A Life in Questions. Jeremy Paxman
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have rarely looked at anything – particularly received wisdom on a topic – without asking ‘Why is it like that’? Journalism is the trade I have followed for the last forty-odd years, and while I’ve had occasional urges to do something different, they never lasted long. To think that I once considered trying to run a pub makes me squirm – I would have been so rude to the regulars that the business would have been bankrupt within a year. Instead, I have been amused and amazed, troubled and terrified, and have laughed a great deal. My work has taken me to astonishing places and provided a close-up view of some extraordinary events. I’ve been very lucky.
At the time I became a journalist, the trade was held in very low esteem, which is probably where it belongs. To judge from the false glamour now sprayed on the media, you’d think that journalists, disc jockeys, reality-show contestants and associated low life performed a useful social function, equivalent in value to the life-saving skills of paramedics or the discoveries of Nobel Prize-winners. They do not. I have suffered all my working life from impostor syndrome, unable to quiet the nagging voice inside asking, ‘And what, precisely, do you bring to the party?’ I have never walked up Downing Street to interview a Prime Minister, or sat in the Ambassadors’ Waiting Room at the Foreign Office, without wondering what on earth I’m doing there.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe passionately in the importance of free-flowing information. Every journalist has to be convinced that a well-informed democracy is a healthy democracy, and that a great part of the trade’s function is to hold to the fire the feet of those who have the nerve to tell us what to do. But we are no more important to a healthy society than the men and women who keep the sewers flowing. In fact, now I come to think about it, we have much in common with them. Too often, journalism is the cloaca maxima of the political world.
At the time I entered this trade, journalism’s position somewhere below the salt was well understood. It was not a profession, and the image of the reporter had hardly progressed from that of a man in a grubby coat with a press card stuck into his oily hatband. The BBC was considered slightly more respectable. But only slightly: my father’s boring golf-club joke when I started work there was to introduce me to his friends as ‘one of those communist homosexuals in the BBC’. Real work was making things or managing things, not observing or commenting on them. I have never really lost a nagging sense that he was probably right: if we are ever to establish what has gone wrong with the British economy, we shall have to examine what the educational system has done to the spirit of enterprise.
In retrospect, I can see that whatever I did as an adult was bound to be something to do with words and with finding things out. At the time I just blundered around, firing off half-hearted job applications here, there and everywhere, and consequently being turned down by almost everyone – including, I think, a multinational firm of distillers whose headquarters I had spotted through the rain on the train from Cambridge to London on an industrial estate, and which seemed an awful portent of life as a wage-slave. One of the very many employers who turned me down was the BBC, a benign-seeming institution – a cross between the Church of England and the Post Office, as I once heard it described – in which it was said you could have a lot of fun, as long as you were willing to sign the Official Secrets Act, be vetted by MI5 and wear the occasional cardigan. I duly applied, and went along for a selection board in front of four or five grown-ups, chaired by a personnel manager in pinstripe suit and stockbroker-belt vowels. I was rejected.
The BBC was not alone; I also collected polite rejection letters from the Diplomatic Service (where the selection process included an interview with a psychiatrist who seemed to my untutored eye to be barking mad), from two well-known Hong Kong trading companies, from independent television, from several manufacturing firms, and from every newspaper group hiring graduates that year. In fact, by the time I left university in the summer of 1972 I had drawn a blank all round. The only employment I could find was a temporary post as a ‘tutor’ on a Cambridge summer course for foreign students. The work was pretty minimal – one talk on contemporary poetry (the English faculty’s view was that poetry stopped in 1945) and living in one of the colleges where the students stayed, in case there was a fire in the night. I was rather smitten by a French girl who attended the end-of-course dance wearing skin-tight white jeans and nothing on her top but a scarf attached to her necklace and tucked into her waistband. (I later made the mistake of going to visit her in Paris and discovering that she was a great deal more interested in the female English teacher who had accompanied her from France to the course.)
As the leaves on the trees began to brown I realised that the state of well-breakfasted indolence into which I had fallen for the rest of that summer in Worcestershire couldn’t continue when one day my father put down his paper and announced, ‘If you think you’re going to carry on living here indefinitely, you’ve got another think coming.’ I thought hard and fast. Nope. There was no prospect of a job anywhere.
Then, like a prop in a bad play, the telephone rang. It was a woman with a cut-glass accent from the BBC in London. Although she – of course – never said anything so clumsily explicit, it was clear that the person who had been offered the job that wasn’t offered to me had decided to do something else with their life. If I could get myself to London I could start on a training course to learn to be a journalist. Salvation! I bought my first suit – a hideous shade of aubergine purple.
What the BBC really wanted, it turned out, was sub-editors for the radio newsroom. The training was largely carried out by Keith Clarke, a retired sub-editor who seemed to have either a cigarette or an extra-strong mint in his mouth at all times, and Eric Stadlen, a worldly Hampsteadite who had spent many years producing a World Service programme called Radio Newsreel, whose theme tune – a military band playing a rousing march called ‘Imperial Echoes’ – took you straight back to the Britain of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in their prime. Eric, who had been born in Vienna and had fled Hitler at the time of the Anschluss, was something of an imperial echo himself, and began most of his comments with, ‘When I was on the Reel …’ He often arrived for work having played poker all night.
The six trainees he was educating were taken on occasional excursions to meet the weather forecasters at the Met Office, to Parliament, and to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard – where an ancient detective showed us assorted murder implements, and the tub in which the Edwardian swindler and bigamist George Smith had drowned one of the brides in the bath. The rest of the time we spent learning shorthand, acquiring a rudimentary knowledge of the law, and having dinned into us useful practices, such as that ‘We say Argentina, NOT The Argentine.’ After several months we were allowed to help out in the radio newsroom, writing a sentence or two about what were judged to be relatively unimportant events, for inclusion in the HRU (Home News Roundup) or FRU (Foreign News Roundup). These were then read out by a newsreader who looked as if he seriously missed the days when announcers wore evening dress to broadcast the news. Afterwards, for reasons I never understood, the news bulletin was retyped on a rotary duplicator for circulation to dozens of people who never looked at the thing. I eagerly appropriated the roneo’d printout of my first two broadcast sentences – about the latest of the industrial disputes which were then a constant feature of British life – and promptly realised that I had no idea what to do with it. Woodward and Bernstein it was not.
The few months working in the television newsroom were more amusing, but no closer to the cutting edge of journalism. The radio newsroom had been located in Broadcasting House, the magisterial BBC headquarters in central London, its entrance adorned with Eric Gill’s sculpture of Prospero and Ariel and the motto ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’ looming over the entrance lobby. The television service was based in a strange circular building near the White City dog track in West London, and seemed to promise a less deferential approach to power. Here, trainee journalists came under the tutelage of Dick Ross, a young New Zealander in sneakers, jeans and a hooped sleeveless sweater who didn’t seem to take anything very seriously.
But although the journalists at Television Centre wore casual clothes and affected a more cavalier style, again, no one chose to rattle the bars of their cage. The Senior News Editor, wearing a pair of Bakelite headphones, was not to be disturbed at his desk when a Test match was being played. The Chief Sub spent a lot of time on the phone to his broker or his mistress. Everyone smoked, usually cigarettes,