their exits and their entrances,

  And one man in his time plays many parts…112

  Being a news broadcaster differs in one highly significant respect from being a print journalist. Nine-tenths of the job is the same, but the remaining one-tenth entails being an actor, pretending to be in control, pretending to know what you are talking about, pretending never to be in a blind panic. The way broadcasters phrase their questions is quite different, as is the tone in which they are delivered.

  Interviewee: ‘Everyone knows that science has proved that the earth is flat.’

  Newspaper reporter, politely: ‘Is that really true?’

  The broadcaster’s response is more likely to be:

  Broadcaster, disbelievingly: ‘That’s simply not true, is it?’

  A broadcast interview is more than just a means of conveying information: it is a form of drama, constructed in the same way as a play, complete with changes of pace and texture. The overriding fear of any broadcaster is that they are boring. The aim is to keep the listener listening and the viewer viewing, to stop them hitting the off button, or changing channels, leaving the room or falling asleep.

  (My favourite compliment, which I always tried to take in the spirit in which I hoped it was intended, was: ‘Oh, you do The World Tonight? I usually go to sleep listening to you…’)

  In 2011, I acted the part of myself in an improvised radio play that carefully aped the sound and structure of a Radio 4 news programme.113 It bore some resemblance to the 1938 American radio broadcast War of the Worlds, with me channelling Orson Welles and intoning, ‘We interrupt this broadcast to bring you the following news flash…’ One of my colleagues was so startled that she sent me a text message: ‘God, you sound convincing. So are you acting on The World Tonight?’

  I replied: ‘Yup, every night. In real life, I’m a shy librarian who hates the sound of his own voice.’

  Talking Point was nothing if not ambitious. We even managed to record a programme in China, not with live telephone callers, admittedly, but with emailed questions and a studio audience made up of students at Tsinghua University in Beijing. No one told us that there were any subjects that we would not be allowed to discuss, so we included an email question from Taiwan and another one that raised the issue of corruption ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Our panel of guests were happy enough to respond, but when I watched the programme being transmitted on BBC World TV the following day, the screen suddenly went blank when those two questions were raised.

  Our biggest failure was in Washington. We knew there was no chance that President Bush would ever agree to do a live global phone-in show, but we did try hard to persuade his Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

  ‘Send us some tapes and we’ll take a look,’ his office said. A few weeks later came their response.

  ‘We’ve watched the tapes. There’s no way we’re going to do this.’

  We did not talk only to politicians: the mountaineer Chris Bonington, for example, was our guest on the fiftieth anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest, and memorably explained why he never claimed to have ‘conquered’ a mountain.

  The way you climb [a] mountain, the way you survive on that mountain, is actually to understand it – to actually work with it, to actually become part of it … you accept what the mountain is, you understand what the mountain is: maybe it lets you climb it, maybe it doesn’t.114

  The best moments in any phone-in programme come when a listener sparks an unexpected response from a guest. In July 1999, on the thirtieth anniversary of the first moon landing, a sixteen-year-old listener in Poland asked our guest Buzz Aldrin – the second man to walk on the moon, after Neil Armstrong – if it was true that his father had tried to persuade the mission planners that Aldrin should go first. Aldrin gave a careful diplomatic reply, but I detected a continuing sense of grievance, even three decades later, when he said: ‘In retrospect, I believe the correct decision was made.’

  ‘You said “In retrospect…” Does that suggest that at the time you thought differently?’

  It was then that he snapped.

  ‘Jeez, you guys won’t leave that alone, will you?’115

  Talking Point was probably the most stressful programme with which I was ever involved. International phone lines were of variable quality – the ones from the US were particularly bad – and some of our callers had only a rudimentary grasp of English. On one early programme, there were virtually no callers at all, and I was left treading water with an increasingly desperate studio guest for a full hour.

  The programme was also my introduction to the terrors of live TV, which meant that I had to learn how to stop the panic showing in my eyes when everything was collapsing all around me. I never really took to it (apart from everything else, I hated wearing makeup), especially after being told that if I was serious about building up my career in television, I would h
ave to shave off my beard. I wasn’t, and I didn’t. Perhaps some people really do have faces for radio.

  On one occasion, the programme’s guest was to be Rodrigo de Rato, a former Spanish economics minister, later arrested for alleged fraud, embezzlement and money laundering, who had just been appointed managing director of the International Monetary Fund. He was due to join us from a studio somewhere in South America but had become seriously exasperated by technical difficulties before we went on air. He then took exception to something I said in my introduction, and – to my horror – could be seen on the studio monitor removing his earpiece and getting up from his chair to leave. The prospect of having to fill the next hour with no studio guest, fielding questions about the IMF, never a subject on which I would claim to be an expert, was the stuff of nightmares. He left, and I soldiered on. No wonder broadcasters wake up sweating in the night.

  Interviewing Tony Blair in Downing Street was another stressful experience, although at least he was good enough not to walk out while we struggled to make the technology work. A producer was still crawling about under the table swearing at cables when the Prime Minister was ushered in to the Pillared Room at No. 10, the same room in which John Logie Baird had demonstrated a miraculous new piece of technology called a television set to Ramsay MacDonald in 1930.

  I had interviewed Blair before, but on this occasion I was able to watch him close up as he fielded calls from around the world about every topic under the sun. The main focus (this was in December 2002) was on the imminent invasion of Iraq, which everyone knew was coming. Re-reading the transcript, I was struck by one line in particular. Asked by a listener in Oman what would happen if UN weapons inspectors found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Prime Minister said: ‘It’s been made clear throughout: the purpose is to make sure that any weapons of mass destruction Iraq has, they are disarmed of. If they find no weapons, that is another matter.’116