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

  I spent enough time on Yesterday in Parliament to pick up another friend for life: David Kogan, who was a producer on Today and seated alongside me in Westminster. David escaped early from the BBC and later became the sports rights guru for the Premier League, in which capacity he was to recur in my working life but playing for the ‘other side’. Now, though, it was time for a dream role: Anne asked me to produce The Week in Westminster, the review programme that has been running on BBC radio since 1929 and is therefore only slightly younger than the corporation itself. It offered a much greater opportunity for a producer to make an impact than the obligation-heavy daily reporting, and it required a good working relationship with the presenters, who were some of the doyens (all men in those days) of Fleet Street. Already starstruck by being in the same office as John Cole and John Sergeant, I now had the chance to work with the political heavyweights of the day: Hugo Young of the Sunday Times, Peter Riddell of the Financial Times and Adam Raphael of The Observer.

  The greatest mentor of all of them was Robert Carvel of the London Evening Standard. Bob was in his mid-sixties when I met him, so fully forty years older than me and with every reason to be exasperated by a young chap from local radio trying to tell him what to do. But his kindness and willingness to share his wisdom set him apart. He would relate stories about the politicians, good and bad, that he had encountered over the years. ‘Never trust a man who is rude to the servants’, he once said, shaking his head at the behaviour of a recent senior minister. But he loved the theatre of Parliament and its conflicts, real or confected. One of his favourite quotations was from Rab Butler: ‘I believe the ferocity of the debate is a very great safeguard for our liberty, because out of the sparks you see liberty shining.’ Many of his anecdotes were delivered from the middle of a cloud of pipe smoke as we sat in the parliamentary press gallery tea room planning the week’s programme, and most weeks he would also take me off to the National Liberal Club for a lunchtime mix of ghastly food with wonderful political gossip. I learned such a lot from him, not just about the technicalities of Westminster but also about the values it should aspire to.

  Bob indulged some, if not all, of my youthful enthusiasms. I was puzzled as to why The Week in Westminster came on air with the first sentence of the script, and without any words of welcome. In a revolutionary change of format, we negotiated that he would start by saying ‘Good morning’. He allowed me to book for interview MPs whom I had read about and found interesting, hence the appearance of the newly elected Gordon Brown in a discussion about events in the Middle East. In return, and to hear it said in warm Scottish tones, I would occasionally sneak in a clip from George Foulkes MP so that Bob could say his favourite constituency name: ‘Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley’. I am proud to this day that my first national Radio Times credit in December 1983 was thus: ‘Week in Westminster. Robert Carvel, Political Editor of the London Standard, views the past week. Producer Roger Mosey.’

  The prospect of returning to Northampton at the end of this attachment was appalling. I therefore started applying for other jobs in network current affairs, and was lucky in that there was a vacancy on the Today programme. With some pre-interview help from David Kogan, I got the job – surviving a ferocious appointment board grilling from the programme editor, Julian Holland. He was another of the greats from the 1980s: a former features editor on the Daily Mail, and known universally as ‘Jules’. He had very little sight, and wore the thickest-glassed spectacles we had ever seen. But behind the dishevelled appearance was an astonishing editorial brain. If you came up with a half-formed idea at a morning editorial, Jules would shoot you down without mercy – and the trick was to reformulate and persist until you came up with something that was intellectually and journalistically watertight. The words from him ‘well done, lad’ were magical because of the agony you had to go through to win them.

  This was the era on Today of Timpson and Redhead, the best combination of presenters the programme has known. John Timpson was avuncular on air, representing southern suburban England, while Brian Redhead was northern and chippier. They covered most of the week, since there was then no Saturday programme. They seldom showed signs of liking each other off air, but on air they were brilliant: partly in their contrasting styles, but also in the way they had an understanding of the dynamics of dual presentation, and a generosity to each other when they came up with funny lines. Instead of the toe-curling attempts to out-talk and out-jest a colleague that many presenters think is clever, Timpson and Redhead would honour a joke by letting the listener savour it and then moving on, perhaps with a small chuckle of appreciation, to a new topic.

  There was none of the indulgence towards new, young producers that I had found on The Week in Westminster. If you screwed up on Today, it was serious stuff – and Timpson and Redhead would take no prisoners. I made plenty of mistakes that were my fault, but one morning I simply obeyed the instructions of the output editor in changing the duration of an item and giving the presenters a little more time to fill. Brian was furious, and hurtled out of the studio into the control room to berate me: ‘I will have you sacked,’ he hissed, before running back into the studio and calmly reading the news headlines. By the end of the programme, he had forgotten that he had planned to have me sacked and was his usual chirpy self. It took time to earn his respect.

  This kind of pressure was especially tough given the hours we worked. A night shift in that era started at 6 p.m. and finished at 9 a.m. the next day, with the intense concentration and adrenalin-surge of the programme’s transmission at the end of the fifteen-hour stint. The air in the Today office was always full of smoke, with most of the programme team puffing away incessantly on cigarettes, and we drank instant coffee from a large catering pack of the cheapest Nescafé, which had a crust that must have been made up of equal parts of cigarette ash and London pollution. When we were released from this, we had just nine hours of rest before we had to do it again; though two night shifts comprised an entire working week when I began on Today, and it was impossible to complain about the amount of time we had off. Perhaps because of this, there was a strong drinking culture – exemplified by the bottle of Scotch opened by the editor at the end of a night shift and shared by the overnight programme team and presenters. We thought nothing of drinking a bottle or two of wine during our evening on-shift meal, which we consumed in one of the late-opening restaurants within walking distance of Broadcasting House. Some producers supplemented the social drinking by stashing away spirits in their locker and surreptitiously glugging the booze during the early hours of the morning. We junior staff added to our experience by sometimes running a programme when our colleagues were not feeling quite well enough to do so. I discussed this recently with a former Radio 4 producer, who said I shouldn’t convey the impression that the drinking was gentlemanly and benign. It wasn’t: it could be unpleasant and unsettling. However, I was never aware of it leading to other kinds of disreputable behaviour, and we existed in our booze-suffused world of radio current affairs with little contact with the rest of the corporation.

  When I began on Today, so did the miners’ strike. For most of my first year there, the strike dominated the programme and almost every morning we tried to book Arthur Scargill for the union or Ian MacGregor for the Coal Board or Peter Walker, the Energy Secretary, to cover the latest developments in the story. Overall, though, Today was probably slightly less political than it became under my editorship ten years later. Breakfast television was still enough of a novelty to be favoured over radio for some major interviews, and Newsnight was a power in the land, offering more political exclusives. But this didn’t bother us because one of the things we took pride in was ‘light and shade’: making sure that the heat of debate was tempered by a gentle feature or a sideways look at modern life. Julian Holland’s Daily Mail background helped with that, and he built up a team of reporters who were able to turn in finely crafted pieces of radio. The mix was lightened further by amusing competitions, such
as ‘Mini Sagas’: asking listeners to tell stories in fifty words, and reading the best of them on air. We producers would regard these as a chore to schedule and a bore to listen to, but the audience loved the warmth of the programme and the chemistry of its presentation team.

  One of the great prizes for a Radio 4 producer in the 1980s was to be selected to be sent to New York for a six-month stint as American producer for all the radio current affairs programmes. David Kogan had done the job in 1985, and a year later I was asked if I would take it on – which was an invitation I thought about for no time whatsoever before saying yes. These were the days of BBC largesse to its foreign-based staff, before the chill of austerity had swept through the corporation. The producer was allocated an apartment in midtown Manhattan, on the ninth floor of a building on the corner of 1st Avenue and 54th Street. It had only two main rooms – a living room roughly the size of my entire flat in England, and an equally large bedroom – but it could sleep five or six with its combination of beds and sofas, and it was perfectly situated. If you stuck your neck out of the window, you could see the East River. Directly below was a stereotypical New York scene of an intersection jammed by illegally parked cars and cabs tooting their horns at all hours of the day, and streets lined with family restaurants and delis. It was a short walk to the BBC office, which was in Rockefeller Plaza near the NBC Network headquarters and the famous skating rink. We had space on two floors of a skyscraper, and for the first time in my career I had my own office with a nameplate on the door, along with a bank of televisions for me to monitor the American networks and make sure London was informed of significant developments. But amid all the buzz of Manhattan, it was hard work: the time difference meant that you were often woken up early in the morning if a lunchtime programme in the UK wanted some material. I was once roused at 4 a.m. by a phone call from Radio Ulster, and when I sleepily explained what time it was in America, they continued regardless: ‘Well, since you’re awake, we wondered if you could find us an interview for our morning show…’ The American day continued with servicing the PM programme, all the news bulletins and The World Tonight – and then, by mid-afternoon, you had to start thinking about items for the next day’s edition of Today. This meant staying in the office with a correspondent long into the evening, and playing the resultant reports across to London in what was for them the early hours of the morning.

  Technology in those days wasn’t necessarily a friend. We were issued with a radio pager, which was seen as thrillingly cutting edge before the introduction of mobile phones, but all it could do was signal that the office wanted you to call in about something. It bleeped when there was an urgent matter, and the drill was to phone the foreign duty editor in London to find out what was needed. One relaxed Sunday I met a new temporary correspondent for lunch, and we decided afterwards to take in the sights on one of the Circle Line cruises around Manhattan – only for both our radio pagers to shriek into life a couple of minutes after the boat had set off. We were scheduled to be on the boat for the next two hours and there was no means of calling London. Every half-hour or so the bleepers would sound again, and we spent our time praying that they didn’t signify the assassination of the President or some other cataclysmic event. The disclosure that we had been drifting past the Statue of Liberty on a sightseeing tour would not have been a good alibi for the non-appearance of reports from America. When we were finally able to reach dry land and dial London from a payphone, we found out that it was a minor story from the West Coast on which they wanted our guidance – and they had lost interest when we failed to report in. But it was the beginning of the age in which everyone was supposed to be ‘on’ all the time, and there was to be no escape from the electronic call to attention.

  Amid the regular duties, there was a special responsibility. The New York producer was in charge of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America, and it was close to the stature of a royal visit when Alistair came into the studio to record the broadcast. He was not always in New York: he still made trips to the UK, and he spent part of the year in California, which meant that sometimes he appeared only as a disembodied voice from a remote studio. But Alistair, then in his late seventies, was a veteran who turned out to be a man of considerable grace. He had to put up with a regular turnover of producers jetting in from London, but mitigated this by having his favourite engineers to keep him company as well as look after the technical side of things. This was one assignment that you did not give to the trainee sound guy. The engineers gave me a tip early on. When Alistair had a funny line or an out-and-out joke in the script, he would look up from his papers and glance through the glass to check that we in the control room found it funny. So the engineers would prompt anyone watching to react as conspicuously as possible. ‘OK, you guys, laugh!’ they would say, as Alistair reached his punchline. It guaranteed a happy presenter at the end of the talk, though the recording invariably took a lot longer than the fifteen minutes of his regular slot. Alistair was a smoker, and there were prodigious numbers of coughs in most of his studio sessions, all of which had to be excised before broadcast. I got on well enough with him to receive one of his honours: an invitation to tea in his apartment, overlooking Central Park. When I left, he gave me a signed copy of his book The Americans with an inscription reflecting my job back home. ‘Gratefully and with good wishes, for the world Today and tomorrow – and on and on. Alistair.’

  The New York producer had the freedom to travel across the United States. I frequently caught the Amtrak train to Washington to work with our correspondents in DC, who were then preoccupied with the Iran-Contra affair. With the radio bureau chief David McNeil, I flew to swing states for the 1986 mid-term elections and we found ourselves at the State Fair in North Carolina and, by a bit of personal planning, tracking Senate leaders on a campaign trip to my old haunts in Missouri. It was in a small town there that David, a wine buff, came up against the limited ambitions of the Midwest. ‘Do you have a wine list?’ he asked the waitress, over-optimistically, in a homely diner. ‘No, we don’t,’ was the reply, ‘but we got red (she pronounced it ‘ray-ud’) and we got white.’ David said he would have the red, earning the approving response, ‘Red – that’s mah favourite!’

  I flew back from New York to London at the beginning of 1987 and went to the family home in Lincolnshire. That January it snowed heavily in the east of England and the temperatures were below freezing for days, which meant that after the neonlit razzamatazz of Manhattan I was confined by a snowdrift to a bungalow on the outskirts of Lincoln. I was not happy. But by then I knew that I had another pleasurable assignment ahead of me. After the retirement of Julian Holland, Jenny Abramsky had become editor of Today; and she was to become the dominant figure in my professional life for the next ten years. I would end up doing five of the jobs that Jenny herself had done, and she entered Today – as she did all her roles – with breathtaking energy. She was unable to pass a news agency ticker service without ripping the latest story from the printer, brandishing it in the air and demanding that we do something about it immediately. But my first big assignment was Jenny asking me to take command of the programme’s election coverage. Mrs Thatcher was expected to go to the country in the summer of that year, and the two Today political producers were to be Peter Burdin and myself. This initiated a deep friendship, and I became godfather to Peter’s son Julien when he was born the following year.

  The two of us cooked up our master plan. We had a stellar set of reporters on Today, so we decided to make them the centrepiece of the coverage by allocating them each to a nation or region of the UK. Thus Justin Webb, who rose to become a Today presenter, was sent to the battlegrounds of the Midlands, while Bill Turnbull, now the host of BBC Breakfast, was put in the south of England. The full team of six gave listeners a lively account of the campaign on the ground, while also offering us the flexibility to track senior politicians across the country. But we knew we needed the set-piece interviews, too, and in trying to attract the party leaders
onto the programme we promised them something a little different. Ours would be longer, more reflective conversations – not the standard knockabout political interview, but something that would allow the leaders to think aloud and have more time to set out their views.

  These encounters were to be near the end of the campaign. Peter Hobday duly did a gently probing interview on the Thursday morning with the two Davids (Steel and Owen) who were representing the Liberal/SDP Alliance; and on Friday it was Brian Redhead who sought light rather than heat from Neil Kinnock. But the biggest moment was to be on the Saturday when John Humphrys, the rather feistier replacement for John Timpson, was going to interview Margaret Thatcher. This caused a surge of excitement because she was planning to come into the studio, which was an extremely rare event in those days. Prime Ministers were far less accessible than they are now, and they tended to be interviewed in the grandeur of Downing Street rather than in the grubby studio 4A in Broadcasting House. But the BBC Premises team had some thoughts about that grubbiness: to our astonishment, the Today green room was repainted overnight in honour of the Thatcher visit and flowers were put in locations that she might visit. Peter Burdin and I satirically sketched a design for a fountain that might be installed in our office, so Mrs Thatcher could watch the calming waters while she waited.