Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC

by Roger Mosey

  The Prime Minister was due on air in the prestige 8.10 a.m. slot, but she arrived extremely early – only just after Jenny Abramsky and me. We therefore had more than half an hour of trying to entertain someone who probably did not want to be entertained at all, and she certainly did not indulge in the free-ranging and indiscreet conversations favoured by some politicians in green rooms. I mentioned that, as I had driven through her constituency of Finchley that morning, I had seen a particularly high number of posters. This earned us a five-minute monologue on the cost of printing and the economics of publicity material. We also tried to find out whether she listened to our programme in the way ministers thought she did. Geoffrey Howe was famous for always wanting to go into the 7.50 a.m. slot, because it allowed him to filibuster up to the start of the weather forecast at 7.55, and it was rumoured that 7.50 was the radio-listening slot within the Thatcher household’s breakfast routine. ‘I listen to the news at 6 a.m.,’ she said, ‘and then I turn the radio off. At seven o’clock I hear the news, and then I’m often working. But I sometimes listen again to the news at eight, and that is it.’ We were duly put in our place.

  It was then through to the studio for the intended reflective conversation with John. Within the first minute I knew with certainty that this was not going to plan. John asked a reasonable first question, to which Mrs Thatcher gave a robust answer, but then he used the word ‘uncaring’ in a description of her prime ministerial style and got this blunderbuss reply:

  And look who is charging me with being uncaring, the people who supported a coal strike, who didn’t support the miners who went to work, but supported those who conducted that strike through intimidation, the object of which was to bring to a stop the whole of manufacturing industry which was to deprive the household and the pensioner of heat and light; and now they want to bring back secondary picketing, that was the party which votes against the prevention of terrorism, the party who in 1979 jolly nearly closed cancer wards. If you look under the health service, if you look at the headlines, then there was a strike in the health service, there was a strike in the ambulance service, the party which supports the teachers in striking against children. No, we care deeply, that’s why I have gone through so much, Mr Humphrys, to restore Britain’s reputation as a reliable ally and a trusted friend, that’s why I went through so much in fighting strikes and that’s why I’ll continue to go through a great deal in standing up for Britain, and might I just say one further thing, the standard of living in this country, including the standard of care, is higher than it has ever been. We don’t talk, we deliver.

  She barely paused for breath, and the interview remained as combative for its full duration. She repeated the words ‘Mr Humphrys’ a number of times, with the warmth with which you might say ‘bubonic plague’. It was, at the time, like watching a train careering out of control down a mountain track with Mrs Thatcher and Mr Humphrys grappling for control in the driver’s compartment. Afterwards, I steeled myself for the task of escorting the Prime Minister to the doors of Broadcasting House. As we descended to the ground floor in the lift, an aide to the Prime Minister started to apologise to her that the interview had not turned out to be the kind of conversation that had been expected. Mrs Thatcher looked into the eyes of the BBC contingent, and said simply, ‘We get what we expect from the BBC.’ To make sure we’d got the message, she repeated, more slowly: ‘We get what we expect.’ We bade her a polite farewell, and the prime ministerial car swept her back onto the campaign trail and, within a few days, to celebrations of another landslide victory.

  Today’s campaign coverage was seen as a success. In the following weeks, Jenny Abramsky was identified as one of the leaders of the revolutionary change that was about to be unleashed in BBC News, courtesy of the arrival of John Birt as deputy director-general. Jenny, who was by this stage a friend as well as my boss, told a group of us over drinks in our regular wine bar that she was never going to be in favour with the new regime. She was promptly given a sizeable promotion to become editor of news and current affairs radio. When this happened, I never thought there would be any consequences for me. I had only been a senior producer on Today for a year, promoted just after Jenny’s arrival. I had thrived on the election coverage, and now I wanted to become better at the most interesting job in radio: being a regular output editor on Today. But the Birt revolution was sweeping away the old guard, creating a raft of vacancies, and I was encouraged to apply for the role of editor on the PM programme. The people choosing the successful candidate were Ron Neil, who had been promoted to running all television and radio news, and Jenny, in her grand new role, and I regarded myself as such an outsider that I did one of the most relaxed and freethinking interviews I have ever done.

  That must be a good tactic. I was at home a couple of days later when Jenny phoned me, with the opening words, ‘Hello – I’m speaking to the editor of the PM programme.’

  Thinking she had kindly rung to tell me who had been appointed, and they were sitting alongside her, I replied, ‘Oh, who is it?’

  ‘It’s you, you dope,’ she said. And so at the age of twenty-nine, only three years after starting in network radio, I was put in charge of one of the flagship daily programmes. It turned out to be the start of the best part of a decade as a Radio 4 editor, in which I gradually moved backwards through the schedule, though upwards in terms of prestige – from PM to The World at One and then back to my original home on Today.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE AFTERNOON SEQUENCES

  MY FIRST VISIT to the PM office after I had been announced as the new editor was a nervous one. The World at One – WATO (‘what-o’) as it is known by its staff – and PM worked together in the same third-floor area of Broadcasting House. It has been managerially fashionable to marry and divorce them, and then remarry them, over the years; and I was inheriting PM as newly divorced from what had been called, quaintly, ‘the afternoon sequences’. But the teams were still in the same office, and they included some redoubtable BBC veterans: the presenters Gordon Clough and Bob Williams, and long-established output editors like Carole Lacey, the partner of Julian Holland. As someone in my twenties, I was about to run a team with people in their fifties, and Gordon had been presenting on Radio 4 when I was still in short trousers. They peered at their new editor from a fug of cigarette smoke that was even thicker than in the Today office, and a glass or two of Valpolicella was seldom far away. Until recently, a bottle of whisky and a bottle of gin had been delivered to the PM office every afternoon for ‘hospitality’ ahead of the presenters’ stint on air. There were often no mixers, and the spirits were consumed – as on Today – from paper cups.

  Most striking was that I was now the editor responsible for Valerie Singleton. Valerie had been the most famous television face of my childhood. She was the presenter of Blue Peter throughout my formative years, and forever associated with Petra the dog, Jason the cat and things made with a cut-up detergent bottle. She had escaped from children’s television to grown-up programmes like Nationwide and The Money Programme, but it is hard to overstate how iconic she was to my generation. She still turned heads in restaurants where there was any accumulation of thirty-somethings or their parents. I had never met her before my arrival on PM, but within minutes she had invited me to a cup of tea in the BBC’s eighth-floor restaurant looking out over the London rooftops. ‘I bet you never thought when you were watching me on Blue Peter’, she began, ‘that you would one day be my boss.’ I confirmed to her that this was true. When I was entranced by children’s television on the flickering black-and-white set in our living room in Bradford, I did not muse during the duller episodes of Bleep and Booster that I would one day become Valerie Singleton’s editor.

  The difference between being the overall editor of a programme and being a senior producer, as I had been on Today, was a significant one. I was now in command of the budget, of staffing and of handling the requests for information and data that were a growing part of BBC life. When
I had duty-edited an edition of the Today programme, I could go home and forget about work. Now I discovered what it was like managerially to be ‘always on’ – concerned about the programme and its people and its reputation even when I was on holiday. I was given not one scintilla of training. It was assumed that we could appoint staff and look after money based on the ability that had got us the job; this was an age before the Fair Selection courses or Producer Choice seminars that burnished our non-editorial skills. I was fortunate to have Jenny as my boss and the wise Martin Cox as my opposite number on The World at One, who were there to offer advice when the BBC management systems left me perplexed.

  In any case, I saw my main task as editorial. PM was rather different in the late ’80s to what it became with Eddie Mair a couple of decades later. For a start, we had two presenters every night, usually from a pool comprising Gordon, Bob, Val and Frances Coverdale. There was a signature tune, which prompted my one order from Ron Neil. He didn’t like the old one at all, so I was despatched to the composer George Fenton, who had written the Newsnight theme, to get a better one. And this was the analogue era, as far away from today’s digital technology as were the gramophone recordings of the 1940s and ’50s. When I arrived at PM, almost every item was on tape; and, as was the case throughout radio in that era, the tape was manually edited by producers. They sliced it in two with a razor blade, removed a section they didn’t want and stuck it back together with a sliver of sticky editing tape. This was burdensome enough on a Today night shift, but it was masochistic in the extreme for a fast-moving high-item show like PM. At half past four and quarter to five you would find presenters and producers running in and out of studios recording down-the-line interviews with correspondents, and then frantically removing retakes or stumbles on the tape machines in the office. It was sometimes known as ‘de-umming’, as interviewees’ ‘ums’ were cut out of the tape.

  There were two reasons for doing it this way. The first was that, if you got it right, it did sound slicker when the bulk of the programme was on tape. You could cut out hesitations, repetitions and deviations. The second was that producers had doubts about Val in particular on live interviews. She was an actress by training and a children’s presenter for most of her career, and some felt it was risky to let her loose on a breaking story. There were examples of correspondents being left almost speechless by a Val question zooming onto the airwaves from the non-journalist segment of her brain. But I thought this was wrong on both counts. Live broadcasting has a charge and an excitement that you do not get from a bunch of tapes; and the point about PM was that it was on air when a lot of news was breaking. As for Val, I was sure that she could take a brief and I have always had a consistent view of presenters: they need to be produced. This can be synonymous with ‘being told what to do’, but so be it. They need to be listened to and handled sensitively, but ultimately editors should edit. I admired a deputy editor of Today who once wrote the word ‘OBEY’ in mirror writing on the glass between the control room and the presenters, to remind them of what was what. Val always had a wonderful, commanding presence on the radio; and with the right handling her performance became even better.

  So we increased the number of items in the programme that went out live. We upped the story count, too, and sometimes a correspondent would pop onto the airwaves for less than a minute to update a breaking story. I was pleased when the Bradford Telegraph & Argus came to visit their local lad made good and headlined the report: ‘Roger’s Radio Rush Hour’. The copy began: ‘In one of the control rooms at Broadcasting House, the atmosphere was so highly charged with adrenalin that even an observer like me, tucked away in a corner with notebook in hand, began to get high on it.’ And the writer concluded: ‘I left the studio appreciating why broadcasting is regarded as a branch of the media to which people need to be recruited young to learn its demanding ways, and wondering how on earth the PM team can do that job day after day without ending up either mad or dead.’ But that was what we enjoyed, of course: the rollercoaster ride of never being quite sure what was going to happen next, which produced an engaging listen for people travelling home in their cars or having their tea.

  We had relatively little interest in political interviews, which were regarded as the fiefdom of Today or The World at One. But I wanted the programme to have the occasional interlude from the rush of daily news, and we were lucky to have on our staff Roger Harrabin – who was then, and is now, one of the best reporters on environmental issues. With a bit of nagging from him, and a sense in the editorial team that green politics was going to be one of the themes of the future, we carved out a role for ourselves as environment specialists. In October 1988, we launched a feature called ‘World Watch’ which used BBC correspondents, and Roger when he could persuade me to pay for an air ticket, to report on some of the challenges the globe was facing beyond the usual headlines. From Lake Baikal, in what was then the Soviet Union, we examined irrigation and its effects; we took to the highways of California to see how they were trying to reduce lead in petrol. Roger visited Switzerland, conducting interviews about the integrated public transport systems there, which never seem to have made it back to Britain. This initiative drew an approving article from the arbiter of all issues in radio, Gillian Reynolds of the Daily Telegraph. She quoted me as asserting, in Birtist-approved fashion, that radio still had to choose ‘important’ over ‘popular’ as a criterion for inclusion in a news programme. ‘With the environment,’ she concluded, ‘he may well have hit both targets at once.’

  Encouraged by the first nice thing ever said about me in a national newspaper, we launched a competition to show how deeply green we were. I confess that this happened partly because we were able to secure a partnership with The Times, and for the lowest-profile of the daily news magazines it was a boost to see our name emblazoned across a distinguished broadsheet’s pages. Hence ‘The Times/PM Environment Award’, which was brought into the world without any of the editorial compliance or competition rules that are mandatory today. It was, however, a lovely source of stories. We invited readers and listeners to tell us about people who had made a difference to their locality by putting the environment first, and the final shortlist showed the quality of what was being done. There was a New Forest keeper who was preserving hornets; a miner in Nottinghamshire who had created a wildflower meadow; a wildlife trust from Radnor; the Orkney Field Club, who were looking after the most northerly woodland in Britain; and a primary school from Reading trying, The Times wrote, ‘to instil in its pupils a lasting reverence for the earth’. They were heart-warming tales, and also met another wish: that PM should get around the country and not be as metropolitan as it had been in former incarnations. It was the miner from Nottinghamshire who came out on top, helped by a background story that involved his working countless hours of overtime to fund the meadow. He was duly awarded £5,000 of The Times’s money, and invited to a celebration lunch at Broadcasting House, where he received his award from Princess Alexandra.

  As someone who celebrated his 30th birthday while being editor of PM, I was still somewhat callow about the way BBC headquarters’ politics operated. I had only a hazy grasp of the hierarchies beyond Jenny as my immediate boss. What I did know was that Radio 4 had little responsibility for us: our line management had moved fully into the news empire of John Birt and Ron Neil. This was deemed necessary to stop non-news specialists interfering in editorial decisions, and to safeguard television news in particular from any pressures from a ratings-minded controller of BBC One. As part of the shutting out of network influence, the controller of Radio 4 had not even been on my appointment board. I took this division rather too much to heart when I was invited by the controller, Michael Green, to be one of the speakers at the Radio AGM, a session at which all the genres of the network came together to share their ideas and plans. In my allocated slot, I said what I really thought. I argued that Radio 4 needed news programmes much more than news needed Radio 4. The network was given its bigges
t audiences by Today, The World at One, PM and The World Tonight – so why did we need the drama and the comedy and the documentaries, which were just a drag on the ratings? We could stand alone. They could not. This was, to say the least, not a tactful case to make to an audience of producers from drama, comedy and documentaries. When I reported back to Jenny what I had said, she went pale.

  ‘Oh, Roger – how could you?’ she asked, as someone who adored almost everything Radio 4 did.

  ‘Well, it’s true,’ I replied. I thought it was generous of Michael Green to send me, along with other speakers, a bottle of champagne for my efforts to sabotage his network. But I never took to much of Radio 4 outside of the news sequences, and I used to pride myself on being able to run across the WATO/PM office to switch off The Archers before the signature tune had stopped playing.

  PM was a wonderful programme for the cutting of editorial teeth. But in the middle of 1989, a vacancy arose ‘next door’ on The World at One when Martin Cox moved to become a managing editor alongside Jenny in her management team. It was a move made many times before: to slip from PM to WATO into what was seen as the more prestigious daily programme – with the editorship bolstered by The World This Weekend as radio’s Sunday flagship. I moved at a fortunate time. WATO was in excellent health thanks to the output skills of its deputy editor, Kevin Marsh. He had transformed the programme from being often a disconnected set of individual interviews into a format that told stories much more coherently, using clips – short extracts from interviews – and well-crafted scripts. Interviewees would then have to respond to the evidence presented to them; I learned more about how to make daily current affairs programmes from Kevin than from anyone else. WATO had also relatively recently acquired a new presenter in James Naughtie – invariably known as Jim – who had previously been a newspaper journalist on The Scotsman and The Guardian. He had started promisingly, and he was much more of my generation than Gordon and Bob on PM. Almost immediately we developed one of the most intense and enjoyable professional relationships of my career. Jim was backed up by the talented Nick Clarke, making a team that was close to perfect.