A Day Like Today: Memoirs

Perhaps Reg’s relationship with His Honour and one or two other municipal worthies in the north-west was, as he insisted, invaluable to the well-being of the BBC. Whether it repaid the considerable sum forked out by the unwitting licence payer is debatable. And he was not alone. There were many of them here and abroad. Our Representative in the United States, where I was later sent to open a television news bureau, had a far grander suite of offices in New York and an apartment in the UN Plaza with stunning views over the East River that would not have disgraced the residence of a Saudi prince.

They were still building the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool when I arrived, the largest religious building in Britain, and the longest cathedral in the world. One of my first assignments was to make a film about its construction. It was a massive project, started some years before I was born. I interviewed one of the stonemasons who had been working on it all his life. Young as I was, and trying to make my way in the exciting world of journalism, I pitied the poor chap. Rooted to one place, always following the same boring routine. There I was, dashing everywhere, never knowing what I might be doing from one day to the next, master of my own timetable and destiny (news editor permitting). And here was this man, turning up at the same time, day after day, week after week, chipping out more stone blocks to lay on the other stone blocks he’d chipped out the day before and so on ad infinitum.

‘Don’t you get bored?’ I asked him.

‘Why should I?’

‘Well, all you’re doing is laying one stone on another year after year.’

‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m building a cathedral. What will you leave behind when you die?’

It was a fair point. Broadcasting disappears into the ether, leaving little trace behind. Those who ply the trade leave no lasting monument. My stonemason was still building his cathedral when I left. By the time it was finished, in 1978, I had become a foreign correspondent.

The wireless in our house had always been tuned to the BBC Home Service and when I was a young teenager I listened to From Our Own Correspondent with awe. I tried to imagine being one of those correspondents reporting from around the world – but only in the way that my younger self had imagined being Superman.

Those were the dark ages for television news. There was no such thing as twenty-four-hour news, no satellite feeds or electronic cameras, and no smartphones. If an earthquake or revolution struck somewhere a long way away television news editors did not, as they do today, have their pick of endless footage filmed by eyewitnesses within seconds of it happening. The first thing they reached for was an airline guide. How quickly could we get a reporter and film crew there and, once there, how quickly could we get their film back to London so that it could be processed, edited and on the next news programme? It might be a day. It might be a week – or more. My first big foreign assignment – and, as it turned out, one of my most dangerous – was in the country now called Bangladesh. In those days it was East Pakistan. It took six months to get my most dramatic footage back to London.

The partition of India in 1947 remains perhaps the darkest stain on the history of the British Empire. For centuries Muslims and Hindus had lived together on the Indian subcontinent relatively peacefully. The creation of Pakistan for the Muslim minority led to a refugee crisis of biblical proportions. Fourteen million people left their homes either to flee violence between Hindus and Muslims or to seek a new home in a new country. At least a million – some estimates are double that figure – died in the violence that broke out. It was, by any historical measure, a shameful betrayal of a great nation and its hopes.

Pakistan was created out of two regions: one in the west and one in the east. East Pakistan was carved out of Bengal, which was part of India. The Bengali people living there refused to accept their status as Pakistanis. They demanded independence. Instead, they were savagely attacked by the West Pakistan military. Vast numbers died. When I arrived there in December 1971 the country was at war with itself.

I had been in the capital Dhaka for only twenty-four hours, and was asleep in my room at the top of the Intercontinental Hotel when I was woken by what felt like an earthquake. There were thunderous explosions and the hotel seemed to sway. During the night India, which had opposed the creation of East Pakistan, had declared war on Pakistan. Indian warplanes were bombing the city.

I shot off to the airport with my camera crew to film the destruction, naively believing that the attacks had ended at dawn. They had not. We were filming the wreckage of what remained of the East Pakistan air force and the runway when the bombers with their fighter escorts returned. They had come back to finish the job and – or so it seemed to me in the terrifying hour that followed – to finish us off too. Thank God, there happened to be a fairly deep bomb crater quite close. We made a run for it.

It struck me then that all those scenes in the movies when fighters fire rockets and machine guns at targets on the ground were about as realistic as kiddies playing at cops and robbers. It’s the noise that instils the fear. Not so much the gunfire and exploding rockets, oddly enough, but the noise of jet engines screaming above your head so close it feels you could reach up and touch them. I have never heard anything like it and nor do I ever want to hear anything like it ever again. I was terrified.

But we made it to the crater, jumped in and my cameraman started yelling at me: ‘Piece to camera! Do a fucking piece to camera!’

Was he mad? We were about to die. Why would I want to do a piece to camera, and anyway what was there to say? But he wasn’t mad – just much more experienced and battle-hardened than me. So I did. To this day I have no idea what I said – or, rather, screamed.

I learned a few things about myself and my trade as a result of that little episode. The first is that it is never wise to assume the bombers will not return to finish the job. The second is that it’s not a bad idea if you’re entering a battlefield to wear something a bit more protective than sun cream. And the third is that reporters have a different set of priorities from real people.

I imagine that the first thought most sane and rational human beings would have had would be something like: ‘Thank God I survived!’ My first thought was: ‘Wow, we must have some bloody brilliant pictures!’ My second thought, which became my first thought, was: ‘And we were the only film crew there! This city is packed with foreign correspondents and film crews and we are the only one with pictures of the Indian air force attacking the airport!’

Pathetic? Yes, with the benefit of half a century in this trade I suppose it is. But it’s not enough to know you have good pictures. What matters is that they must be better than anyone else’s. And that explains what happened next.

I was back in my hotel room wondering how the hell we were going to get our film to London when Michael ‘Nick’ Nicholson knocked on my door. Nick was the opposition. He was the ITN reporter and the best in the business. Hugely experienced, clever, brave, resourceful, brilliant on camera and probably the most competitive human being I have ever worked with – which is saying something.

He was so far my superior in every aspect of our craft that I was mildly surprised he had deigned to pay me a visit – he’d ignored me until then – and even more surprised when he told me he wanted to help. He’d heard that we’d shot some decent stuff at the airport and said he had a small charter plane which was taking his own footage out of Dhaka to Burma where his agent would put it on a plane to London. Did I want my film to go too? You bet I did! The answer to my prayers. He might be the most ruthless operator in the business, but what a decent human being Nick was when his colleagues needed a bit of help. I told him I’d get the film from my cameraman, who was having a much-deserved snooze, when he woke up in an hour or so.

‘No good,’ said Nick, ‘the plane is waiting to take off. I need it now.’

And then the little worm of doubt did its job. I told him my cameraman would be extremely cross to be disturbed and then I went down to the hotel lobby. The first journalist I saw was a friendly stills photographer: ‘Ah, John, heard about the plane have you? It’s been set up by the Americans … probably leaving in a couple of hours. We’re all using it.’

To his credit Nick managed to look a little sheepish when I told him I wouldn’t be handing my precious film to him after all. Later that afternoon the plane took off headed for Burma with all our footage including my own. I treated myself to a large whisky and settled back to await the congratulatory Telex messages from my bosses in London. They never came – for the very good reason that the film took longer to get to London than if it had travelled by camel.

The country I had flown out to on 1 December 1971 was East Pakistan. When I flew home three weeks later East Pakistan no longer existed. The war lasted only thirteen days, one of the shortest wars in history, and Pakistan signed the instrument of surrender on 16 December. The new country of Bangladesh was born. The Bengali people, who had suffered terribly under what they regarded as the Pakistani occupation, went wild. It was the first (and last) time I had ever been carried shoulder-high through the streets of a city by a massive, cheering mob who regarded the BBC as heroes. Tragically, the Pakistan military had taken a different view. When we arrived in Dhaka we had recruited a local Bengali to work with us as guide and interpreter. One night he disappeared. We found him the next day in a ditch with his stomach slit open. Would he have been a target had he not been working for the BBC? It is impossible to know, but equally impossible not to feel guilt.

Everyone was at risk in that war-torn city and the Red Cross declared our hotel a protected zone. They draped a huge Red Cross flag over the roof and we foreign journalists who were staying in the hotel were asked to act as wardens. Our job was to stand guard at the hotel entrance and check all those who wanted to stay. There is something deeply unpleasant about having to search through the luggage of strangers just in case they happened to be terrorists with a bomb. Much more unpleasant when the war ended was watching how the Bengalis dealt with some of the defeated enemy. Vast numbers became prisoners of war, but some of the Pakistani forces’ most notorious leaders were dealt summary justice in public. We decided we would not film some of the most gruesome punishments. Our judgement was questioned later by some colleagues and bosses, but my cameraman had no doubts. There are some things, he said, that nobody should see and he would not film them even if I ordered him to. He was right.

We were, by now, desperate to get home for Christmas and we went out to the airport to try to get a flight. We knew there wasn’t much chance. The problem was that the crater we had sheltered in a few days earlier, plus several more, meant no commercial airlines had a hope of operating. We were told it might help if we lent a hand to some of the workers trying to fill in the holes so that at least some light aircraft might be able to operate. Parked at the edge of the runway was a small, ancient single-engine plane which might, just about, have been the very last remnants of the old East Pakistan air force. The passenger door had been removed and a large machine gun bolted to the floor. There was a young man standing next to it. We asked him if he was the pilot and when he said he was we asked him if he would fly us out – ideally across the border to Calcutta a couple of hundred miles away. He looked a bit dubious but he thought there was probably enough space between potholes to take off. We settled on a price, squeezed in around the machine gun and set off. We did a little praying, held our breath, wobbled a bit … and we were airborne.

The pilot seemed mightily relieved but still tense. He had no maps and nor, as far as I could see, much in the way of working instruments but after what seemed like a very long time he pointed out of the window: ‘Look! Calcutta!’

Now it was just a matter of landing. Obviously there was no question of trying the international airport (they’d have probably thought we were the Pakistani enemy launching an attack) but our pilot said he knew there was a grass air strip somewhere – and so there was. The landing was, second only to being rocketed by the Indian air force, the most frightening moment of my life. It wasn’t so much a landing as a series of crash landings, each slightly less shattering than the last. When we skidded to a halt on the grass strip I swear the pilot offered thanks to whichever god he worshipped. I said something like: ‘Err … well done! Looked a bit difficult …?’

‘Yes indeed,’ he said, ‘it was my first time!’ It turned out that he had been a co-pilot and his instructor had yet to prepare him for a solo landing.

In September 1973 I was despatched to Chile to report on the bloody military coup that had just been staged. It was a big story. Democracy was a fragile flower in Latin America and the democratic government of Chile had been threatened for some time by those who opposed the policies of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Leading them was the man who was to become one of the world’s most ruthless dictators: General Augusto Pinochet.

I happened to be in New York at the time and London ordered me to get to Chile post-haste. It was difficult. All the Chilean airports had been closed and no international flights were being allowed in. So I decided to get as close as possible and, with my film crew, caught the next plane to Buenos Aires – more than 5,000 miles south. Maybe we could drive across the Andes and into Chile by road. I was disabused of that idea very swiftly: far too dangerous and, anyway, it would take for ever. So maybe we could charter a light aircraft from Argentina. No chance. Again, too dangerous. The Andes are very big and very high.

There was only one way to get in – assuming the Chilean army would let us. I decided we should charter a jet and tell them we were on our way. That wasn’t easy either. The only one on offer was from the Argentine state airline and it was a jumbo jet. I suspected my masters in London, desperate though they were to get footage out of Chile, would quibble at the cost. And the airline wanted the money up front. But there were many other foreign correspondents from news organisations around the world in BA also trying to get into Chile so we all met in my hotel room, agreed to split the cost, handed over our credit cards and I scuttled off with them to the airline’s office. They made it clear that once the deal had been done we’d have to pay whether our plane was allowed to land or not. We were over a barrel so I paid up and a few hours later we all pitched up at the airport and prayed.

Late in the evening the word came through from Santiago: permission granted. At any other time the prospect of flying over one of the world’s great mountain ranges in your very own jumbo jet would have been the stuff of dreams. But not in the middle of the night and not when you’re worried sick about trying to catch up on a story that had broken days before. The champagne in the first-class cabin went undrunk. When we finally arrived in Chile we were greeted by the military – ‘greeted’ meaning that we were herded into the back of an open-topped troop carrier and driven into a subdued and fearful city. The fighting was over. The government had been crushed and the dictatorship led by Pinochet was in total control of the country.

We were allowed into the city’s football stadium, now converted into a vast prison for Allende supporters. I wondered as we filmed them how many would still be alive the next day. We also filmed at the presidential palace, which had been stormed by Pinochet’s soldiers. Allende’s body had been removed long since. We all assumed he had been killed by the military. Years later his body was exhumed and it was established that he had killed himself with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro of Cuba. It bore a gold plate with the subscription: ‘To my good friend Salvador from your friend Fidel who, by different means, tried to achieve the same goals.’ His daughter eventually told the BBC that Allende chose suicide rather than face being humiliated and used by Pinochet to further his own goals.

So I had my story. Now I had to get it back to London. The good news was that the airports had been opened. The bad news was that when I arrived with my ‘onion bag’ (the name we gave to the sacks in which we carried the cans of film) they would not let me on the plane. I tried everything – including begging and bribery – but the airport officials, closely watched by military minders, were adamant: they would not let me board the plane unless I handed the film over to be put in the hold. I had no choice. I reckoned that the chances of it getting through security, making it into the hold and reappearing at Heathrow airport were no better than fifty-fifty. At best. So I spent the next fourteen hours en route to London calculating how much money I had laid out in the past five days for a story that might never appear on the air. It was several times my annual salary. I waited at the conveyor belt in Heathrow. And waited. My own suitcase arrived and so did everyone else’s. No onion bag. And then an angel appeared. She did not have a halo and she was wearing a British Airways uniform but I knew she was an angel because she did have the onion bag. She seemed a little surprised to be hugged by a tearful young man who hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for a week.

Those, as I said, were the dark ages for television news. If, God forbid, there were to be another military coup in Chile tomorrow the pictures would start appearing on our television screens within minutes.

In fact, things had already begun to change when I was based in Washington in the mid-1970s. The first electronic news-gathering (ENG) cameras were appearing. They were great clunky things but they had one massive advantage over the cameras we’d been using since the first motion pictures were invented in the 1880s. No film. They transformed the way we covered stories. A roll of film on our news cameras lasted for just over ten minutes, so you had to be very careful when you switched on and when you switched off. And Sod’s Law dictated that the moment you switched off was when the bomb blew up or the Queen slipped on the banana skin.

But you spent your life terrified that you would miss the one moment that mattered. You would also get a bollocking from the boss if you used too much film – partly because it all had to be developed, which took time back at base, but mostly because it was very expensive. And there was the other fear. The hair in the gate. No matter how careful the cameraman was when he loaded a new roll (always a ‘he’ incidentally: I never once worked with a camerawoman) he could never be a hundred per cent certain that a little hair had not managed to find its way into the gap between the film and the lens. You could tell when it happened if you were passing the edit suite just after the film had come back from the lab. The cry from an anguished reporter of ‘Oh fuck! There’s a fucking hair in the gate!’ It made the film unusable.

No such problem with ENG cameras. No film: no hairs in gates. And, pretty soon, with the blessing of satellite transmission, no need to find helpful passengers in foreign airports willing to courier your film back to London so that it could be processed and edited. Why use passengers? Because by the time you got to the airport it was usually too late to send it by freight, and anyway passengers were much more reliable.

By the early 1970s geostationary satellites were in use and in May 1974 the world’s first direct broadcasting satellite (DBS) was launched. So now we had pictures that needed no processing and a way of getting them back to London instantaneously – albeit very expensively in those early days. A ten-minute sat-feed from Washington cost $10,000. All that was overtaken with the birth of the digital age. Instead of lugging great onion bags bulging with cans of film and endlessly worrying about running out, you had a few tiny disks and virtually unlimited airtime in your pocket. One of the unintended consequences of that is the temptation when you’re on an assignment to film pretty much everything that moves. So you end up back at base with endless hours of material all of which has to be viewed – and what no one has yet invented is the computer program in the editing suite that will eliminate all the boring stuff instantly and keep the good stuff. It’s probably on its way.

The biggest problem facing the editor back home now is not how to get a story covered and the footage safely back to base, but how to distinguish between the mass of material that appears almost instantly on social media in one form or another. If it’s a natural disaster – an earthquake or a tsunami – it’s pretty straightforward. But if it is, say, a terrorist attack you have to know who was filming. The role of us broadcasting hacks has changed beyond recognition too – and I’m not talking just about the way reporters are used in television news.

In those days, as a foreign correspondent, I could put a report on a homeward-bound plane and wait for the call from the foreign desk, secure in the knowledge that several days might pass before I might be disturbed again. This meant the pace of news was entirely different from today. A film needed to be processed in a chemical bath for the print to be developed. Then the film had to be edited in the old-fashioned way: it was broken up into its constituent shots, and the strips of film hung up in the editing suite. The picture editor would edit the selected shots together on a Steenbeck – a reel-to-reel viewing machine. All this took time.

Today we all have telephones so packed with technology they can not only do the job of the camera but also replace the need for a satellite station. And along with the advent of digital technology came computerised editing, so it no longer takes ‘real time’ to do an edit. A thirty-second ENG clip would take thirty seconds to lay down for the edit. On a computer, it can be done in the blink of an eye.

All of this would have been the stuff of fairy tales in my early reporting years. Occasionally you will hear old hacks reminiscing about the good old days of black and white film and how vastly superior the pictures were when shot on a proper cine camera by a highly trained cameraman rather than by any ten-year-old with a shaky mobile, but the truth is we’d have given our eye teeth for it. Very little happens in one part of the world today without the rest of the world being able to see it minutes later. But I am not suggesting that this is an unalloyed blessing. Technology has solved many problems but it has raised many questions too about the role of international news organisations.

The BBC in particular has had to face the challenge of new technology by asking what it means for the way the organisation is structured and how best it can position itself to retain a big enough audience to justify the licence fee. It’s made many attempts to get its structure right but somehow it never quite seems to work. Perhaps there is no right answer.

When BBC Television News moved from its early home in Alexandra Palace to the new Television Centre in London in the early 1970s there were no television foreign correspondents based abroad. There was a network of radio correspondents, but no foreign television news bureaux. You might think that the simplest answer to that would have been to train radio correspondents in the ways of television. I have yet to meet a good radio reporter who is not also capable of delivering a good television report. Then again, I’m not a boss. Bosses think differently. Many of them see their purpose as either building their own empires or taking over someone else’s empire. That’s not necessarily an ignoble aspiration but the effect on BBC News was that we ended up with two distinct empires – radio and television – and, almost half a century later, I’m damned if I can see why.