Kitabı oku: «A Day Like Today», sayfa 2

PART 1

Yesterday and Today

1

A childhood of smells

By the time I joined Today in 1987 I had been a journalist of one sort or another for thirty years and I’d been exposed to pretty much everything our trade had to offer. I had been a magazine editor at the age of fourteen – though whether the (free) Trinity Youth Club Monthly Journal with its circulation reaching into the dozens properly qualifies as a magazine is, I’d be the first to admit, debatable. I’d had the most menial job a tiny local weekly newspaper could throw at a pimply fifteen-year-old – and that’s not just the bottom rung of the ladder: it’s subterranean.

At the other end of the scale I had written the main comment column for the Sunday Times, the biggest-selling ‘quality’ newspaper in the land, for nearly five years. I’d had the glamour of reporting from all over the world as a BBC foreign correspondent – not that it seems very glamorous when you’re actually doing it. I’d had the even greater (perceived) glamour of being the newsreader on the BBC’s most prestigious television news programme.

And I had reported on many of the biggest stories in the world: from wars to earthquakes to famines. I’d seen the president of the United States forced out of office and the ultimate collapse of apartheid. I’d seen the birth of new nations and the destruction of old ones. So on the face of it I had done it all. But, of course, none of it properly equipped me for the biggest challenge in broadcast journalism: the Today programme.

Presenting a live radio news programme for three hours a day, day in and day out, is bound to test any journalist’s basic skills, not to mention their stamina. You need to know enough about what’s going on in the world to write decent links and ask sensible questions. You need enough confidence to be able to deal with unexpected crises.

You need the stamina to get up in the middle of the night and be at your best when people doing normal jobs are just finishing their breakfast and wondering what the day holds in store. And you need to be able to do all that with the minimum of preparation. Sometimes no preparation at all.

But thirty-odd years of trying to do it tells me you need something else. You need to know who you are and what you can offer to a vast audience that’s better than – or at least different from – your many rivals. My problem when I started was that I had no idea what I was offering. I had done so many different things I wasn’t at all sure who or what I was.

Was I a reporter?

I’d like to think so. Reporting is, by a mile, the most important job in journalism. Without detached and honest reporting there is no news – just gossip. At the heart of any democracy is access to information. If people don’t know what is happening they cannot reach an informed decision. I like to think I did the job well enough. I had plenty of lucky breaks and even won a few awards. But I was never as brave as John Simpson or as dedicated as Martin Bell and I never had the writing skills of a James Cameron or Ann Leslie. I did not consider myself a great reporter and knew I never would be.

Was I a commentator?

Positively not. Columnists may not be as important as reporters, but they matter. The best not only offer the reader their own well-informed views on what is happening in the world, they cause them to question their own assumptions. They make the reader think in a different way. I very much doubt that I managed that.

Was I a newsreader?

Well, again, I was perfectly capable of sitting in front of a television camera and reading from an autocue without making too many mistakes. Not, you would accept, journalism’s equivalent of scaling Everest without oxygen. Whether I had the gravitas to command the attention and respect of the audience is another matter altogether. Probably the greatest news anchorman in the history of television news was Walter Cronkite, who presented the CBS Evening News in the United States for nineteen years when it was at its peak in the 1960s and 70s. Cronkite not only had enormous presence and authority, he had a relationship with the viewers that any broadcaster would kill for. It can be summed up in one word. Trust. He was named in one opinion poll after another as the most trusted man in America. He also happened to be a deeply modest and decent man.

As for me, back in 1987, I was just a here-today-gone-tomorrow newsreader who was about to become a presenter of the Today programme and who had not the first idea what he had to offer its enormous audience. I tried asking various editors who had worked over the years with some of the great presenters what I needed to do to make my mark or, at the very least, survive. Most of them gave me pretty much the same answer: be yourself.

As advice goes, that was about as much use as telling me to write a great novel or run a four-minute mile. How can you ‘be yourself’ if you don’t know who or what you are? How can you impose your personality on the programme if you’re not quite sure what it is? It’s not as if you can pop out and buy one off the peg.

‘Good morning, I’m looking for a radio personality.’

‘Certainly sir, anything specific in mind?’

‘Well, it’s for Radio 4 so nothing too flash. Obviously I need to be trusted by the listeners and I suppose it would help if they liked me.’

‘Of course sir, wouldn’t want them gagging on their cornflakes every time they heard your voice would we? But when you say “liked” do you have anyone in mind? Dear old Terry Wogan maybe? Or a bit more on the cutting edge, if I may be so bold? Perhaps a touch of the Chris Evans? It’s always a little tricky designing a personality if the customer doesn’t have a specific style in mind.’

‘Yes, I can see that. How about the trust factor then?’

‘Just as tricky as likeability in a way, sir. Takes rather a long time to earn trust.’

‘Of course … So what about “authority”?’

‘Sorry to be so negative sir, but that doesn’t come easy either. Bit like trust in a way … takes time and depends on your track record.’

‘Hmm … I think what you’re telling me is that you don’t actually have anything in stock that would give me a Today programme personality eh?’

‘I’m afraid so. Perhaps I could offer sir a suggestion?’

‘Please!’

‘Why not stick with what you’ve got and then pop back in … shall we say … five years or so and we’ll see whether it needs a little adjustment?’

‘Thank you … most kind of you.’

‘Not at all sir … is fifty guineas acceptable …?’

Had such a shop existed in the real world I might very well have popped back – not after five years but more likely after a week. Because I learned something very quickly, and it’s this: a curious thing happens when you present a live radio programme such as Today for several hours on end, mostly without a script or without any questions written down. You discover that you have no choice but to ‘be yourself’. There is so much pressure that there is no time to adopt somebody else’s persona or even to think about creating a new one for yourself. And that can be a blessing and a curse. In my case it is both.

Those of us who practise daily journalism need to be able to write to a deadline. You either master that skill or you find another way of making a living, and I can make the proud boast that I have never missed a deadline. Very impressive, you might say, given how long I’ve been practising this trade and how many deadlines I have faced. You might be rather less impressed if I reproduced here some of the rubbish I have written over the years as the clock ticks down – but that’s another matter altogether. The rule is: never mind the quality … get it done and get it done NOW!

I’ve lost track of the number of times the 8.10 story on Today has suddenly changed and another story has taken its place, meaning that I’ve had only three or four minutes to write the introduction. In the pre-computer days it meant hammering away at the typewriter in the newsroom, ripping it out of the rollers as the clock ticked down and then running like hell into the studio with it. That, by the way, is always a mistake. I learned the hard way that you might save five seconds if you run to the studio, but when you drop into your seat in front of the microphone you will be unable to speak for the next thirty seconds because you are out of breath. And you will sound very silly.

I like to think I had a pretty rigid routine when I was presenting Today. I would skim the newspapers in the back of the car that picked me up at about 3.45 a.m. so that by the time we got to New Broadcasting House I had a rough idea of what was going on in the world. Then I would log on to my computer, heap praise on the overnight editor for the invariably wonderful programme he had put together (or not as the case may be) and would set about writing my introductions – or ‘cues’ as we call them. Then I had my breakfast sitting at my desk – a bowl of uncooked porridge oats, banana and yoghurt – while I started to think of the questions I’d be asking my interviewees over the next three hours. So by the time I got into the studio, I had lots of questions written down just waiting to be asked.

In my dreams.

Look, I KNOW it made sense to do just that. I KNOW I should have done what most of my colleagues did, which was read the briefs that had been so painstakingly prepared by the producers the day before and had the structure of the interview written down with some questions just in case the brain went blank at a crucial moment. Something which, I promise you, happened more often than you might think. So why didn’t I do it? God knows. I always ended up finding another dozen things to do that seemed infinitely more important at the time but never were.

It meant that at some point in the programme I would realise that I hadn’t the first idea what vitally important subject it was that I was meant to be addressing with the rather anxious person who had just been brought into the studio. Every morning I promised myself I would be more disciplined in future and every morning I failed. I tried to justify my idiotic behaviour by telling myself that interviews are better if you have no questions written down. After all, we wanted our audience to feel they are listening to a spontaneous conversation rather than to some automaton reading from a list of prepared questions. But there was a balance to be struck and I invariably erred on the side of telling myself it would be alright on the night – even when there was a tiny warning light flashing in my brain telling me I might be about to make a fool of myself.

I remember one torrid morning when everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The radio car broke down en route to the interviewee. The person who was meant to be operating the studio for the guest in some remote local radio station had a ropy alarm clock that had failed to go off so he never turned up. The politician who was meant to be coming into Broadcasting House had changed his mind at the last minute. The stand-by reports prepared for just such an emergency had all been used. We were on our last tape. About the only things that didn’t go wrong were the microphones in the studio, but that wasn’t much consolation because at approximately fourteen minutes to nine we had no one left to interview.

And then, just as I was planning to fall off my chair clutching my chest, thus leaving it to the other presenter to deal with the crisis and being able to blame him if he failed, my producer shrieked into my headphones. There were approximately five seconds to go before the report we were broadcasting reached its end – just time enough for him to tell me: ‘We’ve got the leader of the Indian opposition on the line and—’

And that was all he had time to say because then my microphone was live and I was broadcasting to the nation. In theory. Instead I was left to ponder not only what the name of the Indian opposition leader on the other end of the line might be but what might have happened on the subcontinent to cause my colleagues in the newsroom to set him up for a live interview. In short, I had not the faintest idea who he was nor why I was interviewing him. In the milliseconds available I ran through the options short of staging that mock heart attack.

There were only two. I could play for time and say something like: ‘Good morning sir and many thanks for joining us. May I say what an honour it is that you have given up your valuable time to join us this morning on such an auspicious day for your great country …’

A fairly uncharacteristic approach to a politician on Today I grant you, but the strength of it was that if I said it sufficiently slowly it would give my producer a vital few seconds during which he might just possibly be able to tell me why the hell I was talking to whatever-his-name-was. The weakness of the plan was that maybe nothing auspicious had happened and the mystery guest in New Delhi would decide he was dealing with a raving lunatic in London and hang up.

So I went for the opposite approach, gambled that we tend to interview foreign opposition leaders only when they are out to make trouble for their country’s government, and tried this:

‘Many thanks for joining us … it seems the government is facing a pretty serious crisis eh …?’

And then I prayed. If there was no crisis I was toast. It was a fifty-fifty gamble and luck was with me.

‘Yes indeed …’ he began. And that was enough. The opposition politician who ducks the chance of taking a swipe at his government has yet to be born and he was away. The rest of the interview was child’s play.

That sort of thing happens all the time on Today. Scarcely a day goes by without a presenter having to go off-piste for one reason or another. It comes with the territory and, obviously, any live radio presenter who can’t think on their feet would be much better getting a rather less stressful job. Rudyard Kipling wrote a pretty good job spec for Today in the first verse of his poem ‘If’:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating …

I especially like the line about not dealing in lies – can’t imagine why it puts me in mind of certain politicians – but I’m not so sure about ‘being hated’ and ‘giving way to hating’. It raises the tricky question of how much presenters should worry about the way they are perceived by the listener and takes me back to my search for a ‘radio personality’. Presumably if you are a so-called ‘shock jock’ anchorman of the sort they seem to specialise in on the other side of the Atlantic, being hated by a large chunk of your audience is an essential qualification. Perhaps not so much for a Today presenter. But is the opposite true in the more civilised world of Radio 4? Is it important to be liked by the listener? I’ve never been quite sure about that. I like to think that so long as you’re doing your job reasonably competently you will be tolerated. Well … up to a point. Sometimes you get just a tiny hint that not everyone loves you. I got more than a hint from the broadcasting critic on the Observer one Sunday morning. He wrote that if he ever found himself sitting next to me at a dinner party he would probably drive a fork through my hand.

So I turned to some fan mail to cheer myself up and there was this:

Dear John,

Some people ask me what I live for. Well I tell them that I live for the day when Mother Nature finally takes the old codger that you are out and releases the rest of us of suffering your miserable existence. For the sake of humanity, may you rest in peace, and the sooner the better. When you are finally dead heaven will descend on earth and disease, starvation, inequality and suffering will all be things of the past and there will be much merriment and rejoicing in every corner of the globe.

Thank you

It’s the polite ‘Thank you’ at the end of that letter that I cling on to. And I suppose it’s nice that someone out there thinks I have it in my power to make the world a better place – albeit by dying.

The overriding priority of BBC news is to deliver information and try to analyse what it means – but there’s no point in doing a brilliant interview if nobody is listening. Getting the balance right is never easy compared with, say, a Radio 2 show where entertainment is what matters. Someone like Terry Wogan knew exactly what buttons to press. He presented himself as a loveable old Irishman with an endless supply of easy-going charm. His gentle, self-deprecating sense of humour hid a quick wit and a sharp mind but what mattered above all else was that the audience liked him. His vast army of TOGs (‘Terry’s Old Geezers or Gals’) were invited to believe that he was just like them really: just one big happy family. The genius of his radio persona was that the audience could imagine sharing a glass of Guinness with him, enjoying a chat and probably agreeing about pretty much everything. In truth Terry was a complicated man tortured by the same demons that afflict most of us, but that’s not what the adoring listeners heard.

Of course Today presenters want to be liked – don’t we all? – but life is not like that. And certainly not in the world of journalism. One small test of my own humanity (if not necessarily likeability) came on a morning when I was scheduled to interview a senior political figure about the war in Iraq. She was in our radio car rather than in the studio so I’d had no chance of a quick chat in the green room before the interview. If I had, we’d have aborted it there and then. Within roughly thirty seconds of going live I realised she was drunk. It was 7.20 in the morning. The listeners might have thought she sounded a bit slurred but would probably have assumed she’d just got out of bed or was maybe a bit hungover. I knew her well enough to know the truth and that she was capable of saying anything. I pretended there was a problem with the radio-car connection and ended the interview very quickly.

Was that the right thing to do? Certainly not if I were being strictly faithful to the (unwritten) journalists’ code. I should have exposed her frailty and allowed the audience and her political masters to reach their own judgement. It would have almost certainly finished her career. But I liked her and respected her both as a politician and as a human being. I might have asked myself in those few seconds whether the world of politics would have been better off without her and concluded it would not – but I probably didn’t. The fact is, I acted on instinct and I agonise about it still – as I do with another similar interview for slightly different reasons.

This happened at a party conference in the late 1980s. The difference is that it was a pre-recorded interview with a prominent Northern Ireland minister late one evening for use the following morning. Party conferences don’t have too much in common with Methodist temperance meetings. There are many parties and receptions and a great deal of drink is taken. The minister had taken too much. Far too much. He or his advisers should have refused to do the interview but they didn’t.

What he said was pretty incendiary and would almost certainly have had a seriously damaging effect on the peace process, which was going through a tricky time. Should we run it? I talked about it at some length with my editor and in the end we decided not to. Again it was not an easy decision. It might well have made headlines the next day, but what’s a headline in the context of a vicious conflict that killed and injured many thousands of people?

All of which makes me appear as a saintly soul whose only wish is to make this world a better place. The reality is that self-interest played a pretty large part in my calculations too. Experience told me that presenters tend to win more brownie points with the listeners if they are not seen to be behaving like total thugs. I’d had a taste of how much the good Today listeners disapprove of such behaviour following an interview with John Hume I did in my early years on the programme.

At the time he was the leader of the Social Democratic Party in Northern Ireland, a formidable and brave politician who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And I was rude to him. I interrupted for no good reason, told him he wasn’t answering the questions without giving him a chance to do so and generally behaved like a pub bore after one pint too many. Those were the days before emails when the postman arrived with the mail in a sack. The day after the Hume interview there were several sacks dumped in the Today office – almost all filled with letters from angry listeners. I survived – only just – and I’d like to think that I learned a lot from that ghastly interview. But that’s for others to judge.

I suggested earlier that I had a problem deciding on my ‘radio personality’ – assuming it existed outside my own imagination.

What I did not decide on my first morning in the Today studio was that I would set out to be the stroppiest Welshman on the airwaves. And, contrary to popular assumptions, I do not set out when I interview someone to have an argument – even if it’s with a politician. But I cannot deny that I enjoy arguing. Nor would I deny that I approach people in power – all of them – with a pretty strong dose of scepticism. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is for others to judge, but either way it’s not my fault. And I have that on pretty good authority. Aristotle is quoted as having said: ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.’ If he was right it must surely mean that our parents are bound to have a profound influence on us – one way or another.

A few years ago one of our leading universities offered me the chance to become ‘Professor’ Humphrys: a very tempting prospect for a grammar-school boy whose single academic achievement had been a handful of O levels. I even managed to fail woodwork. My father never quite forgave me for that. I accepted the university’s offer immediately but imposed one condition: I would close down the department in my first week. The offer was withdrawn. The department was (what else?) media studies.

Maybe my response had been a bit childish and maybe I’m wrong about the value of a media studies degree. I’m sure that many bright young people have left university with them and gone on to great things. I’m equally sure that they would have succeeded without a media studies degree. I simply do not believe that you can learn to be a journalist. I’m with that late, great reporter Nicholas Tomalin who said the only qualities essential for success as a journalist are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability. Tomalin wrote in a pre-digital age and he would have been forced to add to that list today the ability to understand and navigate the world of social media. I would add insatiable curiosity, and something else: a good journalist needs, in my book, to be contumacious.

Not a word, I concede, that one hears every day but it’s been around a long time and apparently we have St Benedict to thank for it. He applied it to people who ‘stubbornly or wilfully resist authority’. The punishment for it 1,500 years ago was excommunication – which is fair enough I suppose if you are in the business of founding the greatest monastery in history. You can’t have monks calling into question the supreme authority of the Catholic Church, can you? Equally, in my rather more humble view, you can’t have journalists who do the opposite: who accept supreme authority without questioning it. Or any other kind of authority for that matter. And that is not something you can learn. You are either contumacious or you are not. I am, and I have my father, George, to thank. Or to blame.

He was born into a working-class family in Cardiff in what we would now call a slum but was pretty standard housing for people like them in the early years of the last century: a tiny back-to-back terraced house with an outdoor lavatory and a tin bath in front of the fire. He was, by all accounts, a bright and rather wilful child who loved reading and running. But his disobedience was to cost him his eyesight.

Like most youngsters in those pre-vaccine days he caught measles – a particularly bad dose – and my grandmother was told that on no account was she to let him out of the house. He was to be kept in a bedroom with the curtains drawn. The next day she had to go shopping, leaving him in the house alone with strict orders to stay put. Obviously he didn’t. It was a glorious winter’s day – bright sunshine after some heavy snowfalls – and there were snowballs to be thrown and snowmen to be built. The temptation was too great for him. The sun reflected off the snow and that, coupled with the poor nutrition common in working-class families at that time, did massive damage to his optic nerve. For the next couple of years he was blind. His education effectively ended when he was twelve.

Gradually his sight began to recover enough for him to get an apprenticeship and he became a French polisher. He got a job with the firm where he’d served his apprenticeship and, confident of a steady income, promptly proposed to my mother. She accepted. The job lasted barely a week. My father took great exception to something the foreman had said to him, punched him on the nose and he was out on his ear. The dole was not an option – he was far too proud to take what he called ‘charity’ anyway – so he set about building up his own business.

There were always people in the richer parts of Cardiff who wanted a table or a piano polished and, one way and another, he made enough money to keep hearth and home together – with my mother doing the neighbours’ hair in the kitchen and me doing a paper round before school and my older brother making deliveries for the local grocer. We also tramped the streets of the posher suburbs sticking little circulars through letter boxes advertising Dad’s services. I’ve never been sure if it was worth the effort but at least it gave me an idea of how the other half lived.

Obviously we didn’t get paid for it but there was some compensation. I carried two bags – one for the leaflets and the other for any apples hanging temptingly near the garden walls. It’s always puzzled me that my friends and I would not have dreamed of stealing apples from a shop but I think we must have seen scrumping as a victimless crime. And anyway there were always far more apples than the posh people could possibly eat. Or so we reasoned. I also made a modest income from our own neighbours: selling them little bundles of mint door to door which I picked from the backyard where it grew in the ashes thrown out from the coal fires. Twopence for a small bunch: an extra penny for a bigger one. I always sold out. That was where my entrepreneurial career began and ended.

We were told endlessly what was wrong and what was right, and not just by our parents. For those of us who went to Sunday school, the vicar reinforced the message. There was a clear line of authority running through our tight little community, with the vicar and perhaps also the GP at the top. Perhaps it was a small-scale reflection of the wider world, in an age when we deferred to figures in authority, when elites told us what our responsibilities were.

My father had an abiding dislike and distrust of the clergy mostly, I think, because they thought they were a cut above ordinary people like him. That can probably be traced to an experience he had as a young man when he was staying with his aunt at her little cottage in a Somerset village, not long after the First World War. They were about to sit down for lunch when the door burst open and the vicar strode in. Without so much as a by-your-leave or a ‘Good morning’ he demanded to know why my great-aunt had not been at the morning service. She did a little bob and stammered an apology. She tried to explain that she seldom had visitors and that she’d been preparing lunch for her nephew whom she hadn’t seen for a year and who had come from a long way away. She said she would be sure to turn up for evensong. He was having none of it. He did not even glance at my father but barked at his auntie: ‘See that you do and don’t let it happen again!’ Then he turned on his heel and left.

Instinctive deference – unearned deference – is dying if not dead. Its defenders say it has taken respect with it but I doubt that. Over the years I have received countless letters (invariably letters) blaming me and my ilk but I suspect we were reacting to, rather than creating, a change in attitudes to authority. Richard Hoggart, who was one of Britain’s most respected cultural critics, thought that attitudes to authority, whether religious or lay, really began to change at the end of the last war – when the soldiers came home and the women, who’d been forced to work in the factories, decided they didn’t want to go back to the old ways.

I behaved according to the rules of my community when I was growing up, but I think (perhaps thanks to my father) it instilled in me not just deference to authority but a questioning attitude to it too. I don’t like being defined or told what to do, whoever is in charge. I even have a thing about wearing identity tags at work. Once, during the Gulf War, when BBC security was at its tightest, I was rushing to the studio with a few minutes to spare and a man in a peaked cap stopped me at the door.