A Day Like Today. John Humphrys
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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
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