Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC Read online

  Lincolnshire, and BBC Radio Lincolnshire, will always mean a lot to me. I could not have had a better first manager than Roy Corlett, a swashbuckling Scouser who contrived to battle against the BBC and its dafter rules while also being a loyal servant of it. I made lifelong friendships, the strongest being with Les Sheehan, who became another key member of my kitchen cabinet – of the rank of Foreign Secretary, though given his love of television and radio he might have preferred to be Broadcasting Minister. He has been the brother I never had. I also became more attached to this ‘forgotten’ county than I ever thought possible as a Yorkshireman. My parents found Lincolnshire alluring, to the extent that they moved to the county as their retirement home and ended their days in a village just outside Lincoln, which gave them a peace and contentment they no longer found in Bradford.

  Roy’s recipe for team building on his radio station included plenty of alcohol and ribaldry. My memories of the training course are mainly about late nights in the Spaghetti House restaurant in Goodge Street, fuelled by gallons of cheap red wine. But he expected us to work hard too. When we arrived in Lincolnshire, he committed the staff to travelling along every road in the county with our radio car towing a giant transistor radio to show that local broadcasting was about to begin. As a nervous driver, the idea of being entrusted with the radio car and a trailer along the narrow B-roads of a rural county was unappealing, but fortunately there were some strong women who accepted the challenge and even managed to reverse accurately when we were blocked in by tractors. It was already apparent that we were welcome. One glorious day in the south of the county, where the Fens reveal that the sky is bigger than you ever imagined, my colleague Penny Bustin and I were waved down at the side of the road as we motored along with our giant radio. It was a farmer who had heard that Radio Lincolnshire was starting soon and was delighted to see us passing by – so he presented us with two Lincolnshire cauliflowers for good luck.

  We had more formal outings across the county, too. Ahead of our launch, we held public meetings in Boston, Skegness and Horncastle and other significant centres of population. We discovered that most Lincolnshire towns had only one restaurant, which was Chinese and opened between 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. It would be closed most Wednesdays and every Sunday. The meetings were enlivened by Roy’s irreverent introductions of his team, and he always defined me by two characteristics: (1) ‘Roger is from commercial radio’, and (2) ‘He’s a reporter but he’s never even been a journalist before’, which was true in the sense that I had never had any training, and Pennine was regarded by the BBC as being somewhat rock-and-roll and not at the required standard of the corporation. The star of the meetings, though, was our advisory committee chairwoman, an elderly gentlewoman farmer from Hykeham called Mary Large. Mary had little knowledge of broadcasting, but made up for it by limitless enthusiasm and a dose of eccentricity. When asked whether a particular location would be able to receive our signal, she would proclaim excitedly: ‘Yes, the beams will get you. The beams will get you!’

  Our test transmissions from the autumn of that year are like echoes from another age. We all spoke in a much posher way than we did after the onslaught of Estuary English and the rising inflections of Neighbours. Les Sheehan’s announcements then sound rather like Prince Charles does today, with another colleague and friend Debbie Wilson as Princess Margaret. This reflected the voice training we had received during our course from David Dunhill, a former Home Service and Third Programme announcer, and Jimmy Kingsbury, one of the old-style brigade from Radio 2. We were taught to inflect appropriately: ‘The stock market ended UP’ (cheerful, rising voice) or ‘The forecast is for more rain’ (concerned tone, emphasis on ‘rain’), with a precision of pronunciation that had never existed in commercial radio.

  The beams began for real on 11 November 1980. We were buoyed by a message from the Prime Minister, who was, of course, a Lincolnshire girl. ‘I am delighted to send my best wishes to Radio Lincolnshire on its opening day,’ said the letter on Downing Street notepaper from Margaret Thatcher.

  The government attaches very great importance to the expansion of local radio. It can help to strengthen and develop that sense of community that is so essential a part of the fabric of our society. And it is particularly valuable in serving people who live in the country as well as those who live in towns. I am pleased there is now to be a BBC local radio station in my own home county and I wish it every success.

  At the time we didn’t appreciate the rarity value of Mrs Thatcher welcoming the expansion of the BBC.

  The first news bulletin was read by Penny Bustin, who went on to a career in television, and the main local story was a report from me on the effect of fire fighters’ strikes across the county. It was the first of hundreds of items I did in my year or so at Radio Lincolnshire, and we reporters were driven hard: sent off to the coast or the Fens or the Wolds to gather stories, assigned to council meetings where we were expected to report live and then produce more items for the following day’s breakfast show, and despatched every Friday to talk to the county’s football managers ahead of their weekend fixtures. This all sat within a radio station that had a friendliness and accessibility lacking in some other parts of the BBC local network of the time. There was an afternoon when, presenting the sports desk, I was confronted by a mountain of horseracing results that were supposed to be read out. I opted for interactivity. ‘There are so many racing results that it’s probably easiest if you phone in if you want to know any of them, and I’ll give them to you direct,’ I said. Nobody called, which shaped my attitude to the racing results on 5 Live some years later. Our breakfast show had a brief to play only instrumental music before 8 a.m. for fear of scaring off the opinion formers attracted to our news and current affairs items, but after that it became a station with a popular agenda. ‘Super Trouper’ by Abba is the record I forever associate with Radio Lincolnshire’s early days, and it was deemed to be the perfect example of a pop single that wouldn’t alienate the pensioners in our audience. The first set of listening figures confirmed we had the right formula: in our first couple of weeks of transmission we had overtaken Radio 4 in the Lincolnshire ratings, and we were only a whisker behind Radio 1.

  We had a mixed reaction from the county’s press. The Lincolnshire Standard Group, which ran weekly papers, had been friendly to us with preview articles ahead of our launch; but the Lincolnshire Echo, then published in three editions across the day, saw us as the enemy. Barely a word was printed about the new BBC station, until the day of our launch. Buried inside, with the headline in the tiniest font, were these words: ‘On the air. Radio Lincolnshire started broadcasting today.’ That was our last mention in print for months, but there was some collaboration across the battle lines. On the press bench at Lincoln City Council I sat alongside a reporter from the Echo, and in the way of the media we checked with each other after a meeting about what we thought the key decisions were and which stories we were going to file for our respective outlets. Sometimes there’s safety in numbers if you want to escape a bollocking for missing a story. The reporter was called John Inverdale, and it soon became apparent that he was keener than he should have been on radio over print. After a drink one night, I took him round Radio Lincolnshire’s HQ to see our studios and I could safely have predicted afterwards that he would end up in broadcast media – though not that he would achieve such eminence in national radio and television. Some years later, he reminisced about when we had first met. ‘This was the 1980s,’ he said, ‘and I wanted to talk about Spandau Ballet and Lincoln City Football Club. Roger wanted to talk about politics. Central government, local government, the politics of the BBC. To me, he will always be the slightly rotund figure with a receding hairline with an obsessive interest in the workings of the Upper Witham Drainage Board.’ Although there was significant truth in this – certainly in the rotund and receding bits – I had by this stage given up being a member of a political party, because I thought it was incompatible with journalism.
I no longer believed in any single party’s manifesto, and I realised it was more fun watching politics from the media than it was tramping the streets wearing a rosette. I therefore applied myself to watching the birth of the SDP from Lincoln – the home of Dick Taverne’s Democratic Labour a decade earlier – presumably to the incomprehension of Inverdale. But we got on well, really, and he became my successor at Radio Lincolnshire, and later a top member of my 5 Live presentation team.

  Thanks to my parents’ move to Lincolnshire later in the decade, I never really left the county. Indeed, it now feels as much like home as Bradford ever did. That time at Radio Lincolnshire was a profoundly happy one. I still love walking round the Cathedral Close in uphill Lincoln and across the square to the castle with its view over the Trent Valley to Nottinghamshire and beyond; then down Steep Hill to the Wig and Mitre with memories of evenings of beer and chilli con carne with a dozen or more of us from the radio station. Skegness remains one of my favourite seaside resorts, though ‘bracing’ is the appropriate word when the wind comes in direct from the North Sea. I remember the impulse decisions to go to the coast when we were at a loose end, and to ride the Wild Mouse rollercoaster or fritter away 10p pieces in the slot machines before eating fish and chips late at night on a bench on the seafront. They are the kind of things you do in your early twenties and are too often lost when you become fully adult.

  My next home was less romantic. I went to Northampton. This was partly because I was offered a promotion but also because I had so enjoyed launching one new radio station that I wanted to do another. I returned to the Langham for my second new station training course in two years. The manager of Radio Northampton, Mike Marsh, had a different recruitment policy to Roy Corlett’s. I was a rarity at Lincolnshire in having a degree, and most of Roy’s choices were, like him, from the University of Life. Mike went for graduates in pretty much every role, though his concept of the station was markedly more populist than in Lincolnshire. Northampton had been transformed from a traditional market town by expansion zones with a young population, and the county included the steelworkers of Corby and the shoemakers of East Northants. Whereas Lincolnshire’s recurrent stories were its agriculture and its coast, Northamptonshire was about industrial decline and the M1. Therefore we were set up as a bright pop station punctuated by a punchy local news service, and Lincolnshire’s Abba was replaced by Adam and the Ants shrieking ‘Stand and Deliver’.

  I was chosen to read the first news bulletin on the day of the station’s launch, with its opening headline ‘General Galtieri tells the Argentine people – the Falkland Islands still belong to them’ reflecting the end of the war in the South Atlantic. This was filmed by a crew from Look East and I was featured on their programme looking more confident than I felt and sporting an improbable haircut. But Radio Northampton, also in a county starved of local media, was an immediate hit, and it boosted the careers of many of its young team. Martin Stanford ended up as a Sky News presenter, Howard Stableford presented children’s programmes and Tomorrow’s World, and Lisa Ausden became one of BBC television’s most respected executive producers on programmes including Crimewatch and Watchdog. My best friend on the station was Beverley Rigby, a fellow Oxford graduate and affectionately nicknamed ‘the shrew’ for her put-downs of annoying people, which has created a series of small furry animal jokes between us lasting more than thirty years. A clockwork mouse, given to me by Beverley on a recent visit to Cambridge, sits on my study desk.

  I grabbed opportunities to report for television and network radio when they came along, because I hadn’t yet fully realised that I was better as a producer behind the scenes than being on-air talent. An appearance I made as a reporter on Look East, wearing an anorak that looked like something from the C&A bargain bucket, should have been warning enough, but I had more luck with radio. The Today programme ran a report of mine on a new system in fire stations in Northamptonshire designed to switch off electrical appliances when the fire fighters were called out: the kind of piece I would have rejected instantly when I was myself a Today night editor. A rather better package about Northampton Town Football Club and its hopes of giant killing in the FA Cup ran on the BBC World Service, though the club’s nickname of ‘The Cobblers’ is not one that travels well. Every so often there was a jab in the ribs about my relative inexperience. Commentary is a difficult art, and I felt that most keenly when I was assigned to Kettering railway station at the start of the Queen’s visit to Northamptonshire. When Her Majesty emerged, I began a sentence, ‘There is the Queen, greeted by cheering crowds, and…’ – at which point, and rather too late, I remembered that the sine qua non of a royal commentary was to describe what the Queen was wearing. I hadn’t a clue. I had no sense of colour or style, either for myself or anyone else. Was she in red or cerise or maroon or what? ‘And – she is wearing a coat,’ I revealed to the listeners at home.

  There were two other highlights in my time at Radio Northampton. The first was on our Open Day when I was allowed to present a music show while listeners were touring the station, and the local paper ran a story about ‘disc jockey Roger Mosey’ alongside a photo of me clutching a record album and preparing to spin those tunes. I did not show that cutting to the Fellows of Selwyn College during the Mastership election. But even more exciting was the 1983 general election, when Northamptonshire’s concentration of marginal seats meant that we had our share of the national spotlight; it was a thrilling time for a political animal like me to be in charge of the station’s coverage.

  I sent myself off to report on Margaret Thatcher’s campaigning tour of the county, which featured a visit to the Weetabix factory near Kettering. This was a reflection of the style of campaigning that Mrs Thatcher had pioneered. There were photos to be had of the PM in a white coat and hat, looking lovingly at lots of little Weetabix as they whizzed off the production line, but, in the bustle and din of a factory, she was completely inaccessible to the journalists covering the event. Looking for the exclusive angle, I bellowed at Denis Thatcher as he trudged along behind: ‘Do you like Weetabix, Mr Thatcher?’ He grimaced at the noise, doubtless of both the factory and me, and pointed to his ears in a gesture of ‘can’t hear’. The world was never to know what cereal he preferred, and his wife avoided any pesky questions about local issues. But I did interview other top politicians on their visits: Norman Tebbit, who was charming, and Roy Jenkins, then Prime Minister-designate for the Alliance, who wasn’t. He struck me then, and later, as one of those politicians who don’t have much time for courtesy for the people outside their social circle. Every single candidate standing in a Northamptonshire seat was interviewed for constituency profiles, and we commissioned our own election-day exit poll, which miraculously turned out to be right. It was a wonderful opportunity for a 25-year-old, and it was to be the perfect training for running campaign coverage on the Today programme four years later.

  The election over, I didn’t feel much inclination to stay in Northamptonshire. I saw a television documentary in which one of the county’s former MPs said the happiest day of her life was seeing the signpost for ‘Northampton’ in her rear-view mirror as she escaped back to London, and, without quite reaching that level, I was ready for a change. I had had the most wonderful time in local radio, and, as commercial radio became blander and more nationally programmed, I became ever more convinced that the BBC should have an enduring role in the cities and counties of the UK, reporting local issues and fostering community identity. But for now I had done my bit for Lincolnshire and Northampton, and I felt it was time to break the second of the vows I had made when I left Oxford. I used to tell people that I never wanted to work in news and I never wanted to work in London. The gravitational pull was unavoidable, though, if I wanted to deepen my involvement in current affairs broadcasting and to see what it was like having the canvas of a nation rather than a county. I started filling in applications for jobs in the capital.

  CHAPTER 4

  STARTING IN LONDON


  FROM MY TIME in Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, I had no idea how the BBC in London operated. It was an article of faith in local radio that network people were ignorant about life outside the capital, but we had little understanding about how the teams in Broadcasting House and Bush House and Television Centre fitted together or what the jobs there entailed. It was something of a lottery deciding which roles to apply for, but I ended up in what was spectacularly the right place for me. I was given a six-month attachment to the Special Current Affairs Unit (SCAU, as it was known), which was the home on Radio 4 for political coverage. It was run by Anne Sloman, a formative influence on generations of young producers. She was a renowned producer of political documentaries as well as being in charge of regular output such as The Week in Westminster and Inside Parliament.

  Initially, I was allocated to the departmental version of the salt mines. I had a few weeks as producer of Yesterday in Parliament, which had recently become part of the Today programme and was being encouraged to be wittier and more sketch-like in its approach. The producer’s job was little more than monitoring hours of parliamentary debate and then, to the orders of the correspondent of the day, laboriously finding the clips for broadcast from a bank of recording machines. But this drudgery was incidental compared with my thrill at making it to Westminster, to walking down Whitehall and seeing the tower of Big Ben, and knowing that I had a pass that allowed me to see the great men and women of the day in the chamber of the House of Commons. This was before the collapse in faith in our institutions. It was only five years or so since Parliament had mattered enormously during the tail end of the Callaghan government, with its nightly crisis votes and ultimately a defeat on a motion of confidence. When I got there, it was at the height of Mrs Thatcher’s dominance, with the Conservative back benches squashed full with the beneficiaries of her landslide victory earlier in the year. The Commons had the ideological chasms revealed during the 1983 campaign, with a Labour Party still dominated by the pro-nationalisation, anti-Europe, anti-nuclear weapons left. It felt like politics was still a battle that stirred the blood, and one that mattered.