I Should Have Been at Work

3

TAKING THE MIKE

It was one morning in the late autumn of 1969 that I caught the train from Brighton to Victoria Station in London, hopped on the tube to Oxford Circus, and duly presented myself at the reception desk at Broadcasting House as requested. I was excited and nervous. I sensed that a few very important hours lay ahead.

Somebody took me up the three floors to the offices of the radio sports news department, and there I was introduced to a slim dapper man with a thin moustache and slicked-back grey hair. I thought he was pretty old. He was about fifty-eight years of age. He greeted me with a firm handshake and a smile.

‘So you want to come and join the big boys,’ he said. His speech pattern and Scots accent seemed to produce a slight menace in the words as he said them. He was Angus McKay, a legend in BBC Radio. Shortly after the Second World War he had begun a programme called Sports Report, the five o’clock show that is still going today on Radio 5 Live and which is the longest running sports programme in the world. Its familiar signature tune, ‘Out of the Blue’, remains to this day as well. Angus had started with Raymond Glendenning, the most famous sports commentator of his day before television got into its stride, as his presenter, but soon found a young Irishman with a mid-Atlantic style of speech whom he would mould into a star. That young man was Eamonn Andrews, who of course went on to television fame with This is Your Life.

I noticed that Angus worked from an easy chair and in front of him was just a low coffee table. I learned later that he didn’t like desks. ‘If you have a desk, people put bits of paper on it,’ he would say. For Angus, everything was dealt with there and then.

He had heard one or two of my reports from Radio Brighton and apparently thought that my voice was OK and that if he put me through my paces I might make the grade. ‘First though,’ he said, ‘you’re a bit old to join the department [I was just twenty-seven]. We normally catch them younger. I want to make sure you know your sport, so we have worked out a little quiz for you.’

I was put in the hands of his number two, Vincent Duggelby, and asked to fill in the answers to a list of thirty-six sports questions. I got thirty-five right. I must have been a bit of an anorak. Anyway, things went pretty well and I was allowed to apply formally for one of the vacancies as a sports news assistant. The job might involve some broadcasting or production work or writing, or most likely all three. Some weeks went by before I was back at Broadcasting House for a voice test conducted by Bob Burrows, who in due course would take over as boss of the radio sports news department. I passed that test as well, and now came the appointments board. There were four people on the board, but I had figured out that Angus would be making the decisions and was the man to work to. I knew I had hit it off with him because I made him laugh, not the easiest of tasks. Bob Burrows told me later that Angus thought he might make something of me. He told Burrows he had found a new Sports Report presenter. Having been a military man, he had also liked the fact that I was neatly dressed and my shoes were polished. Angus was to change my life.

In a short space of time, I had gone from being an insurance inspector, to a freelance local radio broadcaster, to a member of the staff in national broadcasting at the BBC on a starting salary of £2,030 per annum.

I could not have been happier. Three other hopefuls were appointed with me: Chris Martin-Jenkins, the cricket writer and Test Match Special commentator; Bill Hamilton, who went on to be a television news man; and Dick Scales, who left broadcasting after a few years for jobs with Coca-Cola, Adidas and other businesses connected with sport. Dick and I hit it off straight away. He had a great sense of humour, an eye for the ladies, and was tough as you like – he had spent a few years in the military police before entering journalism. In fact, all of us new boys became good friends. Among those already in the department were Peter Jones, the then presenter of Sports Report and an outstanding football commentator; Bryon Butler, a man with a deep baritone voice and a clever wordsmith; and John Motson, who was younger than all of us.

After my first morning in the department I went off to lunch with Roger McDonald, one of my new colleagues, in the BBC canteen on the top floor at Broadcasting House. After lunch we got separated and I made my way down in the lift back to the office. I duly sat at the desk I thought I had left an hour or so before. After a while a chap came over to me and asked if he could help in any way.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m just waiting to see how the afternoon sports desk is put together.’

‘Then perhaps you should go down one more floor,’ he said. ‘That’s where the sports department lives. At the moment you’re in documentary features.’

Wrong floor. Idiot.

After a couple of days I was asked to read the racing results live on air. Although I had done a good amount of far more difficult tasks in local radio, I was actually quite nervous imagining the enormity of the national audience at 6.45 in the evening.

Soon I was writing and presenting the fifteen-minute sports desk on some evenings, or else I was producing the programme, putting the recorded or live pieces together, briefing whoever was the presenter of the day, and getting the timing spot on so as not to trample all over the news at 7 o’clock. I was also occasionally producing the department’s half-hour weekly sports programme for the World Service called Sports Review. I found the voice work much easier than the production and gradually that part of my role fell into the hands of others who were more adept at it.

Just after I joined the department Angus told us that a new slot was to be our responsibility. The Today programme, the early morning current affairs show on Radio 4, was about to introduce a sports section that would go out live twice every morning – it is still part of the programme today. It would entail a reporter from Angus’ department coming in the night before to put the broadcasts together and then present them live the following morning. If you could grab a few hours sleep, a room was provided at the Langham Building, across the road from Broadcasting House.

Angus had selected me to do the very first one. ‘Vitally important you get it right, old son,’ he said. ‘Big audience. Don’t let me down.’

So on Grand National day 1970, the late Jack de Manio linked over to yours truly to look ahead to the nation’s big race.

After my second broadcast of that morning, Angus telephoned me.

‘An outstanding start,’ he said. ‘You have maintained the reputation of my department as top-notch.’ I thought my chest would burst with pride.

A few months later, after another early morning broadcast, Angus phoned me again. ‘I want you in my office in an hour,’ he said. ‘And you’d better have a very good reason for me not to sack you.’

I had transgressed simply by using in one of my pieces a journalist who was on Angus’ ‘black list’. Apparently he had warned me never to use this individual. I had either forgotten or not listened properly, and Angus was fuming with anger that this person should have made his way, at my invitation, on to one of ‘his’ programmes. After wiping the floor with me, he forgave this mortal sin of mine and I continued to be one of his boys. Angus put the fear of God into all of us who worked for him; but he disciplined us, taught us how to be proper broadcasters, and we had the utmost respect for him.

One of the problems with grabbing a few hours’ sleep in the Langham was that you had to remember to wake up. It was the job of the security man to call you at the appropriate time, but not all of them were reliable. One morning there was no call and I woke up at 7.15 – ten minutes before I was due to broadcast. I threw on a shirt and trousers, dashed across the road to Broadcasting House, grabbed my unfinished script from the sports room, and ran down the corridor to the Today studio.

‘Ah, here he comes’, said the presenter. ‘Desmond Lynam with the sports news.’ I could hardly breathe. I read my first line or two, stopped, and tried to catch my breath. ‘What’s the matter?’ enquired the presenter. ‘Well, I’ve just come from the bedroom,’ I replied.

The other problem for some staying at the Langham was the ghost. Eminent broadcasters like the late Ray Moore and James Alexander Gordon would not stay in a certain room there for all the money in the world. The story went that an old actor-manager had thrown himself from the window of this room when the Langham had been a hotel before the war (it has now reverted to being a five-star hotel). I stayed in the said room several times and had no spiritual experiences, but Ray and James were adamant that they had seen the ghost and that it had frightened them out of their wits.

In amongst all of this, in August of that year, my son Patrick was born. My wife Sue had an easy and uneventful pregnancy and had looked her most beautiful during this time. What a year we were having! New career, new baby, it was all going too swimmingly.

After just a few months, and by the time the football season was getting under way again, Angus decided I was ready to have a go at presenting Sports Report. Peter Jones, who wanted to spend more of his time commentating, would be a hard act to follow. He had a wonderful lilting voice, with just a slight trace of his Welshness, and had considerable style on air. Also, his pedigree was light years better than mine. He was a Cambridge graduate, a soccer blue, a fluent linguist in French and Spanish, and hugely literate. Robert Hudson, the Head of Outside Broadcasts and a rather dour traditionalist, was very much against my quick promotion. He felt I did not have the appropriate experience. He was right, but Angus saw my potential and was all for throwing me in at the deep end. Angus won the day and I did a few programmes not too badly, after one of which, Angus told me that I had appeared disingenuous during one interview. I had to look the word up.

Normally in broadcasting, the editor will be in the gallery or booth outside the actual studio. This wouldn’t do for Angus, who insisted on sitting next to his presenter and whispering instructions in his ear, often while the presenter was talking to the nation. Instruction through a talkback system is commonplace in broadcasting and it becomes second nature to react while still speaking, but it was most disconcerting to have Angus’ lips in contact with your earhole, and if you didn’t react immediately to his instruction, for the very valid reason that you couldn’t actually hear it, he would become apoplectic with rage.

Before one such programme, he and I were sitting in the office putting the final touches to the script for the evening show. At the time, a well-known Daily Mail journalist called J. L. (‘Jim’) Manning used to come in to the show on Saturday nights and do his ‘final word’ piece. Jim was quite a contentious individual and his three minutes were worth listening to.

The phone rang and it was for Angus. I obviously only heard his end of the conversation, the abridged version of which went like this.

‘Hello, Amy [Manning’s wife]. Oh no. A heart attack. In the small hours. Intensive care. Our love goes out to you, Amy. We’ll be thinking of Jim. Call you later.’

Then Angus turned to his number two, Bob Burrows. ‘Bob,’ he said, ‘we’ve got a problem. Manning’s fucking let us down.’

A couple of years after I joined the department, a young Alan Parry came for an interview. If he was lucky enough to get the job, Angus asked him, what did he think his ultimate ambition in broadcasting would be? Alan thought for a moment and, probably struggling for a response, said: ‘I suppose, in the long term, I would like to have a go at television.’ There was a long silence and then much sucking in of air and glances round the room. ‘Don’t you think, Alan, that if television was important Mr Burrows [his assistant] and I would be in television?’

That was Angus: a man with little self-doubt and possessing a consummate belief in his standing in the great world of radio. Alan, of course, has gone on to forge a highly successful career in television.

If I wasn’t doing Sports Report, then I usually presented Sports Session, which went out at 6.30 in the evening on Radio 4. Chris Martin-Jenkins sometimes filled this role as well. One evening, I had finished a stint on Angus’ programme and was listening to ‘Jenko’ doing his bit on Sports Session. It was a half-hour show. At about 6.50 I heard him say, ‘That’s all for this week. Good night.’ We couldn’t believe it. There followed about a minute of nothing, then much shuffling of papers, and then came Jenko’s voice again. ‘I’m afraid that wasn’t the end of Sports Session. And now the rugby.’ One producer had got his timings a bit wrong. We were hysterical with laughter and gave the future much-respected cricket correspondent plenty of stick when he appeared in the office later.

A fairly regular guest on Sports Report at the time was Eric Morecambe who was a director of Luton Town Football Club. I interviewed him several times at their Kenilworth Road ground and once at the BBC Television Centre where he and Ernie Wise were in rehearsals for one of their shows. He always gave his time, no matter how busy he was.

On one occasion I was presenting the programme from London and was talking to him ‘down the line’ during one of Luton’s games.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘We’ve got a penalty. Whey hey!’

‘Tell us about it then,’ I said and Eric proceeded to do a perfect commentary on the build up, the spot kick and the celebrations. It’s a much replayed piece of radio history. Eric was such a huge star at the time, I couldn’t believe how down to earth and how kind he was to this unknown radio reporter.

My first really big adventure with BBC Radio came in the summer of 1972, when I learned that I had been selected for the team to cover the Munich Olympic Games.

Peter Jones had gone out to Germany early to do some preview reports and he phoned me in typically upbeat fashion. ‘When you arrive on Thursday, old son,’ he said, ‘call me straight away. I have fixed up two beauties who are going to join us for dinner.’ I was already greatly excited about going to the Games anyway. Now I had an extra incentive. I was of course married at the time, but I thought a little innocent flirtation would not go amiss.

When I arrived I met Jonesy for a drink and was told that the ladies in question would be joining us shortly. A few minutes later I looked up the long staircase adjoining the bar, and one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen was descending in our direction. I nudged Jonesy. ‘Have a look at that,’ I said. ‘Ah, that’s Heidi,’ he said. ‘She’s my partner for the evening.’ Heidi turned out to be the daughter of a baron, twenty-four years of age, and a multi-linguist who would be working as a translator at the Games but who would not have looked out of place in a Miss World competition. Her friend arrived a few minutes later. I used to tell the story afterwards that Jonesy tucked me up and the friend was hideously ugly. In truth she wasn’t a bad-looking girl and we had some fun for a few days before the Games began.

One day we hired a car so that ‘Marguerite’ could show me a little of the Bavarian countryside and its wonderful castles. I had forgotten to bring my driving licence, so the car had to be hired in her name and she had to be seen driving it away. Only then did she inform me that she had passed her driving test just a few weeks before. Result: first big roundabout, a Munich taxi hit our Ford Taunus amidships. Cue much screaming and yelling in a foreign tongue. Our car now had a mighty dent in it but was drivable and I took over, despite having no valid licence or insurance. The rest of the day went without mishap. In fact it turned out to be idyllic.

When Dick Scales arrived at the Games, he spent the first few days in Munich moaning about everything. He didn’t like the place, hated the food and had been given an impossible task, etc. Then we went to the Games village and as we entered, a group of female interpreters approached. ‘I think I may get to like it here after all,’ said Scalesy. He certainly did. He married one of them a year or two later and I was his best man.

The story of the Munich Olympics is well documented. Mary Peters won her marvellous gold medal in what was then the women’s pentathlon. I remember Alan Minter being cheated out of a potential gold medal in the boxing when he was on the receiving end of a dreadful decision in his semi-final; and of course these were the Games of Olga Korbut, who charmed the world with her gymnastics. Then there were the seven swimming gold medals of Mark Spitz. But, most of all, the Munich Games will be remembered for the tragic killing of several members of the Israeli team by terrorists.

On the morning it happened I found myself the reporter on duty. In the course of that day I became a news correspondent, answering the questions of London-based presenters on the Today programme and World at One. Did I think the Black September movement was responsible? I was being asked by William Hardcastle, doyen of radio news presenters. It could have been the Green October movement for all I knew, but I waffled my way through and came to realise very quickly that it was more important to sound fluent than to produce any real facts. To this day I never put too much weight on those incessant two-ways by which television news programmes are mesmerised.

When I returned from the Games I was hauled before the Head of BBC Radio News. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you handled the terrorist story pretty well in Munich. I think you should stop messing about with sport and join the news team as a reporter. In a couple of years we’ll make you a correspondent and you’ll be off round the world covering proper stories.’

‘Like wars?’ I asked.

‘Well, that might be part of it,’ he said.

‘Thank you for the compliment,’ I said. ‘But I’m perfectly happy doing what I’m doing.’

‘I think you’re making a mistake,’ he said. In the ensuing years, not for one moment have I ever thought he was correct.

Twenty-five years later I returned to Munich for a television programme and reported from the very apartment where the tragedy had taken place. It all came back and I shuddered at both the memory and at the rapid passage of time.

I telephoned home fairly regularly from the Games but there was one period lasting about a week when my home phone was not being answered. Whenever I rang, at whatever time of the day, there was no reply. This was worrying. I telephoned my wife’s parents. What was going on, I wondered? I was told that Susan was just taking a little break and that they were looking after Patrick. This was most odd. Why had I not been told about this? When I got home I subsequently learned that Sue had fallen for someone else and was having an affair. I knew the person in question; he was an accountant. I had thought he was a friend. My marriage was over. It had lasted just seven years. Now I would be one of those ‘visiting’ fathers. Heartbreaking.

I had nobody else to blame but myself. I had been so absorbed with my new life and career, Sue and my new baby son had not received the attention they deserved. How many times have you heard of men throwing themselves into careers at a cost to their families?

I was especially guilty in Sue’s case. After Patrick’s birth in 1970, she had suffered a breakdown. It wasn’t just post-natal depression. Sue was seriously ill: for a time she became a completely different personality and had to spend some time in hospital. Baby Patrick was without his mother for the first three months of his life. How I wish that my mother had been alive to look after him. As it was, my mother-in-law did a pretty good job, but it was a desperate time. When Sue recovered, she needed my arms around her and a great deal of loving attention, but I was intrigued with my new job. I was commuting, travelling abroad, working nights from time to time, and enjoying all the social invitations that went with it. Sue had to recover her health and deal with a demanding infant, mostly on her own. It should have been no real surprise that when an affectionate arm was offered, she took it. Nonetheless, it did come as a huge shock, and she made it clear there was no way back. We had met as kids, I had been at the local boys’ grammar school, she at the girls’ equivalent. We had had some good times and she gave me my wonderful son, who remains a delight in my life. No recriminations. Had she not strayed, it is almost certain that I would have done: there were so many temptations.

The most important thing to do now was to make absolutely sure I didn’t lose touch with my son. Of course I had to preplan my visits to him, and for a time it was awkward. I missed seeing him grow up on a day-to-day basis; but as he got older we had marvellous times together and I know that to this day he remembers them as fondly as I do. We ate out together a great deal. Even as a four-year-old he was asking for parmesan cheese with his spaghetti. He had impeccable manners in restaurants and I was often complimented on his behaviour. We played table tennis and we swam.

Brighton was a great place for us to be together. We enjoyed the beach and the funfair and exploring. Like all small children, Patrick would ask those questions that stun adults. ‘Why does the sea stop coming in, Daddy?’ Pause for thought. ‘Ahem, it’s because the land stops going out.’ Four-year-old accepts answer and moves on to jumping over cracks in pavement.

Meanwhile my BBC career was expanding into areas other than sport. I had been popping up on a Radio 2 programme called Late Night Extra, reporting on the day’s sport. I had one close shave on the programme. I had adjourned to the bar after what I had thought to be my day’s work done when, having consumed about four pints of lager, I was asked by a chap called Derek Thompson, now of Channel Four racing fame, if I could stand in for him on Late Night Extra as he felt decidedly ill. Well, I did; but I shouldn’t have done and I slurred my way through the broadcast, much to the amusement of the presenter, David Hamilton.

Normally I did the job responsibly, and I seemed to interact well with whichever presenter was working on the show. Soon I was asked by the music department if I would like to introduce a new programme that would go out just after the seven o’clock news each night, appropriately called After Seven. I would do one night a week, while the likes of Michael Aspel, Michael Parkinson and the late Ray Moore would do other nights. I used to joke on air that I was the only person doing the show that I had never heard of, and soon under the guiding hand and ample bosom of a fearsome lady producer called Angela Bond, I established a new strand to my broadcasting life. It was basically a middle of the road music programme with some features included. I came up with an idea which we called ‘Monday’s Mimic’. Members of the public could win a prize for their impressions of famous figures, but they had to do it live down the telephone. Some were good, the odd professional was clearly ringing in, but we tried to avoid them because the deluded amateurs were hilarious. We had one poor chap whose ‘James Cagney’ and ‘Mae West’ were indistinguishable and we used to fall about in the studio.

In addition, having presented the sportsdesk on the Today programme I was asked if I fancied actually presenting the whole programme. I began doing this on the occasional Saturday by myself and then joined Jack de Manio, John Timpson and later Robert Robinson, as one of the weekday presenters of the show. All the while, I continued with my sports programmes. I was working flat out. Some weeks I was up at three in the morning to present the Today show, did After Seven on the Monday, plus a six-hour sports show on the Saturday. Bear in mind that I was now to all intents and purposes a ‘single’ man again. I was not exactly behaving like a monk, and the candles were being burnt not just at both ends but in the middle too. Eventually I turned down the invitation to renew my agreement with Today and got my life back on a more even keel. But being on the programme taught me a huge lesson about how to work under pressure and write lucidly and concisely in a very limited space of time.