IT WAS THE back end of March 2018 when I had to drive to London to get a Russian work visa for a big filming job we were doing out there. I wasn’t mad about going to London. I never really am. As usual, I’d been flat out at work, and I was supposed to have gone to Manchester to sort the visa out, but that didn’t happen for some reason to do with the Russian Embassy.
If March 2018 doesn’t ring any bells, it was the same month the former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury. From what I’ve heard and read, it sounds like Skripal had been a double agent in the 1990s and when the Russians found out, in 2006, they sentenced him to 13 years for high treason. He didn’t get close to serving all that because he was traded in a spy swap with the West in 2010. His daughter was visiting him from Russia when they were poisoned. Everything pointed to the Russian government ordering the poisoning, and it didn’t take long for the shit to hit the fan. The Prime Minister Theresa May didn’t take kindly to the thought of the Russian government attempting to murder a foreign spy in Wiltshire and started expelling Russian diplomats, like governments used to during the Cold War years.
All this would have been interesting enough, but we were supposed to be flying out to Russia for three weeks of filming on 21 March, just over two weeks after the poisoning.
The day before going to the Russian Embassy I’d been on a CPC (Certificate of Professional Competence) course in Yorkshire. I’ve had a truck licence since 2009, and I’ve taken trucks on MOTs, but I’m not allowed to drive a truck with a paying load in it without a CPC. You can drive a farm tractor on the road with a 40-ton load on a provisional licence, but if you’re a truck driver you’ve got to do 35 hours of classroom-based lessons over the space of five years. I’ve never done it, so I’ve got to do the training before they let me drive. There was no need to have this training when I was at Moody’s because I was only delivering the tractor units or trucks with an empty trailer. At the new place I’m working I have to take trucks for MOTs with a load on, so they can test them with the correct axle weight.
Anyway, I got home from that and heard the news that it was either the Kremlin that had ordered the attack, or the Russians had lost control of the nerve agent and it got into someone else’s hands to be used. Theresa May said if she didn’t get an answer within 24 hours, things were going to get serious. It sounded like she half meant business. The 24 hours she was waiting for an answer in was the same 24 hours I had an appointment to get my visa.
I went through the process of going to London because I didn’t want to get to the eleventh hour and think, Shit, it is happening, and not have the paperwork sorted. Still, at the time I was driving down the A1 I was pretty sure the Russia trip wasn’t happening. I didn’t doubt we’d get a visa, but when we landed in Russia would they turn us, a British television film crew, around and send us back on the first flight out?
I read the book Red Notice by Bill Browder, an American businessman who is now a British citizen, a few years ago and it gave me a different view of Russia. In the 1990s, as Russia ditched Communism to become the capitalist dictatorship that it is today, the government gave shares of the nationalised utilities and services, like gas, the bus service, train service and telecoms, to the masses in the form of tokens. The oligarchs got millions’ worth, but every adult in Russia owned a fraction of a percentage of Gazprom, or whatever. Browder ran his own investment company, moved to Russia, got half wise to this, started buying these tokens from Russians, and over the years he ended up owning 51 per cent of Gazprom or summat. It was legal, but the Russian powers that be didn’t like it so they made life very difficult for him and in 2005 deported him. The Red Notice of the book’s title is the Interpol extradition request the Russians put on Browder to bring him back to Moscow to stand trial for fraud and tax evasion. The court case went ahead without Browder and he was given a sentence of nine years, to be served if they ever get hold of him. So Browder knew all about this side of Russia and how it all worked, when he heard about a lawyer, a young bloke called Sergei Magnitsky. The lawyer discovered that Russian officials were involved in a fraud of $230 million. When he wouldn’t back down and keep quiet, the officials pulled strings for Magnitsky to be put in prison. According to Red Notice, Magnitsky was tortured over months before being beaten to death by eight secret police.
This all adds to my fascination with Russia. No one’s ever beaten the Russians at their own game. I really enjoy making the travel programmes. We’ve done Latvia, India and China and it was me who came up with the idea of Russia when Channel 4 said they wanted more of them. Because it’s such a big place, with so many interesting stories, the time away was a lot longer than I hoped it would be. It was supposed to be three weeks, then somehow it grew to four, but then back to three weeks and three days. I’d prefer three weeks or less, but there was no way to fit in everything the director wanted to film, so that was that.
We had a fair-sized crew ready to head out to Moscow and we all had our visas, but the flights still hadn’t even been booked and we were due to leave in less than a week. I didn’t know the plan of what we were going to do out there. I knew we were going to Siberia and Chernobyl, but I never ask. I just go for a look and take it as it comes. If they let us in.