A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys
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forcing radical change on an organisation, many of whose bosses enjoyed living in the past. It was more comfortable there. But he did it. He established the specialist journalist posts on which BBC News is still founded and insisted that correspondents should work for both TV and radio – he called it ‘bi-medialism’. He also thought the BBC had ‘starved’ TV news of resources. He pushed news and current affairs together into one directorate. They did not go willingly.
There was ‘no single and coherent overview of the BBC’s journalism’, he wrote later. Many of the news staff, he said, had ‘long since ceased to think enquiringly’. It’s fair to say that many of the news staff did not warm to him. But Birt was a man with a plan, which was unusual for the BBC. In the 1970s, he had developed his journalistic philosophy – what became known as his ‘Mission to Explain’. He argued that there was a bias against understanding in television journalism. News and feature journalism, he wrote, both failed to put events in their proper context:
Our economic problems for instance, manifest themselves in a wide variety of symptoms – deteriorating balance of payments, a sinking pound, rising unemployment, accelerating inflation and so on.
The news, devoting two minutes on successive nights to the latest unemployment figures or the state of the stock market, with no time to put the story in context, gives the viewer no sense of how any of these problems relate to each other.
In 1989, as a sign of the new Birtist seriousness, Breakfast News replaced the Breakfast programme. The era of comfy sofas and chunky sweaters was over. Weekend television bulletins were put under the control of the editor of the flagship Nine O’Clock News, with its two presenters sharing the seven-day presentation duties, to try to invest the bulletins with greater authority.
Birt backed the launch of continuous news output and took money from traditional services to fund the twenty-four-hour news channel and BBC News Online. The BBC World news channel was launched, aimed at an international TV audience, originally under the name World Service Television and funded by advertising and subscription.
In some ways Birt’s greatest achievement was to recognise the significance of the nascent digital revolution that was to change all our lives. He saw that the era when the family all sat around together in the evenings watching whatever it was that the BBC and ITV bosses saw fit to show them was coming to an end. Soon we would not dance to the tune of the mighty channel controllers: we would create our own schedules. And if we wanted to watch news, we would watch it when we chose to, rather than when the schedule dictated. The verb ‘viewing’ would be replaced by ‘consuming’ and the implications of that were clear. Viewers watched what they were given; consumers picked and chose when and where.
Birt decided that the BBC should launch new channels and new platforms. At the 1996 Edinburgh Television Festival, he said that without the resources to prepare for the digital age, the BBC would be ‘history’. So whatever we may have thought about Birt at the time, he had a vision for our journalism and positioned the BBC for the technology of the future with uncanny accuracy. In 1997, when BBC Online was launched, there were fewer than 8 million people online in the UK as opposed to the tens of millions with a TV licence. The Times asked whether ‘dear old Auntie, always regarded as a little dotty’ had now gone ‘completely bats’. A few years later it, and many other newspapers, were fighting to halt the march of BBC Online across their own borders.
Birt’s impact on the BBC’s foreign reporting is being felt to this day too. There are correspondents reporting more and more easily from nearly every corner of the world on scores of different news channels that broadcast 24/7. They can email their videos or radio reports or broadcast direct from their mobile phones. Everywhere you look, you can find news: on your phone, your computer, your watch, on Twitter, on the screen at the rail station, on aeroplanes. Never in the history of the human race have we been able to communicate with each other so quickly.
And yet, at the risk of seeming to hark back to a golden era, I fear we have lost something in translation. Yes, we no longer have to worry about putting the film in the ‘soup’ and waiting anxiously for it to re-emerge. Yes, we can cover the ground more quickly. Yes, we can report from any corner of the world.
But ever more news reported ever more swiftly, if not instantaneously, is not necessarily better. We need to feel the quality as well as the depth and speed of delivery.
4
A gold-plated, diamond-encrusted tip-off
When the first four television foreign correspondents were appointed in the early 1970s I was sent to the United States. My patch stretched from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of South America. Pity we didn’t have air miles in those days. Rather bizarrely, the BBC decided I should set up our news bureau in New York and not Washington. That didn’t last long. Within days of my setting foot on US soil the biggest American political story of the century was beginning to seep out. A group of shady characters hired by Republican Party sympathisers had been caught breaking into the offices of the Democratic Party. The offices were in a building called Watergate. I had been sent to the States for a three-month stint. I was to stay for nearly six years.
I suggested earlier the qualities that reporters need as a basic minimum to survive in the trade: a modicum of literary skill, a plausible manner, and rat-like cunning. All those might help, but every reporter knows that what really matters is the ability to be in the right place at the right time. It’s called luck. I’ve always had more than my share of it. You don’t get luckier than fetching up in the United States just as Watergate was about to blow a massive hole in the side of the White House and threaten to wreck the US constitution and everything the presidency stood for. If the head of state could survive even though he was proving to be a liar and a crook, what exactly was the point of the great American constitution? This was a watershed moment in the history of the United States.
Like all the other foreign correspondents in Washington, I followed the story’s every twist and turn with a mixture of disbelief and, in my case, fear. Disbelief that the most powerful man in the world could conceivably be brought down by such a third-rate bunch of bunglers, and fear that I simply did not have the experience, let alone the knowledge, of the American political scene to analyse every development and offer a remotely plausible prediction as to what might happen next. Pretty basic qualifications, you might think, for a correspondent reporting on the biggest story in the world for the most respected broadcasting organisation in the world. The fact is that I was, by any objective assessment, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The right man was Charles Wheeler, perhaps the greatest foreign correspondent the BBC has ever had. When I was still in nappies, Charles was a captain in the Royal Marines, second in command of a secret naval intelligence unit that took part in the Normandy invasion of 1944. He went on to become the longest-serving foreign correspondent in the history of the BBC. He was, quite simply, brilliant. A small man with a commanding presence, he had steely grey hair, piercing blue eyes, a brain the size of a house and a natural authority born of decades of reporting on crises around the world. When Charles delivered a report the audience trusted him. And they were right to.
The first time I worked with him was at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach in 1972 when Nixon was nominated to run for a second term as president. We knew there were going to be demonstrations. Nixon was a divisive figure at the best of times and protests over the Vietnam War were still tearing the country apart. We suspected that the protests in Florida would turn violent and my film crew and I had equipped ourselves with gas masks in case the police used tear gas. They did. I put mine on and strode confidently into the fray, gas swirling around us, breathing my own filtered air confidently. Except that it was not filtered. Within a minute I was in agony. I had never used a gas mask before and nobody had warned me that they’re not terribly effective unless you make certain that the bung is inserted at the point where the air gets in. Mine wasn’t and I had not checked. The result: I was breathing in undiluted tear gas. By the time I realised what was happening and ripped the mask off my face