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

by Roger Mosey

  The World at One is a deeply satisfying programme for a presenter and an editor. We would start the day at 7.30 in the morning, scrutinising the newspapers almost line by line, and being rude about Today and the stories we believed they had missed or got wrong. The morning editorial meeting had intellectual rigour: everyone from presenter to production secretary was invited to contribute their ideas, but woe betide them if they were half-formed or something that had been done elsewhere. This forum, sometimes brutal but often humorous, was an excellent training ground; and I am proud that so many WATO/PM alumni from the time that Kevin and I were editors went on to become editors themselves. From 9.15 we were firming up stories or hunting down interviewees, and it was a typical WATO gag that one of our producers was so adept at getting people out from hiding to face the microphone that his catchphrase became ‘come on out, I know you’re in there’. The tight deadlines meant that you could move from an idea at the morning meeting to a fully realised story in four hours flat, and there was none of the risk that Today has of a day team’s conception being strangled by the night team or completely misunderstood by the presenters at 6 a.m. Additionally, the flexibility of radio allowed you to change course if something wasn’t working. There were some days when I would look at the running order at half past twelve, decide I was not enthused by it, and throw it up in the air in the hope of transmitting something utterly different at one o’clock.

  Doing this is much easier if an editor has a close relationship with the presenter. There has to be a mutual trust. Jim and I had that, even though at times we succumbed to bickering like an old married couple. Still firm in my belief that presenters are best if they are produced, I would supervise Jim minutely. He called me ‘old mother hen’ by way of thanks, so I named him ‘wayward chicken’. Jim would sometimes ad lib from his scripts, and if he stumbled I would immediately say into his ear, ‘Make it up, cock it up.’ I so annoyed him one day, giving last-minute instructions through his headphones during the news bulletin, that he threw all his scripts into the air in the studio. They floated gently downwards across the presenter’s table and onto the studio floor, while the announcer carried on reading the news in his best Radio 4 manner. But Jim and I were the closest of friends, and when we were out of the office we would socialise together or be endlessly on the phone or chatting about stories for the next programme. I became godfather to Jim and Ellie Naughtie’s younger daughter. She is one of two 1991 goddaughters I have who are called Flora, the other one being the child of Bill and Sesi Turnbull, who both worked with me on Today.

  My editorship of The World at One coincided with the most extraordinary time for global news stories. The first edition of The World This Weekend that I edited started with the breaking news of the massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. We then had a segment devoted to the death, announced overnight, of Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Finally, we just had time to squeeze in the news that the Eastern Bloc’s first non-communist government had been elected in Poland. Throughout the second half of 1989, Sundays were particularly frantic for news because they always seemed to have astonishing developments in the collapse of Soviet-imposed communism, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, we were still putting on special programmes on 24 December as the Ceauşescu regime came to an inglorious end in Romania. I was so tired by the end of that year that I fell asleep at the wheel of my car when driving home for Christmas. I ended up in a muddy field in Lincolnshire, too exhausted even to be shocked. I spun the car back onto the road and drove on, only realising a few miles later that I could easily have hit a stone wall and killed myself.

  In the following year, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The first Gulf War continued into 1991, followed by the abolition of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the Soviet Union. In the Balkans, Yugoslavia was breaking up. The transformation in communications brought all this vividly to British listeners. For the first time, radio had satellite-quality foreign reporting, and there was more chance than ever before that the key participants would be available down the line or even in Broadcasting House. The Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic was interviewed face to face by Jim in our studio 3B during a visit to London before the world knew about the full horror of what he had unleashed in Bosnia.

  It was a period of seismic change in British politics, too. The foundations of Mrs Thatcher’s prime ministership were increasingly shaky. We loved nothing more than giving the political pot a good stir, and it was easy to get backbench Conservatives to be disobliging about their leader after a misstep by the government or a bad by-election result. We liked the humorous newspaper claim that Sir Marcus Fox, the plain-speaking MP for Shipley, had been knighted for ‘services to The World at One’ – and we would most certainly have recommended him. He had a unique ability to start an interview loyally and then bring up complaints which guaranteed bad headlines the next day for Mrs Thatcher, along with an attribution in the newspapers as ‘speaking on The World at One’, which delighted us. He was not alone. The ill-discipline of the Conservative Party was a gift to political journalists throughout the time I was a programme editor. Initially on WATO, the loyal government response to these claims would often come from Sir Geoffrey Howe, then leader of the House of Commons. After his resignation, he was equally willing to appear on our airwaves as one of the government’s critics – to the extent that when I left WATO, my gifts included a model of a dead sheep in recognition of Sir Geoffrey’s ubiquity.

  I would confess that on quiet days we sometimes overdid the internal disputes of the Conservative Party. But it was unquestionably the big theme of 1989/90. Jim and I were in Brighton for the Conservative conference in the autumn of 1990, which turned out to be the last for Mrs Thatcher. Despite our best efforts, paradoxically it was not one of the events where WATO was awash with dissent. The conspiracies were being conducted out of sight. Indeed, my strongest memory of that conference was of the hostility towards the BBC – exemplified by the fact that a motion attacking the corporation was selected by representatives for debate on the final day. There was a conspicuous act of bravery by David Mellor, then the broadcasting minister, in facing down the BBC’s critics, but it was inescapable that we were not popular with many ministers, nor with the Tory rank and file. Political support for the corporation felt in doubt. In the weeks that followed, though, it became clear that the skids were under the Prime Minister, and speculation built that Michael Heseltine would stand against her for the leadership of the party. One morning in the WATO office we listened with particular pleasure to the Today programme waffling away again on this theme to no particular purpose – when Jim and I knew that Heseltine was definitely going to declare his candidacy. We had clandestinely agreed to go to Heseltine’s house at 11 a.m. to record an interview for that day’s programme in which the gloves would come off: Mrs Thatcher was to face a fight for her political life. The public announcement would be made just before lunchtime.

  When Jim and I got to Michael Heseltine’s house, few were aware of the secret. There were no crews outside and we walked up the pathway without anyone observing us. Inside, Heseltine and his wife seemed, understandably, to be nervous. This was an enormous moment in their lives: after all the thinking and the political plotting, one of the best politicians of his day was about to challenge Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, a three-time election winner, for the crown he had always wanted. While we recorded the interview, a lengthy one at twenty minutes or more, word spread that Heseltine was about to announce his candidacy. By the time we opened the front door, photographers and crews were crowding the pavement to the extent that Jim and I had to crawl our way out on hands and knees through a maze of snappers’ ladders and television wires and journalists’ feet.

  This is only one example of the ‘backstage’ view of politics that The World at One offered. Each year at a party conference I would be fascinated as the ‘minister under fire’, whoever that happe
ned to be, would finish his platform speech and then hotfoot it to our studio. He would listen intently to the way the news was reporting what he had said, and to our collection of immediate reaction. Often with a wife and special advisers watching from our control room, during the live broadcast he would then try to spin himself out of disaster or bask in an unexpected triumph. It brought home the brutality and the relentlessness of politics, sometimes distilled into a career trajectory being decided by twenty minutes of platform oratory and an interrogation on WATO straight afterwards.

  We were nicknamed ‘Westminster at One’, a title we accepted with equanimity. Our political instincts sometimes caused bafflement in the radio newsroom, who supplied our news bulletin, when we said we were planning to lead the programme with fifteen minutes on Qualified Majority Voting in Europe or whatever party crisis we could see looming. They preferred their headlines to be about things that had actually happened, like court cases or motorway accidents. But we took pride in working our contacts, and that often put us ahead of the game. On the day after Mrs Thatcher’s inconclusive leadership ballot against Michael Heseltine, the lunchtime television outlets focused on her pledge to fight on and to win the second round. We led with a much more pessimistic outlook for the Prime Minister, based on dozens of phone calls and a senior MP telling us in a pre-recorded interview: ‘I don’t think you can stop an avalanche halfway.’

  The truth of that was revealed the next morning when Margaret Thatcher resigned shortly after the Today programme went off air. There was enormous frustration for The World at One team because Radio 4 turned down our offer of a special live programme at the next available junction, 10 a.m., saying they would like something ‘more polished’ a little later. So at 10 a.m. they stuck with their published schedule and broadcast The Natural World. The billing was: ‘Small mammals can use hedgerows as roads, connecting many lanes of bramble together into one large habitat.’

  Television, meanwhile, was covering one of the biggest political moments of the century. We were only allowed on air in suitably polished form at 11 a.m., and this became used as a compelling example of why radio needed a rolling news network to bypass such ridiculous decisions. For our regular slot at 1 p.m., John Birt slipped into the back of the studio to watch – one of those gestures that increases the pressure on the studio team, but is nonetheless appreciated as a sign that the bosses care about what you are doing. We knew by then that Douglas Hurd and John Major would stand against Heseltine in the next phase of the contest, and their champions were interviewed live on the programme. On major news days, Jim Naughtie would wave his arms in the air like a prizefighter who had just won a bout. There was much arm-waving that lunchtime.

  John Major was considerably more accessible as Prime Minister than his predecessor. There had been a lapsed tradition that the PM would give a radio interview to mark the New Year, and we decided to try to revive that. This was both to cement WATO’s role as the leading political programme of its day, and to fill the gaping forty-minute hole that was otherwise looming on 1 January. Downing Street liked the idea, so on a dank New Year’s Eve Jim and I and our engineer presented ourselves at the Majors’ home near Huntingdon to record the broadcast. We were greeted by the normality of family life: dad John open-necked and in a comfy pullover, some banter between him and their teenage children, and the Majors preparing to go to see the neighbours later on for a ‘pot-luck supper’. I recall Norma Major was supplying the dessert. Only the red box in the study confirmed that this was actually the Prime Minister’s residence. Major showed us the file marked ‘action this day’, and Jim attempted to squint at its contents as proof that he was still a hack at heart. The Prime Minister gently but swiftly removed it from sight.

  The interview itself was a success: robust questioning from Jim, and enough news lines to dominate the television bulletins and the newspaper headlines. We maintained the New Year tradition for some years, taking it with us to Today. Major was always the most courteous of interviewees. Snobs would regard this as inappropriate, but he sent thank-you letters in response to thank-you letters. With a handwritten salutation and sign-off, he replied to my thanks:

  Thank you very much for your letter which I received today and for taking the trouble to write to me. I was delighted to be able to help ‘The World at One’ by recording an interview for transmission on New Year’s Day and shall be happy to do what I can to assist you on future occasions. With all good wishes to you and to everyone on ‘The World at One’ and ‘The World This Weekend’.

  He nonetheless maintained a robust operation at Conservative Central Office under Chris Patten, and the 1992 election was notable for the toughness of both Tories and Labour in dealing with the media. This was partly because it was such a tightly fought campaign and there were daily skirmishes for control of the agenda, with Labour refusing to put up speakers on subjects they didn’t care to talk about and the Conservatives doing the same. We would threaten the ‘empty chair’: ‘X refused to put up a speaker on this topic today’, to the hysteria of press officers who wanted us to opt for their story instead. We would routinely be scolded for falling for their opponents’ agenda or for disrespectful questions to their star performers, in a way that we hadn’t experienced on anything like the same scale in 1987 – nor in most later elections.

  We tried to subvert this by presenting the programme each day from a location outside London, with Jim or Nick taking it in turns to be on the road and as far away from the spin doctors as possible. This also permitted us to stage another event that created pictures across many of the front pages. When we were planning the programme from Northern Ireland, we realised that an election campaign overrode the broadcasting ban in force at the time that kept Sinn Fein representatives off the airwaves. Only in the UK could it be the case that banned spokesmen were actually required to be allowed to take part in programmes once an election had been called. Nick Clarke therefore hosted a feisty debate in Broadcasting House in Belfast, unprecedented at the time, between Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and John Hume of the SDLP, which was genuinely illuminating and showed the absurdity of trying to ban people from making a political case.

  As well as the deluge of foreign news and the seismic events in politics, this was a time when the royal family was in a tumult too. The BBC has always been a somewhat nervous purveyor of royal news, but in the Birt era we were particularly cautious about the sources and provenance of a story. This meant we had no problem with the formal announcements – we did a Radio 4 ‘Charles and Diana to separate’ special – but there was corporate anxiety about speculation in newspapers and any items broadcast by the BBC that appeared to be derived from that. Andrew Morton’s sensational book about Diana therefore posed a dilemma. Diana, Her True Story was serialised in the Sunday Times, and detailed an account of her marriage that we now know to have been supplied by the Princess herself. But, at the time, barely a word made the BBC bulletins outside the newspaper reviews. At WATO we enjoyed the thrill of chasing a story, but we were also not averse to winding up the people in news management that we thought of as ‘the Thought Police’ – and the best way of doing that was to pop a few provocative stories into our draft running order. Our computerised systems meant that the WATO provisional schedule could be read over in Television Centre, so we would gaily write in ‘Diana – the story – Morton interview’ and ‘Diana – reaction – bid for Charles’ and then wait for the phone to ring.

  It invariably did: ‘Roger, I just wondered whether you were thinking about doing anything about the Morton book? Doesn’t look much in it to me … but just checking…’ The often-benign nature of the BBC bureaucracy meant that, on a day when we decided the story was genuine enough to tackle it properly, we did so without recriminations – and with full credit to BBC News, it was they who got the ultimate scoop of the Diana interview for Panorama. But we were conscious that we had a chairman in Duke Hussey, who was married to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and if we made a misstep on a ro
yal story then the management would get an earful from Dukey.

  Against this background, I was pleased that we had a royal scoop ourselves on WATO. One day in March 1992, on a relatively quiet day in that year’s election campaign, I received a phone call not long before 1 p.m. from Paul Reynolds, the BBC’s royal correspondent. This was just after it had been confirmed that the Duke and Duchess of York were to split up, after years of gossip about the state of their marriage and some lurid behaviour by the duchess, Sarah Ferguson. Paul had been to a briefing at the Palace and he was, by his gentlemanly standards, very excited indeed. The Palace had laid into the duchess, he told me, and there was an unprecedentedly strong briefing against her. He had this exclusively for The World at One, and it would make headlines without any doubt at all. Paul is a correspondent I would have trusted with my life, so after a swift consultation with Jim we opted for what we used to call ‘busting the bulletin’: dropping the news summary down the programme, and starting with a presenter interview on a breaking story.

  Paul delivered in spades. ‘The knives are out for Fergie at the Palace,’ he told us live on air. ‘I have rarely heard Palace officials talking in such terms about someone. They are talking about her unsuitability for public life, royal life – her behaviour in being photographed for Hello! magazine, fooling around, putting paper bags on her head on an aircraft while she was being watched by reporters…’ He added that the Palace believed Sarah had hired a public relations company to leak news of the separation to the Daily Mail.