Adventures in Correspondentland (3 page)

But my biggest scoop belonged on the front page: the tale of how a Labour Party frontbencher, a household name to boot, was regularly bonking his secretary. Impeccably sourced and legally watertight, the story could have made my tabloid name. Alas, I could never bring myself to share the details with the news editor. Working on the Street of Shame had already aroused feelings of uneasiness, and to have done the dirty would have brought on an even worse bout of existential torment.

Years later, the
News of the World
revealed that the new foreign secretary Robin Cook was leaving his wife to be with his long-time Westminster mistress. Yet, in common with a surprising number of tabloid hacks, who regularly withhold embarrassing secrets out of compassion for their prospective victims, I opted for valour over glory. From that moment on, in the time-honoured custom of British tabloids, I realised that I would have to make my excuses and leave.

All along, the BBC had been the target of my ambitions. Arriving late one afternoon at JFK airport in New York at the end of a trip to the Galapagos Islands, I heard from my flatmate back home that the corporation wanted me to sit a written examination
in London the very next morning. With only an overnight flight's worth of time to prepare, I did what any self-respecting British journalist would do: buy a copy of
The Economist
and read it forensically from cover to cover. It was exactly the kind of ‘cuts job', in fact, that I would routinely perform as a foreign correspondent.

By the time I touched down at Heathrow, I was not only fluent in the gross domestic product of all the Benelux countries, but I could also quote their seasonally adjusted rates of inflation – factoids that proved to be entirely superfluous when I sat my test but served the useful purpose of giving me almost bullet-proof self-confidence. Fortunately, the examiners looked kindly on my answers, as did a ‘board' of interviewers drawn from the upper reaches of BBC management who cross-examined me the following week. My curriculum vitae, no doubt like theirs, was embellished with degrees from the usual suspects, along with the names of some illustrious academic referees: precisely the kinds of adornments that the BBC always favoured. However, the clincher for my new employer was unquestionably my sojourn with a tabloid.

If my time at the
Evening Standard
and
Daily Mail
sharpened my news senses, my first months at the BBC were spent straightening out my syntax and grammar. I, like my seven fellow trainees, came under the tutelage of an old hand from the radio newsroom, renowned throughout the correspondent corps for his grammatical punctiliousness. War reporters filing from the most perilous of hotspots were regularly stopped in mid-flow at the mention of a split infinitive or dangling participle, even if it meant the hurried refile was punctuated instead by the sound of ricocheting bullets. Clamouring for a slice of this kind of action, we, too, hoped soon to be shouting into microphones over the din
of exploding ordnance, but for now we were held captive in a first-floor classroom at Broadcasting House in London, the inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth, grappling with the basics of the English language in our own version of Room 101.

Our escape came when we were dispatched, like fresh-faced subalterns, to the regional outposts of the BBC empire for a week in local radio. I opted for Liverpool, partly because the city had become something of a production line for improbable stories and partly because BBC Radio Merseyside had such a strong reputation for packaging and distributing them. Its office was also located on the dreamy-sounding Paradise Street, which seemed in my mind at least to rival other great Liverpudlian landmarks such as Strawberry Field and Penny Lane, and thus sounded vaguely providential.

Old Radio Merseyside hands who had graduated to The Network, as London was reverently known, warned me to expect a tough, hard-hitting newsroom full of jaundiced old hacks who despised London and looked upon news trainees from the capital in much the same way that Romans used to watch Christians sent up from the dungeons of the Colosseum. But whereas I arrived expecting the
Boys from the Blackstuff
, I was greeted instead by Carry on Broadcasting.

As I walked through the doors on Paradise Street and took my seat in reception, a chirpy disc jockey, aided by his fabulously camp sidekick, was halfway through his daily general-knowledge quiz in which the good people of Merseyside were invited to hold their plums. Later, I learnt that ‘Hold Your Plums' – a double entendre plucked from the fruit machines – was as much a Scouser institution as The Cavern Club or the Mersey ferry, and that one listener had enshrined herself in local folklore by replying ‘Heil' when asked to provide Hitler's first name. But for now, as I waited
to be introduced to the news editor, ‘Hold Your Plums' served the useful purpose of vastly inflating my own testicular fortitude. If Radio Merseyside could hold its plums, then perhaps it might even take a nervous young trainee to its heart.

Certainly, they were kind enough to give me a slice of some of the best stories, the first of which more than adequately met the description ‘Only in Merseyside'. It was week two of the national lottery, and a local teenager had come up with the brilliant ruse of buying a new ticket featuring last week's winning numbers and splicing it together with an old ticket featuring last week's date. Joyous that the city had produced one of the first lottery millionaires, the local paper splashed a photo of the photocopied ticket, being brandished proudly by its newly minted owner, across its front page. Alas, lottery officials in London quickly detected the stench of a giant-sized rat and revealed the next morning that, of the handful of winning tickets, none had been purchased anywhere near the north-west. With the paper now demanding to see the original ticket, and with the teenager unable to provide it, he did a runner, and Liverpool was left to ruminate, as Liverpool so often does, on how it had produced the first lottery fraudster rather than one of its inaugural millionaires.

By now, the youngster had been missing a few days, and I was dispatched to interview his anguished mother in a lace-curtain bungalow on the fringes of town. Still in the overly diligent phase of my career, my notepad was filled with an exhaustive list of questions, but the interview required only one. ‘What would you say to Jonny,' I asked in a voice of faux concern that I would come to perfect over the years, ‘if he's listening to this broadcast?'

‘Come home, Jonny, come home!' came her howling reply. ‘COME HOME!'

Fortunately, Jonny did come home shortly afterwards, just in time for tea – or, for the purposes of Radio Merseyside, just in time for its drive-time program, where he was given a stiff on-air reprimand from the presenter, who placed him in the wireless equivalent of the public stocks.

By the end of our training, we were equipped with all manner of skills and expertise, which seem antique now and seemed antique back then. In the days of reel-to-reel recorders, the tools of our trade were white chinagraph pencils, razor blades and thin reels of sticky tape, with which we marked, slashed and then spliced together the soundbites making up our reports. A hesitant interviewee, with a bad ‘um' and ‘ah' habit, could take hours to edit, or ‘de-um', in editing parlance.

Still more frustrating was the time we consumed foraging under edit machines among discarded piles of magnetic tape, in the hope of finding a now-needed thought or abandoned consonant or vowel that had been rashly thrown onto the cutting-room floor. On occasions, it could be hazardous work as well, especially when deadlines pressed in and the required blade-work was undertaken at a furious pace. To this day, my body bears just two scars from my years as a correspondent: a wound on the crown of my head sustained on the subcontinent, which we will come to in due course, and a diagonal disfigurement at the top of one of my fingers, when my razor blade missed the editing block and de-ummed my flesh.

To save my body from further impairment, I learnt the trick of alternating the shoulder on which I carried my German-made reel-to-reel tape recorder, a device called a Uher that felt like it had been minted out of lead. It rescued me from a handicap common among radio journalists of a certain vintage: the Uher droop.

As our training progressed, we worked on our correspondent voices mainly by ventriloquising the correspondent voices of others. We learnt that good television was bereft of adjectival padding, that the trick always was to look for small, humanising details and that the great BBC fallback line of enquiry if, in a live interview, all your pre-prepared questions have been exhausted with two minutes left to run is ‘How will this news be received in the south of the country?'. It works virtually every time.

But after our training was complete, I remember being left with a needling sense of the limitations of our new mediums. Most of us had come from newspapers, the purest form of journalism, where stories were usually long enough to accommodate the twin luxuries of explication and complication. By contrast, television news rewarded brevity and simplicity, and reduced multifaceted stories to their most elemental parts. It did to news what Hollywood movies routinely do to the works of great fiction: plotlines that could not easily be retold were simply discarded; peripheral characters were banished from view; and the temptation was not just to simplify but to exaggerate. Much like a reader would barely recognise a much-loved novel after it was put through the cinematic wringer, the characters in our news reports would often identify only with the shadowy outline of their story.

The cadetship finished as it had started, with a written test, and then we were absorbed, like low-grade motor oil, into the BBC news machine. I ended up at our rolling news channel, Radio Five Live, which had so many hours of airtime to fill that even new arrivals were allowed to plug the gaps.

Sure enough, by day two I had been handed my first assignment. That morning, the
Daily Mirror
had managed to expose the cracks in Downing Street security by squirrelling a
reporter into the prime minister's office. As the latest recruit, I was tasked with revealing the fissures in
Daily Mirror
security by squirrelling myself into the editor's office high above Canary Wharf.

From getting lost on the Docklands Light Railway to finding myself temporarily imprisoned in the stairwell of a 230-metre skyscraper, my first forays could hardly be described as auspicious. But the fear of returning to the newsroom empty-handed pushed me on, and I eventually managed to sneak past the security guards at reception, locate the executive floor and get within metres of the editor's office. All the way, I had been faithfully capturing every moment of haplessness, and now my tape recorder was in record mode as I took my final steps towards glory.

With the spires of the City in the near distance and the arc of the Thames below, the view from Piers Morgan's office was magnificent, and I took great delight in describing the panorama to our listeners. Soon, my commentary was interrupted, as obviously I hoped it would be, by a fretful secretary mortified that I was reclining in her boss's executive leather chair. Then came Piers Morgan himself, who was happy to play along in this pantomime by delivering a gentle scolding and describing me as a journalistic low-life.

By now, the main challenge was to make it back to Broadcasting House in central London, and to brandish my razor blade with sufficient speed to deliver the report for the late-afternoon show. With the deadline bearing down on me, I pulled it off with the help of an industrious sound engineer, who underlaid the piece with that most hackneyed of musical clichés, the pounding theme tune from
Mission Impossible
. Over consecutive hours, we ran the story in two parts: the first ending with your correspondent
banging helplessly on the door of some random office 43 floors up as I tried to escape from the fire escape; the second ending with the self-congratulatory words ‘Mission accomplished', a phrase that would feature in very different circumstances much later in my career.

For now, though, as the music died away and the presenter guffawed with delight, I basked in something that I have never managed to replicate: a ripple of applause that spread throughout the newsroom. I had delivered a piece of light entertainment rather than hard-hitting journalism, but it mattered not. After two days spent on the nursery slopes of my career, I had been earmarked as a black-run reporter. So much so that when the news came through from Jerusalem 48 hours later, the newsdesk rang to tell me that I had been booked on a plane at dawn the following morning. It was 4 November 1995, and the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had just been assassinated. My journeys as a foreign correspondent were about to begin.

As for the
loya jirga
in Kabul, the children's choir eventually made it through the security checks and barbed wire to perform on stage before the delegates. Their song was of a land tired of suffering and unfaithfulness, of a country lonely and unhealed, of stars and moons, of poetry and song, and of saddened and weary hearts. As no doubt intended, it provided the ideal coda for our report, but now we feared it might never even be aired. A giant red banner had just appeared on the bottom of the television screen in our hotel room, pulsating with the words ‘BREAKING NEWS'.

Moments later, America's top official in Iraq, ‘the American Viceroy' L. Paul Bremer, stepped beaming before the cameras (prematurely, the Bush White House would later complain) to deliver a six-word announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we got
him!' All that night, and well into the next week, the bulletins would be dominated by the extraordinary sight of a one-time dictator with a ragged grey beard having a swab of DNA taken by a US military doctor wearing white rubber gloves and wielding a wooden spatula. Saddam Hussein had been captured, and the headlines belonged to another corner of Correspondentland.