6
The farmer and I stood in the front yard of his farmhouse in Dorset looking south-west, small fields rolling away towards the horizon, mostly green with tall grass waiting to be turned into silage, some soft gold with ripening corn, others the harsh yellow of rape. Here and there a copse of trees and a glint of river and, if you stood on tiptoes, the distant blue of the English Channel.
‘What a view!’ I said to the farmer.
‘Maybe,’ he grunted, ‘but you can’t pay the bills with the bloody view.’
Welcome to the romantic world of farming.
This, or so I thought at the time, was to be my new life. The farmer’s approach was the sensible one. I knew nothing about farming – except that it would be very, very different from the life I was leaving behind. I wanted tranquillity instead of excitement and I’d always dreamed of owning a patch of land I could call my own – ever since I was thirteen and spent a week in Somerset at harvest time at a farm my cousin worked on. They’d let me drive the tractor slowly around and around the field while they slung bales of straw on the big trailer and then got me drunk on cider in the evening. The hangover went eventually, but the appeal remained.
And here I was, twenty-five years later, with almost enough money in the bank to make it happen. That’s because of the extraordinary generosity of the BBC in those years towards foreign correspondents who lived abroad. The salary was relatively modest but you paid no tax, your home was provided and anyway you were away so much you lived on very generous expenses. If you chose to leave your children in Britain (we didn’t) the BBC paid to send them to private schools and also paid to send them to you for holidays three times a year. It meant you could basically bank your salary and even rent out your home in the UK to add to the pot. One or two of my colleagues wanted even more. Infamously, a radio correspondent charged the BBC for a lawnmower as part of his ‘living expenses’ allowance. It might have been acceptable if he’d had a large lawn – but he lived in a flat on top of a skyscraper. It cost him his job. Things have changed since then.
I did not end up buying the lovely view in Dorset. I went home to Wales instead and bought Fronlas: 134 acres of dairy farm, lock, stock and barrel. It had been so neglected over the years there wasn’t a gate left swinging, a fence left standing or a cow that seemed to realise her job was to stand quietly while she delivered gallons of nice creamy milk. Most were rejects from other herds that the farmer had bought cheaply: savage beasts, some of them, who wanted to kick your head in when you tried to wash their warty teats or too old and weary to bother. Too old and weary to deliver much more than a cupful of milk, too. I didn’t spot any of that at the time, of course. I was a novice and failed to notice the way the farmer’s eyes lit up when it dawned on him. He knew a mug when he spotted one.
On the day we took over I was on one of my last foreign trips, which happened to be in China. I phoned Eddie, my enthusiastic young farm manager.
‘How’s it going?’
There was a slight pause and then: ‘Well … we’ve got sixty starving cows plus all the young stock, not a bale of hay or a pound of silage to feed them with and it’s just coming to the end of winter so there’s not a blade of grass in the fields either. Apart from that everything’s fine.’
Luckily, what we did have were generous and immensely helpful neighbours, who bailed us out. Literally. But I learned over the next few weeks the economic reality of small dairy farming. You can survive (just) if you meet a few basic conditions:
The desperately sad truth – and things have got infinitely worse since I bought Fronlas in 1971 – is that those farmers who create the countryside that we all love so much are vanishing. I mean those small farms with lots of hedges and soil that has not been so plastered with chemicals that worms and other insects and birds have no reasonable chance of surviving.
It is different for those farmers (or farming companies) with a few thousand acres of good flat land in East Anglia, for instance. They have done away with the hedges, so their enormous machines (usually, owned by contractors who roll like an invading army from farm to farm) have nothing in their way as they plough and harvest and spray. And how they spray. The effect was that pretty much the only thing left living in those endless prairies was the wheat or the barley or the oilseed rape. The farmer made a fat profit in the short term, but the soil suffered terribly – and is still suffering.
Some small farmers do manage to make a reasonable living and many of them are those who took the gamble of spurning chemicals and converting to organic farming. I met two of them after I’d been at Fronlas for only a few weeks. They appeared at the bottom of my drive one Saturday morning, welcomed me to Wales and asked what the hell I was doing using chemicals. They were Peter Segger and Patrick Holden, two of the most remarkable people I have ever met. We became close friends and remain so to this day. The organic revolution would not have happened without them and a few other brave and reckless souls in west Wales in the 1960s.
They farmed land near me and both were regarded as completely barmy by just about every other farmer in their county. The rules for profitable farming were straightforward and everyone knew them. You spread tons of nitrogen on the grass in the spring or you’d never grow enough to feed the cows or any other crops; you stuffed the cows full of antibiotics every time they sneezed or they’d curl up and die; you killed off every weed and insect with poisonous sprays or they’d eat you out of house and home. Wasn’t that what everyone had been doing since the dawn of the age of intensive agriculture which had revolutionised farming soon after the war?
Peter and Patrick did none of that. They found other ways to crop crops and they very nearly went bankrupt trying to prove it, but they survived. And so did their farms – and their message. Organic farming improves, rather than degrades, the soil, enhances the environment and produces food that is better and, in reality, cheaper. Don’t look only at the price we pay in the supermarket; look at all the other costs. Who picked up the £4 billion bill for BSE, just for starters? And what price can we put on the environmental vandalism of industrial agriculture?
Not that I can claim credit for my own organic achievements, alas. I had neither the knowledge nor the aptitude nor the determination nor the ambition. Peter and Patrick wanted to save the world. I wanted to save my marriage. They also needed to prove it was possible for a small farmer to make a perfectly decent living from their modest acreage. I had another job.
I could earn a lot more in a couple of days sitting in a nice warm studio reading a few lines from an autocue than I could in a freezing milking parlour in the middle of winter before the sun has risen waiting for a beast weighing a third of a ton to try kicking me to death.
You might think they are gentle doe-eyed beasts, and so they are when they are dealing with experienced dairymen who know and like them. But I tell you, they can smell fear. And I learned that the first time I ended up flat on my back in a pile of steaming dung with a bruise the size of a very large hoof on my hip, barely able to stand and knowing that I had another fifty cows to milk before the tanker arrived. I learned a couple of other things too: things that should have been obvious to me several years ago. I was not born to be a farmer and Fronlas was not, perhaps, the rural idyll I had created in my dreams. So I sold up in the early 1980s and settled for being a newsreader instead. Not that my path to newsreading had been quite as smooth as Alan Protheroe had promised after that dinner in Stellenbosch.
When I managed finally to get back to London from South Africa many months later, having heard barely a cheep from Alan in the meantime, I reported for duty and asked him when I was to start newsreading. He looked slightly puzzled and, in truth, more than a little shifty. The meeting in Stellenbosch might as well never have happened.
‘What? Newsreader? You don’t want to be a newsreader, bloody good reporter like you, sitting behind a desk like some stuffed dummy reading an autocue …’
‘But Alan, you clearly promised …’
‘Nonsense! What we need is an experienced foreign correspondent like you who won’t be wasted in Joburg or Washington … you’ll live here in London and your patch will be the whole world! If a really big story breaks somewhere you’ll be the man to do it. Best reporting job on the planet eh bach? And you’re just the man for it.’ Great. I felt like the waiter taking Alan’s order for dinner. Or maybe the piece of steak. This was exactly the job I did not want. I knew what it would mean and I was right. For the next year I barely saw Britain – or my family. I was out of the country for almost nine months.
And then a new editor took over BBC Television News and he delivered on the Protheroe promise. I tore up my passport, burned my suitcase and swore the next foreign trip I made would be across the River Styx or wherever old hacks go when they finally cast off this mortal coil.
Actually I was a little more cautious than that. I suspected I might be called on to do the odd bit of reporting or presenting the Nine O’Clock News from foreign parts occasionally but, even so, my life was transformed. I would leave my home in Henley-on-Thames mid-morning, drive to Television Centre and drive back again about twelve hours later. I had a routine. Bliss.
For roughly half the population, I suspect, newsreading is considered a dream job. You get paid a small fortune for sitting in front of a camera for a few minutes and you become famous into the bargain – assuming you measure fame partly by the number of people who catch your eye in the street, do a double take, and sometimes say: ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’
The problem with this, as I discovered fairly early on, is that you can never be completely sure whether you have really met them or not. There is always the danger that you dismiss them with a slightly patronising smile and mutter something like: ‘Oh, you’ve probably seen me on the telly …’ And then you remember after they’ve left, looking seriously puzzled, that you’d actually sat next to them at dinner six months ago and they had no idea you were supposedly famous. No wonder they hurried off, understandably thinking you were a bit of a prat.
Apart from assuming a convincing degree of false modesty the only real skill required by a newsreader is being able to read fluently from an autocue under the pressure of the studio lights, knowing that several million people are watching you do it. My old friend Michael Buerk once described it as ‘the only job that actually requires no talent at all’. Just in case we hadn’t got the point he added: ‘There are some real lamebrains doing it.’ For the record, Michael was brilliant at it.
In the early days of the autocue – or ‘teleprompter’ as it was then known – the words were typed onto what looked like a wide toilet roll positioned just above the camera lens. The effect was to make the reader look either shifty or snooty because you were always staring slightly above the viewer’s eyeline. The other problem was that you had to control it yourself with a pedal. The harder you pressed the faster it went. It made for a pretty jerky performance if, like me in my early days, you were desperately nervous and your foot kept jiggling up and down.
It’s much easier these days when the autocue screen is positioned in front of the lens and operated by a professional. Most people can manage it perfectly well with a bit of practice – though some need more than others. It was often said that Ronald Reagan – not perhaps the sharpest brain ever to occupy the Oval Office – required two autocue screens when he was addressing a conference. One screen would have ‘Good …’ on it and the other, when he swivelled his head to take in the rest of the audience, would have ‘… morning.’ Possibly unfair on a much-underrated president but, with the best will in the world, you’d be hard-pressed to describe sitting in front of a camera and reading from an autocue as demanding.
When I joined the BBC, newsreaders were not journalists. They were almost all continuity announcers or, in some cases, actors who hadn’t quite made the grade. They were required to have a pleasant voice, an unthreatening appearance, a degree of authority and a certain amount of charm. Silvery grey hair was not exactly compulsory but it was definitely an asset. So was being a man.
I worked briefly as a subeditor in the television newsroom in the days when Robert Dougall was one of the best known and most loved (yes, the audience loved newsreaders in those far-off days) in the business. I was simultaneously intrigued and baffled by the way he dealt with the scripts as they were presented to him by us newsroom hacks who’d written them. The notion of a newsreader writing his own script had yet to be born.
Robert would sit erect in his chair, as though the cameras were pointing at him, and read the lines aloud. Then he would read them again and this time, with a heavy pencil, would underline the word in each sentence that he thought most worthy of emphasis. Then he would do it again. And again. By the time he’d moved on to the next script almost every word in every story would be underlined and almost every word emphasised. Often the story made almost no sense but it didn’t matter: he was Robert Dougall. I truly believe that if Robert had chosen to deliver the news in Aramaic standing on his head, at least half the audience would have assumed there had to be a very good reason for it and they’d have loved him even more.
Many years after he’d retired I asked him whether he was missing the public adulation. ‘Not in the slightest old boy,’ he told me, ‘I was in Regent’s Park only yesterday and a couple of elderly ladies approached me to say how much they enjoyed the news when I was delivering it. I told them I’d stopped years ago. “No no, of course you haven’t,” one of them said as the other nodded, “I saw you only the other night and you were wearing that lovely blue tie. You must never retire!”’
I admit I was slightly sceptical of the tale at the time, but no longer. I still get elderly strangers approaching to ask me what I’m doing these days because they haven’t seen me reading the news recently. Unsurprising really, given that I had last presented the Nine O’Clock News more than thirty years ago.
The original plan had been for me to present five days a week, which would have been pretty daunting, but the bosses relented. I would do three days and the other presenter would be my old friend John Simpson. Even better. John is a brilliant journalist, one of the kindest and most decent men I have ever known and we share the same, seriously warped sense of humour. And, boy, did we need it over the coming months. The audience did not like us – which is a bit like saying the snake isn’t terribly fond of the mongoose. Except that with the mongoose it isn’t personal. With the audience of the new revamped Nine it seemed very personal. They hated us – partly because we had ousted Richard Baker.
Many felt, with some justification, that Dickie had been treated pretty shabbily by BBC News. He was an institution in the very best sense of the word. He was the first person ever to read the news on television way back in 1954 and he’d been doing it ever since. He was also a consummate professional: always in total control, never flustered. Above all, the audience both liked and trusted him. He was an old friend in every living room in the land.
He was also a very nice man. On the day of my first outing on the Nine O’Clock Dickie had been demoted to reading the Six O’Clock News and I was doing my best to avoid bumping into him. I tried to imagine how I might have reacted if I’d been in his position – unseated after nearly thirty years of immaculate service by a callow youth who’d never read a news bulletin in his life. I should not have worried. When I went into the newsreaders’ make-up room half an hour before we went on air there was a message scrawled across the mirror in lipstick. It read: ‘Break a leg John! You can do it! Dickie.’
I can’t tell you what my first Nine was like because I can’t remember. And I can’t remember because I was frozen with fear. All I could think about was that 10 million people out there beyond the studio lights were watching me and waiting for me to make a fool of myself. Ten million people. Each of them (with the possible exception of my nearest and dearest and the BBC management) willing me to fail – if only because I wasn’t Dickie Baker. But of course I did what I had to do. I read the words on the autocue as they appeared and I suppose I must have been conscious of the director talking into my earpiece from time to time. But only just.
If the autocue had stopped working or a large rat had leaped onto my chest and started nibbling at my nose I would have kept sitting there and kept reading. My brain simply was not functioning. People talk about being on autopilot but it was much worse than that. I was in a state of suspended animation. When it was all over the editor came into the studio and told me I had been brilliant. Obviously I hadn’t but what else could he say? ‘Sorry old boy, this newsreading lark obviously isn’t for you. Maybe you’d be better off going back on the road – or possibly retraining as a messenger!’
The way I was feeling, anything would be preferable to subjecting myself to that twenty-five minutes of torture again the next night … and the next … and the next. It was like looking down a very long tunnel with a torture chamber at the end except that instead of the water slowly dripping off its dank walls there was a bank of very bright lights with all those people on the other side of them – 10 million people who, I was about to learn, hated me and, when he started his stint in front of the cameras, hated John too.
Mercifully those were the days before instant communication. If we’d had email and the ludicrous Twitter mob back then I suspect the bosses would have pulled us off the air immediately, crawled to Dickie to beg his forgiveness and asked him to come back. But it took a few days for the letters to start arriving in the post and another few for the television critics to have their say. And then it began.
I often think that if I had not been sharing an office with John at the time I might very well have taken the lift to the top floor of TV Centre, climbed out onto the roof and jumped off. The word mortifying is nowhere near strong enough. Embarrassing? Certainly. Crushing? Without a doubt. Humiliating? Oh yes! It was John who saved me for two reasons. The first was that the audience seemed to hate us equally so we shared the pain. The second was that John had a brilliant idea.
When the BBC is criticised by the audience its instinctive response is to say sorry. John took the opposite view. He suggested that instead of handing all the letters to the department responsible for complaints we should deal with them ourselves. Every single one of them. And instead of grovelling and promising to try harder in future and be a bit more like Dickie, we would fight fire with fire. The more abusive the letter, the more abusive our reply. And we awarded each other scores for who could write the most creative abuse. John always won.
I almost felt sorry for the poor viewer who had written to tell him that he was the newsreading equivalent of a particularly inarticulate talking dog, or some such. To this day I wish I had been there when he opened John’s reply to find himself accused of being lower than a camel’s crotch and far more smelly. They didn’t have to be clever, you understand, just rude.
And here’s the extraordinary thing. We had expected retribution to be visited upon us by our bosses who would, obviously, be overwhelmed by complaints from the recipients of our bile. Exactly the opposite happened. The more vicious our abuse, the more cringing their apology when they wrote back to us as, invariably, they did. They almost always began with something like: ‘I’m so sorry if I’ve offended you by describing you as the worst newsreader in the history of broadcasting …’ I’ve never been able to figure it out. But eventually the flood of letters reduced to a trickle and then pretty much dried up when the poor old audience realised they were never going to get their beloved Dickie back in his rightful place.
The newspaper and magazine critics were more difficult to deal with. No point in sending them abusive letters: they’d be delighted to know their barbs had gone home. Richard Ingrams, then the editor of Private Eye and a Spectator columnist, was probably the most vicious. John and I spent happy hours discussing ways we might kill him, or at least cause him the maximum inconvenience. I think it was John who suggested we should find out where he parked his car and pour pee into his petrol tank. I don’t suppose we were serious about it, but the childish plotting helped a little.
From the bosses there was an ominous silence until the day I was called into the editor’s office. It was a Wednesday and he told me I would need to come in the next day to read the news. I reminded him that John was on the rota. Not any longer, he said. He’s on a plane on his way to Uruguay. I’ve never been able to verify this, but I gather the director general, no less, had decided enough was enough and one of us had to be sacrificed to appease the audience. Why John and not me, I have no idea. I thought he was much better: far more authoritative and convincing than I had ever been. But the decision had been taken and that was the end of John’s days as a newsreader.
And what a sensible decision it turned out to be. John was free to do what he has always done superlatively: travel to foreign places and produce reports that tell us what we need to know. That, of course, is the minimum requirement for a foreign correspondent but John has always gone so much further. He is immensely resourceful, a brilliant writer and one of the bravest reporters it has ever been my privilege to work with. We have talked often about the day he got the push from the Nine. He has always been immensely grateful to the DG for sacking him.
As for me, I was left to soldier on for another five years. Inevitably I got over my first-day nerves but it’s one of the oldest clichés in the slim volume of How To Do Live Broadcasting that the day you stop feeling at least a wee bit nervous is probably the day you should stop. In the end (having been asked to present five days a week instead of three) I fell victim to the America Rule: whatever American broadcasters do, the British must eventually copy.
In this case the America Rule dictated that one newsreader may be good but two is better. And, in the perfect world, one will be a grizzled male and the other a rather beautiful younger female. I’ve never quite understood why, and, even after all these years, I am still embarrassed when I watch one presenter staring raptly at the other reading from the autocue. In a typical half-hour news bulletin there will be four or five minutes of copy to be read. Does it really take two people to do that? But I eventually fell victim to the Rule myself. I was told by my clearly discomfited boss that in future the Nine would have two presenters and the other would be Julia Somerville. Then he waited for me to ask the obvious question. It was the only one that mattered: ‘Who will read the headlines?’
He looked down at his shoes and mumbled ‘Umm … Julia …’
And that’s when I decided my time as a newsreader was up. I could perfectly well see their reasoning – or at least I tried to pretend I could. Julia was a terrific journalist and broadcaster and (I think we can all agree on this) rather better-looking than me. In fact, she was beautiful and it would be foolish to pretend that good looks don’t play a part in a hugely competitive business. And why shouldn’t they? Television (the clue is in the word) is a visual medium.
So, one way and another, when the call came from the Today programme on that October night, I was ready for it.