Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © John Humphrys 2019

Cover image © Jeff Overs/Getty Images

All images courtesy of the author unless otherwise stated.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

John Humphrys asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007415571

eBook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780007415601

Version: 2020-09-24

Dedication

For Sarah

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Prologue

7  Part 1 – Yesterday and Today

8  1 A childhood of smells

9  2 The teenAGE pAGE

10  3 Building a cathedral

11  4 A gold-plated, diamond-encrusted tip-off

12  5 A sub-machine gun on expenses

13  6 A job that requires no talent

14  Part 2 – Today and Today

15  7 A very strange time to be at work

16  8 Why do you interrupt so much?

17  9 ‘Come on, unleash hell!’

18  10 A pretty straight sort of guy?

19  11 Management are deeply unimpressed

20  12 Hamstrung by a fundamental niceness

21  13 A meeting with ‘C’

22  14 The director general: my part in his downfall

23  15 Turn me into a religious Jew!

24  Part 3 – Today and Tomorrow

25  16 The political deal

26  17 Shrivelled clickbait droppings

27  18 Goodbye to all that

28  Picture Section

29  Also by John Humphrys

30  About the Author

31  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Prologue

In which I answer the questions in the way I choose …

JH: Good morning. It’s ten past eight and I’m John Humphrys. With me live in the studio is … John Humphrys. It’s just been announced that he’s finally decided to leave Today after thirty-three years. Mr Humphrys, why leave it so long?

JH: Well, as you said it’s been thirty-three years and that’s—

JH: I know how long it’s been … far too long for the taste of many listeners, some might say. It’s because your style of interviewing has long passed its sell-by date, isn’t it?

JH: Well I suppose some people might say that but—

JH: You suppose some people might say that? Is it true or not?

JH: I’m not sure it’s really up to me to pass judgement on that because—

JH: What d’you mean you’re ‘not sure’! You either have a view on it or you don’t.

JH: Well I do but you keep interrupting me and—

JH: Ha! I keep interrupting you! That’s a bit rich. Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing to your guests on this programme for the past thirty-three years and isn’t that one of the reasons why the audience has finally had enough of you … not to mention your own bosses?

JH: I really don’t think that’s fair. After all it was only politicians I ever interrupted and only then if they weren’t answering the question.

JH: You mean if they didn’t answer YOUR questions in the way YOU chose—

JH: Again that’s not fair because—

JH: Are you seriously suggesting that you didn’t approach every political interview with your own views and if the politician didn’t happen to share those views they were toast? You did your best to cut them off at the knees.

JH: That’s nonsense. The job of the interviewer is to act as devil’s advocate … to test the politician’s argument and—

JH: And to make them look like fools and to make you look clever. It’s just an ego trip, isn’t it?

JH: No … and if that were really the case the politician would refuse to appear on Today. And mostly they don’t—

JH: Ah! You say ‘mostly’, which is a weasel word if ever I heard one. Isn’t it the case that when they do refuse it’s because they know you will deny them the chance to get their message across because all you want is a shouting match?

JH: Not at all. They’re a pretty robust bunch and I’d like to think they hide from the live microphone because they don’t want to be faced with questions that might very well embarrass them if they answer frankly and honestly.

JH: I’m sure that’s what you’d like to think but the facts suggest otherwise don’t they? And when they do try to answer frankly, you either snort with disbelief or try to ridicule them.

JH: Look, I wouldn’t deny that I get frustrated when the politician is simply refusing to answer the question, and I’m sure the listeners feel the same. It’s my job to ask the questions they want answered and if the politician refuses to engage or pulls the ‘I think what people really want to know …’ trick, then it’s true that occasionally I do let my irritation show.

JH: Nonsense! The fact is you have often been downright rude and that is simply not acceptable.

JH: Well … we agree on something at last! You’re absolutely right when you say being rude is unacceptable and I admit that I’ve been guilty of it – but not often. In my own defence I can think of only a tiny number of occasions when it’s happened and I regret it enormously – not least because it really does upset the audience. One of the biggest postbags I’ve ever had (in the days before email which shows you how long ago it happened) was for an interview in which I really did lose my temper. The audience ripped me apart afterwards and they were quite right to do so. If we invite people onto the programme we have to treat them in a civilised manner.

JH: So we’ve established that you’re not some saintly figure who always occupies the moral high ground. I suppose that’s a concession of sorts. But what I’m accusing you of goes much wider than that. Of course you have a responsibility to the audience and to the interviewee but you also have a wider responsibility. Let me suggest that when people like you treat politicians with contempt you invite us, the listeners, to do the same. And that’s bad for the whole democratic process.

JH: Once again, I agree with you. Not that we treat them with contempt, but that programmes like Today might contribute to the growing cynicism society has for politicians and the whole political process. But which would you prefer: a society in which politicians are regarded with awe and deference, or a society in which they are publicly held to account for their actions by people like me who question them when things go wrong or when we suspect they might be misleading us?

JH: Not for me to say: I’m the one who’s asking the questions this time remember! But what I’m asking you to deal with is a rather different accusation. If people like you, who’ve never been elected to so much as a seat on the local parish council, don’t show any respect to the people the nation has elected to run the country … why should anyone else?

JH: But that’s not what I’m saying. Quite the opposite. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I have huge respect for the men and women who choose to go into politics. I hate the idea that for so many people politics has become a dirty word. Henry Kissinger once said ninety per cent of politicians give the other ten per cent a bad reputation. The wonderful American comedian Lily Tomlin put it like this: ‘Ninety-eight per cent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two per cent who get all the publicity. But then – we elected them.’ Yes, that’s funny, but it’s wrong. One of the greatest broadcasters of the last century, Edward R. Murrow, got closer to it when he chastised politicians who complained that broadcasters had turned politics into a circus. He said the circus was already there and all the broadcasters had done was show the people that not all the performers were well trained.

JH: In other words you regard political interviewing as a branch of showbiz rather than your high-flown pretension to be serving democracy!

JH: Look, I’m not going to pretend that we don’t want our listeners to keep listening and if that means we want to make the interviews entertaining as well as informative I’m not going to apologise for that. After all, the BBC’s founder Lord Reith said nearly a century ago that its purpose was to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. But you’ll note that he made ‘entertain’ the last in that list. Ask yourself: what’s the point of doing long, worthy and boring interviews if nobody is listening?

JH: Ah … so now we get to the nub of it don’t we? It’s all about ratings!

JH: Of course it’s not ‘all about ratings’ but obviously they matter …

JH: … because the higher they are the more you can get away with charging the BBC a king’s ransom to present the programme!

JH: Ah … I wondered how long it would take you to get onto this because—

JH: I trust you’re not going to deny that you’ve been paid outrageous sums of money over the years for sitting in a comfy studio asking a few questions when somebody else has probably briefed you up to the eyeballs anyway?

JH: That’s not entirely fair is it? You know perfectly well I spent years as a reporter and foreign correspondent in some very dangerous parts of the world. And anyway are you really saying the amount a presenter gets paid shouldn’t be related to the size of his or her audience? That’s rubbish!

JH: Ooh … touchy aren’t we when it comes to your own greed! Have you forgotten it’s the licence payer who foots the bill and the vast majority of them earn a tiny percentage of what you take home?

JH: Yes, I am a bit touchy on this subject and that’s partly because for various reasons I got a bit of a bum rap when BBC salaries were first disclosed back in the summer of 2017. And anyway I volunteered several pay cuts as you well know …

JH: Yes yes yes … we all know you’re a saint but I’m afraid we’ve run out of time. John Humphrys … thank you.

JH: And thank you too. And now I’m going to tell my own story without all those impertinent questions …

One year after I left Today …

JH: So … we meet again. A whole year without hearing your truculent tones on Today. They seem to have managed perfectly well without you.

JH: Of course. There was never any doubt about that. I’ve always said that a programme is much more than the sum of its parts. I was one presenter among many.

JH: Very noble but I bet even if they’re not missing you, you’re missing them.

JH: Quite the opposite. I’m amazed at how little I’ve missed presenting Today. I won’t pretend that I haven’t screamed at the radio from time to time, but I’ve made the incredible discovery that there may be more to life than arguing with politicians.

JH: Sixty years as a journalist, fifty of them with the BBC, and you’re honestly telling me you were able to pack it in without so much as a backward glance? I don’t believe it!

JH: That’s because you never believe anything. But I’m still broadcasting and—

JH: Oh sure … Classic FM! Not exactly the Today programme is it?

JH: No, thank God! If you had a straight choice between listening to Mozart at ten past eight in the morning and listening to the Minister For Never Answering a Straight Question I’m prepared to bet—

JH: As you well know that’s a silly comparison. They fulfil different functions. But you’ll seize on any excuse to attack the BBC even though it gave you a bloody good living.

JH: That really is nonsense. I was critical of certain managers but I am as loyal to the BBC as I have ever been. I still believe it is the most important cultural and democratic institution this country has ever produced and—

JH: Oh really? If that’s true how do you explain the front-page headline in the Daily Mail the day after you left New Broadcasting House? Let me remind you what it said: ‘BBC ICON SAVAGES BIAS … AT THE BEEB’!

JH: No need to remind me. I remember it well and I stand by every word of what I wrote. The BBC has had problems with bias in many areas even though it has an absolute obligation – legal and moral – to remain impartial.

JH: So why didn’t you make a fuss at the time?

JH: I did. I just didn’t go public. You cannot continue to work for an organisation if you’re publicly attacking it at the same time.

JH: So now we have it! If it’s a choice between speaking out publicly for what matters and clinging on to your fat pay cheque you will take the money and stay shtum.

JH: I concede that’s how it might look but if every senior figure at the BBC who had misgivings about its conduct in one way or another were to walk out there’d be many empty chairs on the News Board.

JH: All the better for that …

JH: Quite possibly. But my worry is that, in the year since I left, BBC News has been under assault from activists determined to impose their own political agenda.

JH: I could almost hear the sneer in your voice when you used the word ‘activists’! I assume you’re referring to people from the black and ethnic minority community who’ve been seriously discriminated against for generations. Not to mention the LGBTQ community.

JH: No ‘sneer’ but, yes, it’s true that I’m deeply uneasy with that word ‘community’ in this context. I know many black and gay people who are insulted by the notion that they are members of a specific ‘community’. It suggests that they have no individual opinions or experiences of their own and must all see themselves as victims. They’re not and they don’t.

JH: So you’d be happy for the BBC to have carried on as it was when you joined fifty years ago? I suspect the only black people you ever saw then were cleaners and all the bosses were straight white men. And institutional racism wasn’t challenged because it wasn’t even recognised.

JH: Of course I wouldn’t. God forbid! They were indeed bad days in so many ways. But the BBC was hardly unique in racially discriminating. It was reflecting the nation. As I describe later in this book, I was brought up in what would certainly be regarded now as a ‘racist’ household. My parents had not a single neighbour, let alone friend, who was black. Jews were regarded with profound suspicion. People of mixed race were ‘half castes’. I can’t recall there being a single black child in my school or even a black teacher. The idea of being served in the post office, let alone the bank, by a black man or woman was literally unimaginable. And as for a black woman or even a white woman reading the news on the wireless, let alone the telly … dream on!

JH: In which case why have you been attacking the BBC for trying to put right those terrible wrongs? Why have you been sceptical about its coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement or its attempts to meet the demands of black and ethnic minorities, let alone transgender people?

JH: I’m afraid you simply don’t understand what the BBC is for. It is legally and morally bound to be unbiased. What I attack in the book is the way the BBC has failed too often in its duty to be totally objective in its coverage of controversial issues such as immigration and the EU. It is not the BBC’s job to transform society in ways that will meet the approval of certain pressure groups.

JH: Not even if those pressure groups are on the side of the angels and want to change society for the better?

JH: Not even then. No. And let’s not forget that Black Lives Matter in this country is a political movement with objectives many people regard as profoundly disturbing – such as ‘defunding’ the police and closing the prisons.

JH: So you’d be happy if we still had laws, for instance, making it illegal for a man to sleep with another man? It was right to send Oscar Wilde to jail was it?

JH: Don’t be ridiculous. It was an obscenity. And do you know why that law changed?

JH: I’m sure you’re going to tell me.

JH: It was changed because the men and women we sent to Parliament voted for the change. And, yes, they came under pressure, but it was not pressure from the BBC. It was pressure from the victims of that iniquitous law and their supporters who marched in the streets and demanded reform and won the support of the majority of British citizens. It’s called the democratic process. And the BBC reported that great campaign because that was its duty. And is still its duty.

JH: You can bang on about impartiality as much as you like but the fact is that Lord Reith himself, the man who created the BBC, said it was not impartial as between good and evil, and racism is evil.

JH: Tell me about it. I lived for years in South Africa. I saw the evil of apartheid at first hand and I reported what I saw. That’s what journalists do. And when the authorities tried to get the BBC to pull me out because I was ‘hostile’ to the apartheid regime, my boss told their ambassador in London to sling his hook. He was concerned only that I reported the facts.

JH: And one fact is that there is still racism in this country and the BBC has an obligation to report it.

JH: True, but there are now laws that make racism illegal and when those laws are broken the BBC does indeed report it. The same applies to sexuality. It’s illegal to discriminate against gays or lesbians or transgender people and the BBC’s reporting must reflect that.

JH: In which case why did you attack the BBC for appointing an LGBT correspondent?

JH: I didn’t. I attacked it for giving him a platform on which he said he regarded himself as a ‘mouthpiece’ for LGBT people. That’s simply outrageous. Journalists aren’t ‘mouthpieces’ for anyone.

JH: Even if their cause is just?

JH: Look … PR people are mouthpieces. They say what their clients want them to say. That’s what they get paid for. Journalists must question everyone and everything. They must accept almost nothing on trust.

JH: One single example of some loose language is hardly evidence of the BBC allowing its reporters and correspondents to set their own agenda.

JH: You want another? Since I wrote the book the BBC has also appointed a ‘gender and identity’ correspondent. She became involved in a massive row when she questioned the decision of a television news reporter to use the N-word in a report about a serious racist attack on a young black man.

JH: Quite right too. Everyone knows that word is simply unacceptable in this day and age.

JH: Fair enough, but in this case the young man’s mother wanted the word to be used because it proved the attack really was racially motivated. The police changed the charge from ‘hit and run’ to ‘racially motivated attack’. And the reporter warned the audience she was going to use an offensive word. So did the presenters.

JH: But I bet the audience was massively offended.

JH: That’s what was so interesting. When the report was shown on Points West there were a handful of complaints. But by the time it was repeated the following morning on the BBC’s national news the Twitter mob and the lobby groups were on the case. They screamed blue murder. There were more than 18,000 ‘complaints’ and the BBC started to panic. A week later the director general Lord Hall called a meeting of the top bosses on a Sunday and the position he’d originally taken was reversed. The BBC apologised.

JH: And so he should have. You can’t go around offending thousands of people without saying sorry – even if you are the almighty BBC.

JH: Rubbish! Thousands of people are offended every day by stuff the BBC reports. There’d be something wrong if they were not. The founding principle of the great New York Times was that it would report ‘without fear or favour’ and that’s as true today as it was back in 1896.

JH: But only if what you’re reporting is important …

JH: … which is precisely what Lord Hall said this was. I quote: ‘This is important journalism which the BBC should be reporting on and we will continue to do so.’ But then he said something which flatly undermined that: ‘Yet despite these good intentions, I recognise that we have ended up creating distress among many people.’ And then he apologised. So in other words the BBC will continue to do ‘important journalism’ just so long as it doesn’t ‘cause distress’. That is simply not rational or logical. How do they deal with, say, some low-life scum who deface a Holocaust memorial? Reporting it will cause distress among vast numbers of people (not just Jews) so should it be ignored?

JH: Of course not. But the BBC must take into account people’s feelings.

JH: Really? Which people specifically? And who makes the ultimate decision?

JH: Well … BBC editors following the guidelines.

JH: Ah … we can agree on something. My real concern is that those guidelines are at risk of being hijacked by, among others, an organisation called Embrace, which the BBC recognises as the voice of black and ethnic minority staff and which is represented at high-level management meetings. In an internal document to senior figures in the BBC, Embrace said it ‘understands there is not necessarily a consensus on the use of the N-word, however we believe this to be a matter for debate within Black communities, and not one for the BBC’. That is simply outrageous.

JH: Because?

JH: Because the BBC is responsible for ALL its editorial decisions. It cannot be excluded from the ‘debate’ by any special interest group.

JH: So you’re saying the N-word should be treated like any other. Really?

JH: Of course I’m not. There’s no question about it being highly offensive in a way that very few words are. But the BBC simply cannot ban a word. Any word. The very notion should send shivers down the spine of anyone who believes in the sanctity of free speech. The next step is banning thoughts. Ask Orwell about that.

JH: I wondered how long it would take you to trot out that old cliché. The fact is that the BBC took note of what its critics were saying and changed its mind. Maybe it should have done it more often in the past. It’s a publicly funded organisation dammit!

JH: Except that in my fifty years with the organisation there was never the sense that its senior management was being effectively held to ransom by people on its own staff in self-appointed ‘advisory’ groups who tell the bosses how things should be done. They themselves have largely no editorial responsibility and they all have much the same agenda. They are, in the modern sense of the word, about as ‘woke’ as it gets. I have spoken to editors and very senior bosses who admit they feel intimidated. It has a chilling effect.

JH: You exaggerate again. There have always been pressure groups telling the BBC how it should report stories. What’s different now?

JH: Everything is different in this digital age. Older people like me had precious little choice in what we watched and listened to, and the broadcasters had to meet standards set by the regulator. If they didn’t they could lose their licence to broadcast. But young people have always known a multi-channel, multi-platform, social media universe, most of which is impossible to regulate. So pretty much anything goes. And Twitter is a malign force in this universe where battles have to be fought and won, where forces can be mobilised, pressure applied and arguments are cheapened. The BBC top management have allowed – or even actively encouraged – the rise of the woke warriors and are now allowing them to frame the argument. They are the real power in BBC News today. And that is profoundly worrying.

JH: So if we have the dubious pleasure of meeting again in another year or two are you seriously telling me BBC News will have become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the equivalent of what Harold Wilson once memorably called a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’? Except, obviously, it would be ‘people’ rather than ‘men’ and Wilson was talking about striking dockers.

JH: No. Because there are still many good and brave people inside the BBC who share my fears. And, I believe, many more outside. So let me end with a quote of my own – from a poet rather than a politician. He was G.K. Chesterton. His poem was called ‘The Secret People’:

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget,

For we are the people of England … that have not spoken yet.

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.

‘You can’t go in there,’ he told me sternly.

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re not wearing your ID.’

‘But you know who I am and I’m on air in two minutes.’

‘Sorry. No ID, no admission.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘you do the bloody programme.’

Mercifully, he gave in. Yes, I know I was being petulant and he was just doing his job but I thought at the time I was striking a small blow for freedom. Today, I suspect I was just being difficult because I don’t like authority.

Mine was a childhood of smells: the horrible smell of the chemical Mam used for perms and the even more horrible (and probably dangerous) fumes from the chemicals Dad used when he had to polish furniture in the kitchen – which was often. One of the tricks of his trade – I was never quite sure why – was to pour methylated spirits onto, say, a tabletop, wait a few seconds and then set fire to it. There’d be a great ‘whoosh!’ Job done. Remember … this was in the kitchen where my mother cooked and the family ate. Even worse, because it was so noxious, was his use of oxalic acid. The crystals were boiled up in a baked beans tin on the gas stove and the liquid used as a very powerful bleach if he needed to lighten the colour of a particular piece of furniture. The fumes got into the back of your throat. God knows what they did to your lungs. My mother suffered the most and died a relatively early death. The doctor said her lungs ‘just gave out’. Unsurprising really.

Dad would have had an easier life had he been a bit less stroppy. He hated ‘snobs’ – a word that encompassed a vast range of people – and he hated authority in all its manifestations. Almost all. There was one exception. He did a lot of work at Cardiff and Port Talbot docks polishing the officers’ quarters on the banana boats and iron-ore carriers. I sometimes worked with him as an (unpaid) labourer and was always surprised to see how he treated the captain. He even called him ‘sir’. That was a word I’d never heard him use.

His politics were perfectly balanced. He hated capitalism – specifically those who got rich from it – and inherited wealth. And he hated socialism. When he turned up at a really grand house to do some work he would always ring the bell at the main entrance, and if he was ordered to use the servants’ entrance – which happened from time to time – he would tell them to bugger off and walk away. He was, as he unfailingly pointed out, a skilled craftsman. He was absolutely NOT a ‘servant’. The fact that he needed the work took second place to his pride.

He had a special place in hell reserved for the bosses of large companies, specifically the ship owners and the banks, who hired him to do a job and did not pay him for at least a couple of months. I decided long ago that when I become prime minister the first law I shall propose will be one that forces all companies to pay their bills within one month – except in the case of one-man firms like my father’s in which case it will be one week. Why not?

Dad hated royalty too. He was the only person in our street who did not go to see the Queen when she visited Cardiff soon after her coronation, even though her motorcade passed down a road only a few minutes’ walk from our house. ‘Why should I?’ he’d demand. ‘She’s just another human being … she’s no better than me.’ He was thrown out of his club because of her. It was a busy Friday night and the only spare seat was beneath a portrait of her. ‘Buggered if I’m sitting there!’ he announced. And that was the end of his club membership. He hated socialism equally. He regarded trade union leaders as dangerous and their members as dupes. The welfare state was an excuse for lazy men to live off hard-working men like him. He made an exception for women who had lost their husbands in the war or were struggling desperately to bring up their children. The Man from the Board, with his large notebook, intrusive questions and prying eyes, was hated by everyone in our street. If you applied for benefits you had to prove your need. One of our neighbours, who’d been widowed and was struggling desperately to bring up her two children, told my mother how he had demanded to know why she had four chairs around her kitchen table when there were only three in her family, her husband having died in the war. The Man from the Board said it would count against her when ‘the office’ reached a judgement on her case. Obviously my father hated him too.

The curious thing was that Dad never admitted we were poor – even when there was no work and we were really on our uppers. I remember one night – I was probably seven or eight – being woken up by him screaming when he should have been snoring. My brother told me he was having a nervous breakdown – not that he really knew what that meant. I understood much later that he was at breaking point because he didn’t know how he was going to put enough food on the table for all of us. I think what I understand now is that he regarded himself as a failure and that was more than he could handle.

In fact, we kids never really went hungry. We knew when times were hard because there would be lamb bones boiled for a very long time with potatoes and onions for dinner (meaning lunch) and sugar sandwiches for tea (meaning supper). In better times meals were strictly regimented. I can remember exactly what we had for dinner every day of the week. It almost never varied and it gave me my unshakeable conviction that the cheapest meat is the tastiest.

Scrag-end of lamb neck made the perfect stew, and point end of brisket the perfect roast – so long as you left it in the oven for about six hours. It was at least seventy per cent fat but that was fine because my father preferred fat to lean meat – especially when it was burned to a crisp. I can’t imagine it was terribly healthy food, but he made up for it by drinking the water the cabbage had been boiled in. And, yes, it was just as disgusting as it sounds.

Tea was slightly more flexible, especially in summer when the allotment was producing lots of lettuce and other salad ingredients. Funny how the middle class came to discover the joy of allotments for themselves in later years. Unlike the working class who grew the food because they needed it, the middle class grew it for the pleasure of it. Nothing was wasted in our house. I mean nothing. Stale bread was soaked in water and used to make bread pudding and, on the vanishingly rare occasion when one of us left some food on our plate for dinner it would be served up again for tea. Obviously there was no fridge, but that didn’t matter because nothing stayed around for long enough to go rotten. On hot days the milk stood in a saucepan of cold water. It worked.

My father’s nervous breakdown did not last long. He was not a man to show emotion of any kind. In the language of the time he ‘pulled himself together’ – almost as though his breakdown had been a fault in his character. I’m not sure the word ‘counselling’ existed in those days, possibly because there were so many men who had survived the war but were still suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. We had no language for PTSD then.

My favourite uncle, Tom, had fought in the Great War and was still suffering horribly. He had been gassed in the trenches, shipped back to Britain and put to work in the docks. Unbelievably, given the state of his lungs, his job was offloading coal. The coal dust completed the job that the gas had begun. His lungs were wrecked. He was never again able to lie down to sleep because his lungs would fill with fluid. His life had been hellish enough anyway.

He and Auntie Lizzie had one child, Tommy – or ‘Little Tommy’ as everyone called him even though he was a very large man. His brain and his face had been terribly damaged at birth and he had the mental age of a toddler and no speech. In fact, he had nothing – except an unlimited supply of love from his utterly wonderful parents. Whenever I went to his house Little Tommy would bring out the photograph albums and point gleefully at every picture of me and my siblings and parents and look terribly proud of himself for having made the connection. Then he would laugh uproariously.

Uncle Tommy and Auntie Lizzie had a hard life by even the harshest of standards. Desperate would be a better word. Their one constant worry was what would happen to Little Tommy ‘when we are gone’. But I never once heard them complain. Yes, I know that’s one of the oldest clichés in the book but so what? It happens to be true. Whether their lives might have been improved if they had complained we shall never know.

My father’s proudest possession was a medallion he won representing Glamorgan on the running track. He carried it with him in his jacket pocket everywhere. He was a first-class sprinter but two things held him back: his eyesight and his poverty. It’s not easy to race if you can’t see the man in front of you clearly. A friend of his told me how Dad once ran off the course and into a barbed-wire fence alongside the track. He kept going. He always did. But poverty proved to be a bigger problem. He had been selected to run for his athletics club in a meet some fifty miles from Cardiff. He had no money and so the club paid his bus fare for him. But those were the days when athletics was a strictly amateur sport and when the Amateur Athletics Association got to hear about his subsidised bus fare he was banned. Like Uncle Tom he did not complain. Unlike Uncle Tom he got angry.

I am sometimes told how remarkable it is that I made such a success of my career in spite of my poor background and having to leave school at fifteen. But of course that’s nonsense. I succeeded not in spite of it but because of it. And anyway I had some huge advantages. My mother was one of them. She left school at fourteen without a single qualification and had never, as far as I could tell, read a book in her life. Not that there was much time for reading with five children and no little luxuries such as a vacuum cleaner or washing machine or fridge. The only time I remember her sitting down was when there was darning to be done. Mostly socks as I recall.

She seldom expressed opinions – certainly never political ones. But she was utterly, single-mindedly determined that her children should have the education that was denied to her and my father. That meant that, unlike the other kids in our street, we were forced to do homework. It also meant that when the Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman came knocking on our door Mam made my father buy a set.

It cost a shilling a week and the salesman called every Saturday morning to collect the payment. It was the only thing my parents ever bought on the never-never. She told us one evening that the woman who lived opposite had paid for a holiday on the never-never. She could not have been more shocked if the neighbour had sold her children to the gypsies who came to the door every few weeks selling clothes pegs.

So precious were the encyclopaedias that my father built a bookcase especially to protect them. It had glass doors so the neighbours could admire them. Sadly, the doors had a lock and he was the key holder so when he was out – which was most of the time – we kids couldn’t use them. That might have seemed rather to defeat the reason for buying them, but even if we had never opened them they sent out an important message. Knowledge was important. It was empowering. My parents wanted their children to have something they could not have dreamed of in their own childhoods: access to everything they wanted to know beyond the grinding poverty of their own lives. Hence the homework.

There were two rooms downstairs in our house: the kitchen with a coal fire in it where we cooked and ate and washed (dishes and selves) and a tiny front room where no one was allowed except at Christmas and for homework. At least a couple of hours a night. That was when the encyclopaedias came out of the bookcase.

My parents were utterly determined that we would pass the eleven-plus and go to high school – we didn’t use the term ‘grammar school’ then – but beyond that, I don’t think they had any real ambitions for us. There was just the unswerving certainty that if we went to high school we would have a very different life from theirs. And we did pass – all of us. My younger brother Rob and I went to Cardiff High, which was regarded as the best school in Cardiff, if not in Wales. I hated it from the day I joined until the day I left.

The headmaster was a snob and I was clearly not the sort of boy he wanted at Cardiff High – far too working class for his refined tastes. I remember being beaten by him because I was late one morning. I tried explaining to him that it was because I had a morning newspaper round and the papers had not been delivered to the shop as early as usual because it was snowing heavily, which also made it difficult to get around on my bike. I tried to suggest I could not let down the shop’s customers and we needed the money from my job, but he was not impressed. The pain from the beating did not last long, but the anger never faded. Some years later, when I had started appearing on television and was considered something of a celebrity, I had a letter from the school. Would I accept the great honour of making a speech at the annual prize-giving? I replied immediately. Yes of course, I wrote, and then I added a few lines about what I proposed saying. The invitation was swiftly withdrawn.

By then the various chips on my shoulder had been firmly welded into place. Growing up in the immediate post-war years in Splott (an ugly name for a pretty ugly neighbourhood) I’m not sure children like me were really aware of being poor. We knew there were rich people, of course, but we simply did not come into contact with them. The man who owned the timber yard a couple of doors up from my house had a car, and that put him in a totally different class way beyond our own imaginings. It wasn’t, I think, until some of the neighbours got television sets and we were able to see inside the houses of middle-class people like the Grove Family (the first TV soap opera in Britain) that we realised the gulf between them and us.

I remember clearly the first time I was invited for tea in a middle-class home and how surprised I was that the milk came out of a jug rather than a bottle and the jam was in little cut-glass bowls. There was even a bowl of fruit on the table for anybody to help themselves. An old friend of mine, the brilliant comedian Ted Robbins, always says you could tell someone was really rich if they had fruit in the house even when no one was ill … and if they got out of the bath to have a wee.

Envy was one thing. Anger was something else again. Anger not because they were richer than us but because of the sense that some looked down at us for being poor. People like my old headmaster, and the hospital consultant I was sent to see when I was thirteen because I had developed a nasty cyst at the base of my spine. I was lying naked face down on a bed when the great man arrived, surrounded by a posse of young trainee doctors. He took a quick look at my cyst, ignoring me completely, and told his adoring acolytes: ‘The trouble with this boy is that he doesn’t bathe regularly.’ Mortified, I lay there, cringing with shame and embarrassment and hating the arrogant posh bastard and all those smug rich kids surrounding him who were sniggering at the great man’s disgraceful behaviour.

The resentment had been building for a long time. I was barely six years old when it began. It was a Friday lunchtime (dinner time) and although it was seventy years ago I remember it in terrible detail. I had been sent out to the local fish and chip shop to buy dinner. This was a huge treat – the closest we ever got to eating out. All the more special because it happened so rarely and only ever on Fridays. I got back to the house, clutching the hot, soggy mass wrapped in newspaper, vinegar dripping through, the smell an exquisite torture of anticipation. When I stepped into the kitchen my small world had changed for ever.

Dr Rees, our local GP, was there. This in itself was an extraordinary event. He visited very rarely – only when one of us was literally incapable of walking to his surgery – was always handed a glass of whisky by my father who kept a half-bottle in the cupboard for just this purpose, and never stayed more than a few minutes. This time he looked different and so did my parents. They were white and visibly trembling. The tears came later for my mother. I never saw my father cry. The doctor had just told them that Christine, my baby sister and the apple of my mother’s eye, was dead. She had been admitted to hospital the day before, suffering from gastroenteritis.

That is not a disease that kills people – not even in those more clinically primitive days – and for as long as he lived my father believed she died because we were poor. How can I make a judgement on that? All I know, because he told me years later, was that he and my mother had not been allowed to visit their dying child in hospital and, had they been middle class, things would have been different. She had been put in the ‘wrong’ ward and nobody spotted how ill she was. My mother would have spotted it had she been allowed to.

She never recovered from it. She had been blessed with a head of magnificent raven hair. It went white almost overnight. She had been strong and confident and healthy. She lost all that when Christine died. Eventually, of course, she came to terms with the loss. People do, don’t they? But she was never the same woman, and my father’s resentment and anger towards what he saw as the ruling class grew even stronger.

Their one consolation was their surviving children – especially my younger brother Rob, who was born five years after Christine died and took her place in my mother’s affection if not in her memory. As for me, I found another reason to rail against the establishment some years later.

My career had prospered and I was living overseas. On one of my weekly calls home my father told me he was desperately worried because he had been summoned to an interview with the tax man. It was a serious matter. He had been accused of fiddling his taxes. I knew this to be total nonsense. My parents were as honest as it is possible for two people to be. And anyway, my father earned so little from his one-man business he scarcely paid any taxes. That, it turned out, was the problem. My mother was summoned with him because she kept his accounts – such as they were. She told me some years later what happened.

She and Dad had been made to sit on two hard chairs in the inspector’s office and he sat behind his desk. He handed Mam a copy of her accounts and told Dad to swear they were accurate and that they would be in very big trouble if they were not. Dad said they were. Then the inspector said:

‘The accounts show you have earned very little money indeed. If that is so, would you explain how it is that you and your wife were able to take very long holidays not only to the United States of America but also to South Africa? And don’t try to deny it. We have checked out the information handed to us and it is accurate in every detail.’ Presumably some jealous neighbour had snitched.

Dad told me what happened next:

‘Your mother leaped to her feet and she looked that man straight in the eyes and said: “My son lived in America and he lives in South Africa now and he sent us the tickets and paid for both holidays. My son is the correspondent for the BBC. And if you don’t believe me you can watch him on television!”’

I talked to Mam about it in her closing years. She told me it had been one of the proudest moments of her life.

You can add that tax inspector to my blacklist of authority figures. It is a long one and, I fear, still growing.

2

The teenAGE pAGE

I was seven when I knew that I wanted to be a reporter. I’d like to claim I was inspired by grandiose visions of speaking truth to power and enthralling my millions of readers with eyewitness accounts of the great events that would determine the future of humanity. The reality was rather more prosaic and a lot more embarrassing.

In post-war Britain poor families like mine did not squander what little spare cash they had on buying books and there was no television, and so much of my spare time was spent reading comics – mostly Superman. Vast bundles of second-hand comics were sent to this country from the United States as ballast in cargo ships. They ended up being sold for a penny or two in local newsagents and then getting swapped between one scruffy kid and another. Superman, as all aficionados will know, took as his human alter ego a chap called Clark Kent and Clark Kent was a reporter. Ergo: reporters were akin to Superman. I would break free from my grim existence in the back streets of Cardiff and save the world into the bargain by becoming Superman. And Lois Lane – adored by everyone who read the comics – would be my girlfriend.

You might say that for a very small boy that logic was perfectly understandable. Not so much for a grown adult maybe. But no matter, when I left school at fifteen I had only one ambition and that was to get a job on a local paper. There wasn’t much alternative. The monster of media studies had yet to be created.

No, you learned on the job – if you were lucky enough to get one. I got mine by lying, or, as we journalists prefer to describe it, through a little creative embellishment of the facts. My years in school had been, to put it kindly, undistinguished and highly unlikely to impress any prospective boss. But I’d been told that the editor of the Penarth Times – a weekly paper in a small seaside town a few miles outside Cardiff – was more impressed by athletes than brainboxes. So I allowed him to believe that I had often been first across the finishing line when Cardiff High School staged its cross-country races. It was technically true – but only because I was so hopeless at running that I was never selected to compete and instead chose to cycle alongside the real athletes shouting encouragement (or abuse). My deception worked.

‘Just what reporters need,’ huffed the editor, ‘plenty of stamina and determination!’ I still feel a twinge of guilt – but only a very small one.

I learned a great deal during my two years on the Penarth Times. For a start: how local papers stayed in business. The good people of Penarth were far more likely to buy it if their names were printed in it, so one of my regular jobs was to stand outside the church after a funeral or wedding and take the names of everyone who had attended. That taught me something else. Accuracy. By and large our readers asked little enough of the paper, but if their name was spelled incorrectly my editor would hear of it. They would demand an apology and a correction the following week. He would not be pleased.

Another skill I developed was how to stay awake in the local library, which was where I spent very large chunks of my time leafing through past issues of the paper in the hope that I might find something interesting enough to fill the ‘Penarth 50 Years Ago’ column. There almost never was anything interesting, so I filled it with boring stuff instead. Nobody seemed to mind – I suspect for the very good reason that nobody read it.

My biggest contribution to the survival of the Penarth Times was on a more practical level. I became an expert in operating a Flit gun: a hand pump you filled with insecticide and squirted at flies or other nasty insects in the house. It was a lifesaver for the Penarth Times when the printers went on strike. The proprietor had refused to shut the paper down. He rampaged around the place declaring that he wasn’t going to allow a couple of bolshie inky-fingered troublemakers to deprive the good people of Penarth of their democratic right to be informed about the local council’s latest pronouncements or who was the latest miscreant to be fined five shillings for urinating against a wall in the town centre after a pint too many. So the paper would be printed without them.

Sterling stuff, but not without one or two difficulties. It didn’t help that none of us had the first idea how to operate a printing press, even something as modest as the one owned by the Penarth Times. It wasn’t exactly one of those thundering behemoths I was to encounter on daily papers years later – the sort that made the whole building shudder when they roared into life – but still way beyond our ability, as was the typesetting. So instead we used just typewriters and stencils and an ancient duplicating machine. The problem was that the paper had a habit of sticking to the roller. My job was to stand beside the machine with a Flit gun filled with water, and give it a quick squirt when it happened. It worked a treat – even if it did end up looking like an extremely amateurish version of a parish magazine. Mercifully the strike didn’t last long: the printers had made their point and good relations were restored.

Sadly, the strike had done nothing to dampen our boss’s enthusiasm for establishing a publishing empire – albeit a modest one. Penarth’s population was tiny compared with Cardiff’s. It had a morning and evening paper (the Western Mail and South Wales Echo) but no weekly, so the boss decided we should fill the gap with a new weekly newspaper called the Cardiff & District News. It was a brilliant idea – or might have been except that we had no budget.

One feature of the paper was a double-page spread headlined, in huge type, ‘the teenAGE pAGE’. It was my job to edit it and, because there was no money for reporters, to do all the reporting as well. I did not complain – mostly because my editor would not have listened but also because I used my fancy title (I called myself Showbiz Editor) to blag free tickets for all the big concerts in Cardiff. Since it was the capital city of Wales it attracted lots of big stars and I usually managed to persuade the promoters to fix an interview for me with them. I won’t pretend they were memorable interviews, but when you’re sixteen and discovering (or hoping to discover) what sex was all about, that wasn’t really the point.

A casual ‘Fancy meeting Cliff Richard next week … or Billy Fury or the Everly Brothers?’ would surely work miracles with girls who had been way out of my league even before I was struck down by late-onset chickenpox and spottier than a Dalmatian. The theory was sound – I’d be able to bask in reflected glory – but I failed to spot the obvious flaw. The girls did indeed fall in love – but not with me.

My greatest professional triumph was to set up an interview with the one star who put all the others in the shade. She was Ella Fitzgerald, easily the greatest singer of her generation. It was also my greatest disaster. The interview was scheduled to happen in her dressing room before she went on stage with another musical giant, Count Basie, and his orchestra. When I arrived at the theatre I was not so much paralysed with nerves as the exact opposite. I was hyperactive, bouncing from one foot to the other, waving my arms and speaking much too loudly. And when I was finally ushered into the presence I was overwhelmed: hopelessly star-struck.

There she stood, magnificent in her glittering stage gown, and utterly terrifying. She was a living legend at the height of her powers and I was an awkward teenager in total awe of her – so awkward that as I advanced towards her my elbow caught the corner of a mirror, which fell from the table and smashed to pieces. Smashing a mirror was said to be bad luck at the best of time. Smashing a mirror in the dressing room of a star minutes before she was about to go on stage put it in another category altogether.

She glanced across at me. ‘Get that fucking kid outta here!’ she snarled. And they did. Within a second I was surrounded by her heavies. My feet literally did not touch the ground. They took my elbows, lifted me about a foot off the floor and deposited me outside the dressing room with the big star on the door. So ended my career as a showbiz reporter.

Many years later when I was working in New York for the BBC I (almost) met my other musical hero: Duke Ellington. He was performing for a small, invited audience in the Rainbow Room at the top of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and I wangled an invitation. I was determined to shake the great man’s hand and be able to claim in years to come that we’d been old mates, so when he left in the interval I followed. He was headed for the gents’ toilet. I stood at the urinal next to him and tried to strike up a conversation. And I froze. I suppose I can boast that I peed alongside the greatest jazz musician of all time but the truth is I was so intimidated by his presence I couldn’t even manage that.

As for my career on the Cardiff & District News, it did not last long. Apart from writing most of the paper (stealing stories from the Echo and Mail) I also had to deliver it. Physically deliver it, that is, to the few newsagents in Cardiff who had agreed to stock it on the strict condition that if it didn’t sell they got their money back. I was too young to drive, so the publisher hired the services of a nice old lady who owned a pre-war Ford Prefect. She and I would pile the newly printed papers on the back seat and sail off to Cardiff. The following week we would repeat the journey, each time collecting the unsold papers and dumping them in the boot. Logic dictates it is impossible, but I have always believed that we took back more newspapers than we had delivered the previous week. The Cardiff & District News did not live to see the year out. I don’t think anyone noticed.

I had hit seventeen when that happened and decided it was time to leave to work on my next newspaper, the Merthyr Express. It was also a weekly, but there the similarity ended. Penarth was prosperous and so prim and proper in those days that it may even be true that it was the inspiration for the old gag about its residents believing that ‘sex is what coal comes in’. Merthyr was a tough industrial town with a glorious past and not much of a future. It went from being the most prosperous town in Wales to the poorest. There was still coal mining in the South Wales valleys but towns like Merthyr were living on their histories. And what a history.

At the peak of the Industrial Revolution, the Welsh valleys were producing vast amounts of coal and iron. Merthyr had four great ironworks (one of them was said to be the most productive in the world) and – maybe Merthyr’s proudest boast – the first railway. The locomotive was designed by the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick – Stephenson’s Rocket came later – and it managed to haul twenty-five tons of iron and a few passengers too.

So there was plenty of money being made, but not much of it found its way to the wretched souls slaving for a pittance in the ironworks and the pits as they created the wealth for the mighty ironmasters and pit owners to enjoy. The great Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote of ‘those poor creatures broiling, all in sweat and dirt, amid their furnaces, pits and rolling mills’.

The area where most of them lived became known as ‘Little Hell’ – and for good reason. If their jobs didn’t kill them there was a pretty good chance they and their families would be seen off by the cholera and typhoid which thrived in the open sewers. Flushing toilets were a stranger to Little Hell. A century after Carlyle, when I was reporting for the Merthyr Express, I had my own tiny taste of what the miners he had written about all those years ago had to endure. To this day I marvel that any of them managed to survive.

To drop in a cage to the bottom of a deep mine is not an experience for the faint-hearted. The speed of the descent through total darkness is terrifying, made worse by the grit that flies through the air, stinging your face. And when you get to the bottom all you can think about is how quickly you can get to the surface again. The idea that these men could spend a third of their lives down there was simply incomprehensible to me – as was the massive physical effort it had taken to create this and every other deep mine in the valleys.

I suppose I had imagined in my childish ignorance that once a mine had been sunk the miners immediately found the coal waiting for them to hack away and get it hauled to the surface. But first, of course, they had to dig out the thousands of tons of rock and waste to form the tunnels that gave them access to the black stuff. I looked up at the roof of the tunnel we were walking through to get to the coalface. All that stood between us and instant death were the ceiling props these men had put in place. If they got it wrong they died. And, of course, vast numbers did die: some from roof falls, many more from the deadly gases that could seep into the tunnels and reach the coalface.

Carbon monoxide was one of the big killers until, in 1913, someone had the brilliant idea of taking canaries down the mine. If the canary keeled over, the miners knew they had to get to the surface fast. Canaries were still being used until only a few years before I first went down a mine in 1961. An even bigger killer was methane.

An old miner told me what it was like to be working at the coalface and hear a loud bang. It happened to him once and, mercifully, turned out to be a relatively minor incident – a few injuries but no one killed. Even so, I struggled to imagine the sheer terror as he and the men with him raced back through the tunnel, not knowing whether the blast had brought down the roof ahead of them so they would be trapped. Perhaps rescuers would break through the fallen rock to save them. Perhaps they wouldn’t and they would die, as so many miners had, when their oxygen ran out or the attempt to rescue them brought more rocks crashing down and crushing them. Fatal accidents were commonplace.

Every miner in the Welsh valleys had his own story to tell of disasters that nearly happened – and those that did. The worst – only a few miles from Merthyr – killed more men and boys than any other mining disaster in the history of British mining. It was in 1913. Nearly 950 men were working at the Senghenydd colliery when a massive explosion ripped it apart and 439 were killed either by the blast itself or the poisonous gas that had created it.

Like most reporters working in the valleys in the days when almost every village had its colliery and every colliery had its share of tragedies, I was occasionally ordered by the editor to knock on the door of a grieving widow. I dreaded it. How could such an intrusion be justified at such a time? But never once was I sent away. Invariably I was invited in, given a cup of tea and shown photographs of the dead miner while the widow talked about what a wonderful man he had been. I seldom saw a tear shed – and I have always wondered why. Perhaps it was because women who married miners lived with fear from day one. They were prepared for the worst to happen. They knew, too, that even if their husband survived, his retirement would be a short one. The biggest killer of all was not the gas: it was the dust.

The first time I went for a drink in a miners’ club I noticed that many of the miners coming in after their shift would have a pint of water plonked in front of them by the barman. I asked him why. His answer was obvious when you think of it: ‘Waste of money buying a pint when your throat’s full of dust isn’t it? Makes sense to wash the dust away so you can taste the beer.’ If it was doing that to your throat, I thought, what the hell was it doing to your lungs? The answer: pneumoconiosis or silicosis or any of the other hideous illnesses caused by a life spent underground breathing in the deadly dust.

Many years after I had left the valleys behind me I reported on the 1984–5 miners’ strikes that brought the coalfields to a halt in a doomed attempt to save them from the cost-cutters and the hated Margaret Thatcher. I talked to many angry miners. But it was rare to meet a miner’s wife who mourned the death of the industry. In all my years in South Wales I never spoke to a mother who wanted her sons to follow their father down the pit.

I was to see for myself the ultimate, unthinkable, price of coal: a disaster in so many ways worse than all the others because its victims, crushed or suffocated to death, had not chosen to face the dangers of deep mining. But that was a few years after I had left the Merthyr Express to return to Cardiff and take another step up the journalistic greasy pole.

I had been offered a job as a reporter on a national daily no less – though not exactly the giddy heights of Fleet Street. It was the Western Mail, the national daily of Wales. I’d like to report that pretty soon my name was up in lights, or at least writ large on the front page. Sadly it never was. Not once. My great mistake had been to bear the same surname as the news editor of the paper, though he spelled his with an ‘e’ which I affected to think rather vulgar. Mine, I claimed, was pure Welsh, which was complete nonsense. The truth was that an incompetent registrar had misspelled my surname on my birth certificate so my parents and older siblings were ‘Humphreys’ and I was ‘Humphrys’. I pointed out to my news editor – a rather unpleasant bully with one of the most prominent beetled brows I had ever seen – that the different spelling would remove any confusion in the reader’s mind, but he was having none of it. He ordered me to adopt a different name for byline purposes. I chose Desmond and so I became ‘John Desmond’ for Mail readers. (I had been christened ‘Desmond John Humphrys’ but contracted very severe hooping cough when I was little and was such a miserable child my mother decreed I should henceforth be known as John. She was not, she announced, going to have people calling me ‘Dismal Desmond’.)

In spite of my new name, my brief time on the Mail was not particularly distinguished. But I suppose I must have done enough to impress someone because, my editor told me after I’d been working there for a year or so, I had come to the attention of ‘London’. He seemed almost as surprised as me. For a young provincial hack, ‘London’ was not just beyond my wildest dreams. It had not even figured in them. Until now.

The Western Mail and many other papers, including the mighty Times and Sunday Times, were owned by the Thomson newspaper group. My editor told me the Sunday Times, no less, was thinking of giving me a job and I was to go to London to meet both its managing editor and news editor over lunch. I was terrified – and totally intimidated. I’d been to London only twice in my life and I had never eaten in a restaurant anywhere near as grand as Simpson’s in the Strand, which was where they took me. Nor had I met such imposing journalists before.

My own recollection of the lunch was more of trying to remember which knife and fork to use and agreeing with everything my hosts said rather than making a serious attempt to impress them with my journalistic brilliance. I had no doubt they would send me on my way with a pat on the head and a patronising ‘perhaps you’re not quite ready for the big time just yet’ and, had they done so, I suspect I’d have agreed and felt rather relieved. But they didn’t. They offered me the job of reporter on the paper’s brand-new Insight section. This really was the cutting edge of national investigative journalism. Insight, which exists to this day, was to become one of the most respected institutions on one of the most respected newspapers in the world. On the train back to Cardiff I wondered when I would wake up from this ridiculous dream.

The next day I told the Sunday Times I didn’t want the job.

Like so many things in life it happened because of a chance encounter. When I got back to Cardiff from London I’d gone to meet a few reporter friends for a drink in our favourite pub to do some serious boasting. One of them, Norman Rees, had left newspapers to work for the new commercial television station TWW. He out-boasted me. Newspapers, he told me, were old hat. Television was where it was at. He made it sound amazingly glamorous and exciting. I’d be famous – plastered all over everyone’s TV screens, the prettiest girls in Cardiff throwing themselves at my feet wherever I went! Why didn’t I join him? He promised he could persuade his editor to give me an interview if I was up for it. I was and he did and I got the job.

The Sunday Times were furious. They told me I had wasted their time (not to mention a fat bill at Simpson’s) and my name was on their blacklist. If I ever so much as dreamed of working for Times Newspapers again I could forget it – which made it all the more gratifying when, thirty years later, I was invited to write the main comment column for the Sunday Times and did so for five years.

It’s fair to say that Norman had rather overplayed the glamour and excitement bit. TWW was among the first companies to get a commercial television licence. It broadcast to South Wales and the West Country – a ridiculous cultural mix given that the two regions had virtually nothing in common apart from the Bristol Channel – and it was also among the first to lose its licence. That did not come as a great surprise. Most of us thought its owners were far more concerned with selling exciting new adverts. showing perfectly made-up housewives, with just a few stray blonde hairs escaping from their Alice bands, glowing with pride as they told us how happy they had made their hard-working husbands by discovering how to make the perfect gravy. Not to mention the sheer joy of washing dishes, knowing that it would make their hands just as soft as their face – which would make those hard-working husbands even more proud of them. Ah … the glory days of television advertising.

It might have been sexist garbage, but the profits poured in. Charging a fortune to broadcast commercials was so much easier than trying to produce insightful television programmes. The Canadian publishing tycoon Lord Thomson, who owned TWW and half of Fleet Street, famously called it a ‘licence to print money’ and so cross was he when they lost their licence that they abandoned the station months before they were supposed to. I suspect few tears were shed by the viewers.

My own contribution to TWW was limited but it taught me a lot – such as not getting drunk at lunchtime on Christmas Eve if you were live on telly that night. I did – and when I leaned in closer to try to read the autocue I fell off my chair. No one in the studio or the newsroom seemed to care very much – possibly because they were all as drunk as me. I also learned that nothing in the whole world is more scary than drying up on live television. I did it twice. It’s the most extraordinary sensation – as though you are floating just below the studio ceiling looking down on a young man whose body, tongue and brain have become totally paralysed.

The first time it happened I was trying to interview the most famous broadcaster in the land, the ultimate smooth-talking Irishman Eamonn Andrews, and the second time I was interviewing the finest rugby player Wales has ever produced, Bleddyn Williams. Bleddyn rescued me but Eamonn just smiled and waited for consciousness to return to me, which it did after an hour. Or maybe it was only five seconds. Either way, the scars remain.

One memorable (for me) story was the disappearance of a middle-aged man who had vanished from his home in Cardiff without trace for no apparent reason. An everyday event, perhaps, but this was local telly and ‘man disappears’ was news. So I was sent off to interview his wife. She was a nurse – clearly in great distress – and she greeted me warmly, sat me down with a cup of tea and talked at length about her fears for what might have happened to her beloved husband. She shed a quiet tear and my heart bled for her. Some months later he turned up. The police found him underneath the patio on which I had been sitting taking tea with the loving wife who buried him there after she had murdered him.

By now I had been a journalist for the best part of ten years. I was to practise the trade for another fifty years, travelling the world, reporting on many of the great events that would come to define the century. I would, in the words of the old cliché, have the great privilege of occupying a ringside seat at history. I would watch an American president forced to resign in disgrace. I would report on earthquakes and famines and wars around the globe. But nothing would compare with what happened just a few miles from where I was born, on 21 October 1966. I was still a young man who had barely set foot outside South Wales. I watched a community deal with a tragedy I still struggle to comprehend. It left me with memories that will never fade, an immense respect for the strength of human beings faced with horror beyond comprehension and a lifelong distrust of authority.

On that terrible morning I had turned up as usual just after nine in the TWW newsroom, and I wandered over to the Telex machine that was always clattering away spewing out endless, useless information. One relatively small story had caught my news editor’s eye. It reported that there had been a tip slide at Aberfan in the Merthyr Valley.

There was nothing particularly unusual in that. It often happened. The waste tips above the old collieries were notoriously unstable and shamefully neglected. They were slipping and sliding all over the valleys. Sometimes a slide would take the occasional miners’ cottage with it, but mostly they just made a mess of the road and the land beneath. This time it seemed it might be a little more serious than that.

I knew Aberfan well from my years on the Merthyr Express. My closest friend on the paper lived there and I often stayed with him after we had drunk too much beer in his local. So I knew that there was a primary school below the tip and at that time in the morning it would have been full of children. But there was nothing in the PA report to suggest that it had been affected or that this was anything more than the usual minor slippage. Even so, nothing else of any news value was going on in South Wales that morning, so I suggested I might as well drive up the valley to take a look. It was only twenty-five miles away from Cardiff and if I thought the story was big enough to merit sending a film crew I could always phone in and ask for one.

As soon as I’d started driving up the valley I began to get the sense that something truly awful had happened. The steep sides of the Welsh valleys are lined with cottages, little terraced homes of drab grey squatting defensively against the hillside. You could tell which were the miners’ cottages – almost all of them at that time – because it was the day of the week when they had their small piles of coal dumped outside. Cheap coal was one of the few perks of being a miner. Normally the women would have been busy shovelling it up and carrying it through their tiny terraced houses to dump in the small coal sheds at the back. This morning they were standing at their doors looking worried, peering up the valley in the direction in which I was driving. They knew something bad had happened and so, by now, did I. None of us could begin to imagine how bad. Here is how I described, all those years ago, what had happened:

Just after 9.15 a group of workmen had been sent to the top of the big tip that loomed above Aberfan, grey, black and ugly. There had been some worrying signs that it was sinking more than usual. A deep depression had formed within the tip like the crater in a volcano. As the men watched, the waste rose into the depression, formed itself into a lethal tidal wave of slurry and rolled down the hillside, gathering speed and height until it was thirty feet high and destroying everything in its path. From that moment the name of Aberfan has been synonymous with tragedy beyond comprehension.

It crushed part of the school and some tiny houses alongside like a ton of concrete dropping on a matchbox. And what that foul mixture of black waste did not flatten it filled – classrooms choked with the stuff until the building was covered and the school became a tomb. The moment the terrible news reached them, hundreds of miners had abandoned the coalface at the colliery which had created that monstrous tip and raced to the surface. And there they were when I arrived, their faces still black – save for the streaks of white from the sweat and the tears as they dug and prayed and wept. Most of them were digging for their own children.

Every so often someone would scream for silence and we would all stand frozen. Was that the cry of a child we had heard coming from deep below us? Sometimes it was and some were saved. I saw a burly policeman, his helmet comically lopsided, carrying a little girl in his arms, her legs dangling down, her shoes missing. She was a skinny little thing, no more than nine years old. Thank God she was alive. The men dug all day and all night and all the next day. They dug until there were no more faint cries, no more hope, but still they kept going. They were digging now for bodies.

I watched through the hours and days that followed as the tiny coffins mounted up in the little chapel. There is nothing so poignant as the sight of a child’s coffin. By the end of it there were 116 of them. One hundred and sixteen dead children and twenty-eight adults.

When the miners finally stopped digging they went home to weep, to mourn, to relive the nightmare. To cherish the children who were spared. And later to show their anger at the criminal stupidity and venality of the officials and politicians who had allowed it to happen.

Never was anger more justified. The National Coal Board who ran the mines had – from a mixture of deceit and cowardice and fear of retribution – tried to claim that the tragedy was an act of God. It was not. It was an act of negligence by man. Criminal negligence. The politician responsible for the NCB, Lord Robens, a blustering lying bully of a man, had gone on television to say that the cause of the disaster was the water from a natural spring which had been pouring into the centre of the tip and produced the water bomb that finally exploded with such devastating results. The spring, said Robens, was completely unknown. That was just one of his lies. Not only was it known, its presence was marked on local maps and the older miners knew exactly where it was and what the danger was and they had been saying so for years. They were ignored. Mercifully, they had put their fears in writing and the letters, written by the miners and ignored by the NCB, were eventually produced at the inquiry into the disaster so the truth could be revealed for the world to see.

I was twenty-three when Aberfan happened. I have been back many times over the years and talked to the dwindling handful of bereaved parents and to the few children in the school who survived the disaster. And every time I wonder how they were able to recover from their grief and the nightmare of that terrible morning. But ‘recover’ is the wrong word. As so many have told me, you don’t get over it … you just have to live with it. What is the alternative? To that, there is no answer.

What we owe the people of Aberfan

Today, 20 October 2016

When I drove here from Cardiff fifty years ago, the hills on either side of the valley were scarred with tips. Black and ugly and threatening. Now, as I look back down the valley from this cemetery, they’re gone. Bulldozed away or covered with grass and trees. The mining valleys of South Wales are green again. The river that flows beneath me was also black and dead. And now it’s clean and children can play and fish in its shallows. And the men of these valleys, unlike their fathers, do not end their day’s work with lungs full of coal dust. I never met a miner who said he wanted his son to follow him down the pit. The nations owed miners a debt of gratitude for the wealth they helped create over the centuries. The mines have gone, of course, but our generation owes something different to the people of Aberfan. Respect for the courage and dignity they have shown for fifty years in dealing with unimaginable grief. But more than that. The children in these graves were betrayed by the men in power decades ago who refused to listen to their fathers when they warned them their little school faced a mortal danger. If Aberfan stands for anything today, apart from unbearable grief, it stands as a reminder for every journalist in the land of this: authority must always be challenged.

3

Building a cathedral

I was still in my early twenties when I was offered a job by the BBC. I remember feeling terribly pleased with myself. I was going to be based in Liverpool, the most exciting beat in Britain for a reporter in those days, with the Beatles and the Cavern club at one end of the news scale and dock strikes at the other. I was to work out of Castle Chambers, an office building in the heart of the city where the north-west Representative of the BBC was based. The Representative (I can never think of him without the capital letter) was a dapper little fellow called Reg. But only to his closest friends. To young pond life like me he was Major H. R. V. Jordan (Retd), JP, BA (Hons) and he was a very grand figure indeed.

Reg had an extremely large office with a well-stocked cocktail cabinet and two elegant young secretaries. Not one, you will note, but two. Their duties, it is accurate to say, were less than onerous. Reg graced the office a couple of times a week to sign a few letters, and occasionally drove up the coast to Blackpool for lunch with ‘my friend, the mayor of Blackpool’ in his large plum-coloured Jaguar and white cotton driving gloves before returning to his home in The Wirral.

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.

What happened in the BBC in the early 1970s was that two separate cultures were encouraged to develop: radio and television. That meant two different satrapies, each with its own boss, management structure and team of journalists – and crucially, each with its own budget. Television, for entirely obvious reasons, had much more money than radio and, equally obviously, was seen as more glamorous. Television wanted to create its own stars.

So a corps of television foreign correspondents was formed. In the early 1970s four were appointed to cover the world: one based in the Far East, one in Europe, one in East Africa and one in the United States. I won Washington.

In 1987, John Birt became deputy director general of the BBC, in charge of news and current affairs, and he tried to change all that. He had quite a fight on his hands: forcing radical change on an organisation, many of whose bosses enjoyed living in the past. It was more comfortable there. But he did it. He established the specialist journalist posts on which BBC News is still founded and insisted that correspondents should work for both TV and radio – he called it ‘bi-medialism’. He also thought the BBC had ‘starved’ TV news of resources. He pushed news and current affairs together into one directorate. They did not go willingly.

There was ‘no single and coherent overview of the BBC’s journalism’, he wrote later. Many of the news staff, he said, had ‘long since ceased to think enquiringly’. It’s fair to say that many of the news staff did not warm to him. But Birt was a man with a plan, which was unusual for the BBC. In the 1970s, he had developed his journalistic philosophy – what became known as his ‘Mission to Explain’. He argued that there was a bias against understanding in television journalism. News and feature journalism, he wrote, both failed to put events in their proper context:

Our economic problems for instance, manifest themselves in a wide variety of symptoms – deteriorating balance of payments, a sinking pound, rising unemployment, accelerating inflation and so on.

The news, devoting two minutes on successive nights to the latest unemployment figures or the state of the stock market, with no time to put the story in context, gives the viewer no sense of how any of these problems relate to each other.

In 1989, as a sign of the new Birtist seriousness, Breakfast News replaced the Breakfast programme. The era of comfy sofas and chunky sweaters was over. Weekend television bulletins were put under the control of the editor of the flagship Nine O’Clock News, with its two presenters sharing the seven-day presentation duties, to try to invest the bulletins with greater authority.

Birt backed the launch of continuous news output and took money from traditional services to fund the twenty-four-hour news channel and BBC News Online. The BBC World news channel was launched, aimed at an international TV audience, originally under the name World Service Television and funded by advertising and subscription.

In some ways Birt’s greatest achievement was to recognise the significance of the nascent digital revolution that was to change all our lives. He saw that the era when the family all sat around together in the evenings watching whatever it was that the BBC and ITV bosses saw fit to show them was coming to an end. Soon we would not dance to the tune of the mighty channel controllers: we would create our own schedules. And if we wanted to watch news, we would watch it when we chose to, rather than when the schedule dictated. The verb ‘viewing’ would be replaced by ‘consuming’ and the implications of that were clear. Viewers watched what they were given; consumers picked and chose when and where.

Birt decided that the BBC should launch new channels and new platforms. At the 1996 Edinburgh Television Festival, he said that without the resources to prepare for the digital age, the BBC would be ‘history’. So whatever we may have thought about Birt at the time, he had a vision for our journalism and positioned the BBC for the technology of the future with uncanny accuracy. In 1997, when BBC Online was launched, there were fewer than 8 million people online in the UK as opposed to the tens of millions with a TV licence. The Times asked whether ‘dear old Auntie, always regarded as a little dotty’ had now gone ‘completely bats’. A few years later it, and many other newspapers, were fighting to halt the march of BBC Online across their own borders.

Birt’s impact on the BBC’s foreign reporting is being felt to this day too. There are correspondents reporting more and more easily from nearly every corner of the world on scores of different news channels that broadcast 24/7. They can email their videos or radio reports or broadcast direct from their mobile phones. Everywhere you look, you can find news: on your phone, your computer, your watch, on Twitter, on the screen at the rail station, on aeroplanes. Never in the history of the human race have we been able to communicate with each other so quickly.

And yet, at the risk of seeming to hark back to a golden era, I fear we have lost something in translation. Yes, we no longer have to worry about putting the film in the ‘soup’ and waiting anxiously for it to re-emerge. Yes, we can cover the ground more quickly. Yes, we can report from any corner of the world.

But ever more news reported ever more swiftly, if not instantaneously, is not necessarily better. We need to feel the quality as well as the depth and speed of delivery.

4

A gold-plated, diamond-encrusted tip-off

When the first four television foreign correspondents were appointed in the early 1970s I was sent to the United States. My patch stretched from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of South America. Pity we didn’t have air miles in those days. Rather bizarrely, the BBC decided I should set up our news bureau in New York and not Washington. That didn’t last long. Within days of my setting foot on US soil the biggest American political story of the century was beginning to seep out. A group of shady characters hired by Republican Party sympathisers had been caught breaking into the offices of the Democratic Party. The offices were in a building called Watergate. I had been sent to the States for a three-month stint. I was to stay for nearly six years.

I suggested earlier the qualities that reporters need as a basic minimum to survive in the trade: a modicum of literary skill, a plausible manner, and rat-like cunning. All those might help, but every reporter knows that what really matters is the ability to be in the right place at the right time. It’s called luck. I’ve always had more than my share of it. You don’t get luckier than fetching up in the United States just as Watergate was about to blow a massive hole in the side of the White House and threaten to wreck the US constitution and everything the presidency stood for. If the head of state could survive even though he was proving to be a liar and a crook, what exactly was the point of the great American constitution? This was a watershed moment in the history of the United States.

Like all the other foreign correspondents in Washington, I followed the story’s every twist and turn with a mixture of disbelief and, in my case, fear. Disbelief that the most powerful man in the world could conceivably be brought down by such a third-rate bunch of bunglers, and fear that I simply did not have the experience, let alone the knowledge, of the American political scene to analyse every development and offer a remotely plausible prediction as to what might happen next. Pretty basic qualifications, you might think, for a correspondent reporting on the biggest story in the world for the most respected broadcasting organisation in the world. The fact is that I was, by any objective assessment, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The right man was Charles Wheeler, perhaps the greatest foreign correspondent the BBC has ever had. When I was still in nappies, Charles was a captain in the Royal Marines, second in command of a secret naval intelligence unit that took part in the Normandy invasion of 1944. He went on to become the longest-serving foreign correspondent in the history of the BBC. He was, quite simply, brilliant. A small man with a commanding presence, he had steely grey hair, piercing blue eyes, a brain the size of a house and a natural authority born of decades of reporting on crises around the world. When Charles delivered a report the audience trusted him. And they were right to.

The first time I worked with him was at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach in 1972 when Nixon was nominated to run for a second term as president. We knew there were going to be demonstrations. Nixon was a divisive figure at the best of times and protests over the Vietnam War were still tearing the country apart. We suspected that the protests in Florida would turn violent and my film crew and I had equipped ourselves with gas masks in case the police used tear gas. They did. I put mine on and strode confidently into the fray, gas swirling around us, breathing my own filtered air confidently. Except that it was not filtered. Within a minute I was in agony. I had never used a gas mask before and nobody had warned me that they’re not terribly effective unless you make certain that the bung is inserted at the point where the air gets in. Mine wasn’t and I had not checked. The result: I was breathing in undiluted tear gas. By the time I realised what was happening and ripped the mask off my face I was a blubbering mess. Somebody told me helpfully after I’d recovered that it’s possible to die if you do something that stupid. I never did it again. The other thing I learned from that convention was how to make the most powerful man in the world look an idiot – courtesy of Charles Wheeler.

National party conventions are awe-inspiring demonstrations of American politics at their majestic best and cringe-making worst. There is a bit of a gap in rhetorical brilliance between Williams Jennings Bryan in 1896 and Donald J. Trump 120 years later. The big issue at the 1896 convention was whether the United States should have gold coinage as well as silver. The moneyed classes said yes, the poor farmers said no. Bryan was on the side of the poor: ‘Having behind us the commercial interests and the labouring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’

What a phrase eh? Hard to imagine anything like it coming from the lips of some more recent candidates. Perhaps the most memorable sound bite from the Trump convention was the endless baying of ‘Lock her up, lock her up!’ from the floor whenever the name of Hillary Clinton was mentioned.

What made the Nixon convention of 1972 memorable for me was not so much the big speech itself as how it reached us. The party managers always make sure that the candidate’s speech is distributed to the media an hour or so before the candidate himself delivers it. It is eagerly awaited. We were in the BBC office – perhaps a dozen of us including Charles Wheeler – when our copy was handed to us by a couple of Nixon’s staff. Charles started to read it. He stopped, looked puzzled, and began again. And then he started laughing.

‘For God’s sake!’ he spluttered. ‘They’ve given us the wrong copy. This is Nixon’s own personal copy. It’s the one he will be reading from!’ And so it was. Between almost every paragraph were instructions to Nixon as to how, exactly, he should deliver it:

Serious expression here

Look as if you really care

Smile! This is meant to be funny

Squeeze out a tear at this point … VERY sad face!

Nobody believes this: show that YOU do!

Stern look at the delegates!

ENJOY this bit!

I may not recall every instruction in precise detail, but this was gold dust for Charles. One of Nixon’s big PR problems was that so many Americans believed he did not have a sincere bone in his body. Not for nothing was he known across the nation as ‘Tricky Dickie’. This would be deeply embarrassing. If he had to be instructed in how to react to words that were supposed to be coming from the heart, what would America make of it? Charles was scribbling furiously, trying to get as much of it down as possible, and then the inevitable happened. The door to our little office burst open and a posse of red-faced Nixon staffers barged in.

‘Give it back!’ they shouted.

‘Not on your life!’ we shouted back.

Then they saw it on the table and made a grab for it. Charles got there first. They tried to snatch it from his hands and he threw it across the office. Chris Drake, one of my radio colleagues, caught it and they tried to grab it from him so he threw it to me and I threw it to someone else. The farcical scene must have lasted for a few minutes and Charles (by now holding it again) tried to make peace.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I am going to report this and there’s absolutely no way you are going to stop me. If you bring in security guards you’ll get it back in the end but there’s going to be an almighty stink. Freedom of the press remember? So leave it with me for another few minutes and I’ll give it back to you.’

What else could they do?

An hour later Charles was sitting in front of a BBC camera not just telling his audience what Nixon had to say at the convention, but also what his team did not want us to know. This was television gold.

Part of the problem for any journalist covering the Watergate story – let alone a new boy like me, taking over from the great Charles Wheeler, who was being sent to Brussels – was trying to come to terms with the notion that the president of the United States, with his vast experience of politics, could have been so breathtakingly stupid as to destroy everything he had spent his life trying to achieve. And in such a crass manner. This was a man who had been written off by most of America when he was defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960 and who had fought back in the face of an often viciously hostile press. The Washington establishment, who worshipped the ground Kennedy had walked on, regarded Nixon as a lying, scheming lowlife and they made no attempt to conceal it. They treated him with contempt.

But he won the presidency in 1968 and again four years later. I followed him and the Democratic contender George McGovern around the country in 1972 from one rally to another and the result was never in doubt. McGovern himself knew he had no chance. It was one of the biggest landslides in American history. I remember one rally in a Midwestern state that removed any doubts I might have had. We filmed McGovern getting off his plane and walking through the obligatory, but pretty sparse, crowd of supporters. Most were cheering but one of them was clearly not a McGovern fan. He hurled some abuse at the candidate as he walked past. McGovern stopped, went back to him, and said something that left the man silent and looking stunned. Later I asked him what McGovern had said. ‘He told me: “Suck my cock buddy!”’ I swear he looked impressed. But a candidate who can do that knows he’s not going to be president.

It was clear even to a novice like me that as the Watergate saga rolled on Nixon was in deep trouble. Once we discovered that he had been secretly recording everything that was said in the Oval Office we knew how deep. So did he. For me the most telling moment – and certainly the most surreal – came when he made a trip to, of all places, Disney World in Orlando Florida. It was November 1973 and the country was being rocked by a relentless stream of accusations – mostly unearthed by the Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward – of endless clandestine and illegal activities by members of Nixon’s administration. What nobody had actually said, explicitly, was that Nixon himself was a crook. He was, after all, the president of the United States. ‘Crook’ was not a term to be used lightly – and certainly not without copper-bottomed proof. And yet Nixon used that word himself.

‘People have got to know whether their president is a crook,’ he declared. A slight pause and then he went on: ‘Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I’ve got.’

The room was silent. We journalists looked at each other open-mouthed. Had he really said that? Had he really invited the people of America to consider that he might be a crook but to take his word that he wasn’t? And then to add the bizarre line about ‘earning everything I’ve got’. It was as though someone had accused him of stealing the takings from a drug store. Instead, as we were about to learn over the coming months, what he had been trying to steal was the presidency of the United States.

I said earlier that the greatest blessing the gods can bestow upon a journalist is luck. My luck had already played a huge part in my getting the best story in the world by the time I was still in my twenties. But my biggest break was yet to come. And it happened because of yet another piece of luck.

When I first went to the States for three months to set up the New York bureau I left my family at home in Britain and lived in a small apartment in midtown Manhattan. But then, when I got the correspondent’s job, I had to find a house big enough for my wife and two young children to join me – preferably outside the city but not too far. It wasn’t proving easy. And then I fell into conversation with a wealthy businessman who told me that his mother had a house in the small, delightful town of Irvington just a few miles north of the city. Would I care to rent it? It sounds perfect, I told him. But then he described it. It was a mansion. The servants’ quarters were bigger than our house in England. It was fully furnished down to the Steinway grand piano in the library and the Tiffany silver in the butler’s pantry. The lawns ran down to the Hudson River.

I told him that not only could I not afford the rent, I couldn’t even afford the heating bills. He looked shocked. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘we’re not interested in making any money from it. Mother is living there alone with just the servants and we want to persuade her to move out for a year or so in the hope that she’ll agree to sell the wretched place. It’s just too big.’

So we did a deal there and then. He settled happily for my meagre BBC rent allowance and I rang my wife to prepare herself for a shock. That was pretty lucky. But the really big luck came when I met my neighbours. One of them just happened to be a Republican congressman called Peter Peyser. It may be overstating it a bit to say that I owe him my career, but not by much. The fact is that he was to give me the greatest gift a politician can bestow on a journalist: a tip-off. Not just any old tip-off. This was a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted tip-off that any journalist would have offered his soul for.

What Peter did was phone me on the morning of 9 August 1974 as the Watergate crisis seemed to be approaching some sort of climax to tell me he’d just come from a prayer breakfast at the White House. Would I perhaps be interested in what President Nixon had told him? I rather think I might be, I said. Well, he said, the president had told him he would be going on television this very evening to make an announcement.

With this president at this time there could be only one reason for it. Never in the history of the United States had a president been forced to resign but that is what Richard Nixon was planning to do before the sun had set over the White House. At least, that’s what I told my editor in London as soon as I’d hung up on Peter. ‘How can you be sure he’s going to resign?’ the editor asked me.

‘I can’t but …’

‘You know how much a satellite feed costs? Ten thousand dollars – that’s how much – and you can’t be sure?’

‘No, but it’s worth every cent if—’

He finished the sentence for me: ‘If you’re right, maybe. But if you’re not we’ll be ten grand out of pocket and the BBC will be an international laughing stock and your career will be toast before you’ve even hit thirty.’

‘And if we don’t do it and Nixon resigns tonight we’ll have thrown away a sensational scoop and it’ll be you standing outside your local supermarket begging for a crust to feed your starving children.’

Maybe I didn’t put it quite as strongly as that – editors are powerful people – but after a few minutes of heated discussion, he agreed and pretty soon I was sitting in front of a camera informing the British people that President Nixon was on the point of resigning. Twenty-four hours later, standing on the lawn of the White House, I understood the meaning of that old cliché so often applied to journalists: the privilege of a ringside seat at history.

A White House press pass entitles the holder to strictly limited access to the briefing room, and if you are ever foolish enough to try to stray off-limits without an official invitation the secret-service agents make sure you don’t get far. But on that historic morning, as we waited for Nixon to make his last appearance as president of the United States and board the helicopter waiting to fly him to political exile, the rules broke down. I remember wandering into the Blue Room and spotting one of Nixon’s two daughters sitting in a corner by herself looking out at the gardens of the great house. Five extraordinary years with all those memories: the triumphs and the humiliations and finally the most spectacular fall from grace any president had ever suffered. The journalist in me wanted to try to coax her into doing an interview – but the soppy father in me won. She clearly wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

Watergate and the downfall of the most powerful man in the world was – and remains – the biggest story of my career. Even as I write that sentence I question it. Bigger than the earthquake in Nicaragua which I reported in 1972? More than 10,000 people lost their lives, 20,000 were badly injured, 300,000 lost their homes. Bigger than mass famine in sub-Saharan Africa or revolutions in Latin America or wars on the Indian subcontinent? I reported on them all and neither I nor anyone else could even begin to put a figure on the number who died. Nobody died in Watergate.

And yet none of those massive human tragedies had even a fraction of the coverage given to the story of one flawed human being who tried to subvert an election by authorising a handful of shabby characters to break into the offices of his opponent and try to dig some dirt that might gain him a few extra votes in an election which, as it turned out, he won by one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. What a supreme irony.

If Nixon had played by the rules he would have stayed in power for another four years instead of being thrown out in disgrace and quite possibly earned himself a place in the history books in the top rank of American presidents. Instead his name is synonymous with lying and deceit. And the name of an unremarkable office building in Washington has become the prefix for every serious scandal in the Western world ever since. It is the yardstick by which stories of political skulduggery are measured.

I stayed on in the United States to see Gerald Ford become president and then lose the White House to a relatively unknown peanut farmer from the Deep South: Jimmy Carter. Washington winters can be pretty miserable and Gerald Ford was about as boring as an American president can be. The most interesting thing about him was the claim that he was so dumb he couldn’t chew gum and walk at the same time. True or not I was keen to get out of Washington and, ideally, spend a few days in the sun. It so happened that Carter had just begun campaigning in Florida. I persuaded my boss in London that he was an intriguing character and just about a dead cert to win the Democratic nomination. He fell for it. I got my few days in the sun to do the interview as well as the chance to boast about spotting Carter’s potential before most of my British colleagues. Thus are reputations cemented.

But by then my family was getting restive. Or, at least, my wife was. My children were, to all intents and purposes, native Americans. They spoke with an American accent, knew every word of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and thought it perfectly normal that our delightful, friendly neighbours kept his ’n’ hers pistols in their bedside tables. All they knew about the United Kingdom was that every time they went there for a holiday it rained. But I had promised their mother that we would return home before they went to secondary school and she was keeping me to that promise. A date was set. And then the big story (for the BBC at any rate) switched from the United States to another country on another continent. Two countries in fact: Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known) and its powerful neighbour, South Africa.

BBC Television News had a problem reporting from South Africa. We were not allowed to open a news bureau there. The apartheid regime tolerated radio, but drew the line at letting in a television correspondent. Then, in 1976, they changed their mind. Nobody knew why. Maybe they calculated that if only the rest of the world could see what problems the country was facing they would change their hostile attitude to apartheid and remove the iniquitous sanctions. Whatever their reasoning the BBC leaped at the offer and I got a call from my boss Alan Protheroe.

‘Hi John … looking forward to leaving Washington?’

‘You bet! My wife is counting the days … packing the suitcases already.’

There was a slight pause and then …

‘Umm … that’s good. Just one slight snag …’

‘Stop right there Alan! I’ve told her we’re leaving the States and that’s that.’

‘Of course … of course … no question about leaving the States … it’s just that I’d like you to make a bit of a diversion en route to London.’

The diversion was 8,000 miles.

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