by Roger Mosey
This was incredible stuff to be coming from Buckingham Palace about a royal duchess, and officials had, it was claimed, made it plain to Paul that some of the anger was coming from the Queen herself. The story the next day in The Sun compressed it into ‘Queen Puts Knife Into Fergie’. In her autobiography some years later, the duchess described it as ‘the royal story of the year’, with what she called a ‘somewhat breathless’ Reynolds making a ‘bombshell allegation’ on The World at One. Why had Palace officials behaved in that way, she asked?
They needed to cut me off at the knees, abort my future options, destroy my standing with the Queen. They also needed to send a warning to Diana, to keep her in the fold and shore up the monarchy. My public vivisection would be a reminder: this is what happens if you cross us.
I doubt that the founding fathers of The World at One quite had this role in mind for the programme. But we sat there with open mouths, before ploughing dutifully through the rest of the day’s agenda.
Inevitably, the phone call came in shortly afterwards from BBC News HQ. ‘Great story. Where did it come from? And, er, are we sure it’s true?’ Other phone calls rained in from rival broadcasters seeking a copy of the tape for their own output, and from newspapers and agencies wanting a transcript. The truth of it was that this was a case where you put your trust in a correspondent, and you have to exercise a judgement on his or her record and the plausibility of what you are being told. In a fast-moving daily news programme, you can take a decision to make the item your main story, or play it somewhere down the running order, or drop it altogether. There was a manifest danger in giving such prominence to the Fergie story that day, as subsequent – and more substantive – scoops broken in a correspondent ‘two-way’ have shown. But there is also a journalistic risk if you have a story like that and fail to trumpet it. By no means did we – or I – get this right every time; and I always have the greatest fellow feeling for any editor who has to make a call at short notice and stand by it. There is no scientific way of being right 100 per cent of the time in the content and weight of a story, and belief in standards has to be tempered by an understanding of the pressures of daily journalism. You cannot hand over all the big decisions to a management board or a regulatory review panel.
By contrast with the breathless rush of The World at One, The World This Weekend (‘TW2’) was a more considered weekly current affairs programme run largely by the same team. I was fortunate to have support from two deputy editors who did the planning for TW2: first Rod Liddle, who would have been surprised at that time to know that he would one day feature in television’s Pointless Celebrities, and Anne Koch. Rod was a formidable journalist. He was on best display at a party conference where, with his long, tousled hair and a cigarette never far from his hands, he would sidle up to politicians with a genial ‘Hello, mate, what’s going on?’ He almost always came away with a story and he was effective at digging away for the longer-form journalism that TW2 needed.
The programme was an hour long in those days, and that gave us room to experiment. We introduced ‘signed features’ – reports by people in the news expressing their personal points of view. One of the early ones tried to illuminate the issues in the ambulance drivers’ dispute by giving airtime to Kenneth Clarke, as Health Secretary, and Roger Poole for the ambulance workers. Somewhat to type, I produced the Clarke report and Rod worked with Poole. I was amazed by the access Clarke let me have to the government meetings working out how to keep services running and win the dispute. Even more impressive, he never said ‘this is highly confidential’ but simply trusted us to behave properly. It was hard work to get these kinds of features by public figures to the standard expected of a professional broadcast. Yet they were illuminating because they broke out of the routine ‘X said this, Y said that’ approach, and they allowed time for an argument to be developed.
This did prove a trial, though, when we asked Tony Benn to do a report. I had a jolly breakfast with him at his home in Notting Hill, where he made delicious wholemeal toast and was in his more attractive ‘grandfather of the nation’ mode. But when it came to conducting interviews, and more particularly writing a script, he had revolutionary ideas. ‘I think working people are never allowed to have their say,’ he told us, ‘so I don’t want to filter their views and offer mine. We should just hear them as they are.’ This is, of course, a rational argument, though at the time we wanted more Benn and fewer unknown interviewees. We therefore tried to persuade him that a radio report in which he said only ‘here’s Joe Bloggs’ and ‘here’s Mary Bloggs’, with a lengthy extract from what they had said, was possibly not going to be as interesting as if he made a case. But he was not to be persuaded. It was a big enough wrench that he had to edit his interviewees in any way. I could not claim that the end result was the finest piece of broadcasting, but Benn himself was happy. He wrote to say he had enjoyed it and volunteered himself for further duty. ‘I would really like to do an alternative news bulletin – dealing with some issues that never seem to surface in the official news.’ Rightly or wrongly, we decided the world was not yet ready for News at Benn.
Norman Tebbit was more amenable. He was invited to give us his view of Europe, and I still have his handwritten script.
What will be the effect of the Maastricht Treaty? Will Britain as a self-governing nation be like a salami sausage on the slicer – disappearing bit by bit into a new Euro state? Or has the Treaty, as John Major claims, reversed the slicer and begun to put the sausage back together again?
This seemed to us to be claiming improbable things for slicer-reversal, but that was what the signed features were for. They were a modest commitment to plurality in public service broadcasting.
There were more conventional political set pieces on TW2. I enjoyed bringing together Ted Heath, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey for their one and only joint broadcast. The significance was that they had all been students at Balliol College, Oxford. They had fought in the Second World War. They had risen to positions of political eminence, but had never been interviewed together because Healey and Jenkins had spent most of their time in the same party, and Heath had been Prime Minister, which meant he did not take part in the run-of-the-mill broadcasting debates.
It was, I thought at the time, one for the archive, and elder statesmen are invariably more relaxed and revelatory than those in power. Hence another rarity: Heath in discussion with James Callaghan, as two former Prime Ministers. This got off to a bad start. We were scheduled to do the recording in a basement studio in Broadcasting House, only to find that the key had gone missing. With no hospitality area, and only a gloomy corridor to wait in, we had fifteen minutes of anguished time-filling while the Premises team searched for a spare. For two men who had been served in their high office by the machinery of the state, they bore the inefficiency of Broadcasting House with surprising equanimity. I always found Heath, contrary to his reputation, to be easy to deal with. He would answer his own phone when we called him at home, and give a speedy answer on whether he would take part in a programme or not. It was usually ‘yes’ if there was an opportunity to be disobliging about Mrs Thatcher.
The rogue factor among these veteran politicians was Denis Healey. He liked to be playful. A WATO producer once came across a quavering falsetto on the end of the line, with someone claiming to be the Healeys’ cleaning lady. After some minutes of this becoming ever less convincing, the producer challenged the char: ‘Is that actually Mr Healey I’m talking to?’ ‘Oh dear, I’ve been rumbled. Yes it is,’ he replied.
During this period, the BBC gave us a lot of autonomy. One of my friends, who had been on The World at One a little before me, described her time there thus:
My WATO days were balmy – almost no competitors, a news cycle that didn’t start up until the Today programme was off the air, no management interference, no budget awareness (we were actually forbidden to know the details lest it affected our editorial judgement) and compulsory alcohol in terrifying quantities
(no one minded what that did to our editorial judgement).
In my period on the afternoon sequences in the more controlled Birtist days, radio was still less front-of-mind than television for the news division management, and in any case Jenny Abramsky was a doughty defender of her medium against any encroachment. Our faults were seldom, I believe, in political balance: the somewhat leftish tinge of some of our producers was balanced by the mildly rightist instincts of some of the editors, and everyone accepted the idea of impartiality. If there was a fault, it was that we were all rather alike: youngish, university-educated, metropolitan. I am unable to remember ever doing an item about rural affairs, unless it had a Common Agricultural Policy dimension.
But The World at One and PM years were marked by an extraordinary camaraderie among the staff. In the early ’90s, with Kevin Marsh editing PM and me on WATO, there was sparring between the editors, but friendship and respect too. Our teams would breakfast together, lunch together and then go to the pub together after work. We would repair en masse to the Dover Castle and stand outside in the mews on warm days in summer, and we had a softball team that played, badly, in Regent’s Park. The programmes we produced each day had a journalistic swagger that made radio punch above its weight, which is what the founders of The World at One wanted. But the shows were also the most tremendous pleasure to work on. When I left the BBC, in my interview with the staff newspaper, Ariel, I was reported thus: ‘Mosey regards his years as World at One editor, working with presenter James Naughtie and a “fantastic” team of producers, as the “purest” BBC job for a news hack like him. “I love the big TV moments, but as a practitioner, I think radio is fantastically creative.”’ I had no itch at all to move into television at that stage, and there was about to be an even bigger radio challenge.
CHAPTER 6
BACK TO TODAY
IREALLY DID NOT want to leave The World at One. It had got into my bloodstream, and on my wall in Cambridge I have a cartoon that I was given as a leaving present. ‘Why are you so glum today?’ asks one character. ‘I got the job I was going for,’ answers the other. The job I got in 1993 was editor of the Today programme; and it was terrific, once I became established, to return to the place where I had had my first full network job. But the pressure of being overall editor, and the antisocial hours of the duty-editing roles, meant that I was less able to be hands-on than I had been on WATO. Today is divided into day and night teams, with the day team, under its duty editor, planning the next day’s programme, and then the night team, also with a duty editor, supplementing what they have been given and turning the items into a running order. Both are long stints, since they cover a 24-hour period between them, though the day shifts were longer and the nights were shorter than when I had been a producer. I made occasional appearances as a duty editor myself, but ran into the inevitable problem after a tiring night shift of having to cope with issues that emerged during the daylight hours. It was also a shock to the system to discover how much higher-profile is the editorship of Today: within a week of arriving I was being denounced in the House of Commons for some transgression on the programme, and the scrutiny was of a different order to the quieter life of Radio 4’s afternoon programmes. Two of my successors, Rod Liddle and Kevin Marsh, would undoubtedly confirm that.
I had set out my manifesto for Today in my application. It began:
Today’s strength is range and diversity, and it should be seeking to broaden its agenda. The single most important task is to report Britain to itself. Government and society are becoming complex, and this must be reflected and explained by programme makers. We should focus on the day-to-day concerns of our listeners in areas such as health, education, crime, the economy, Europe, science and leisure. Reporting from the grassroots is vital in presenting the big picture.
All pretty obvious, I accept. I proposed appointing at least one reporter to be based permanently outside London. This became two: one in north-east England, and the other in the Midlands. ‘New technology’, I wrote, ‘should allow increasing use of live reporter injects from across the UK.’
I went on to spell out the immediate priorities: improving planning, being better at set-piece events and, I noted, ‘Today has to win the battle for the big interviews and generate more publicity.’ This was a reflection of the belief within the WATO team that we regularly beat Today in getting the main newsmakers onto our airwaves, and WATO was more often quoted in the following day’s papers. We also believed that Today’s interviews sometimes missed the point, hence my pledge of ‘higher standards in briefings and in writing scripts’. But potentially the most contentious point was number 5: ‘The Presenters’, which said baldly, ‘John Humphrys should be The Voice of Today.’
I inherited John as an established Today presenter along with Brian Redhead, Sue MacGregor and Peter Hobday. As a producer on Today in the 1980s I had got along increasingly well with Brian, once he had stopped trying to have me fired, and he was an advocate for my return as editor. I also rated Sue: I used to say ‘when you return from a foreign holiday, you simply need to hear Sue MacGregor on the radio and you know you’re home and all is well’ – such was the warmth and authority of her presentation. I liked Hobday personally, but I had never been keen on him on air. He was not as charismatic as the others, and in a decade on the programme he had not risen above being ‘the nice bloke on a Monday, or when the others are on holiday’. However, Humphrys seemed to me to be in a league of his own: outstanding in confrontational political interviews, incisive on the issues of the day and also increasingly good at human interest stories. If it had been possible, I would have had him presenting six days a week.
The looming problem was what to do about Brian. It is always a tricky issue when the broadcasting greats are not quite as good as they used to be, because producers wish that they would go out at the top with appreciative applause from the audience. As a listener to Today, I could tell that Brian was no longer at the peak of his form, and my early days back on the programme confirmed that impression. There is a narrow borderline between ‘charmingly tangential’ and ‘off-topic’, and Brian was edging too much to the latter. One morning he was supposed to be interviewing a leading politician about a breaking political story, but instead his first question was about the previous day’s Afternoon Play, which he had heard and found fascinating. The politician sounded bemused, and the studio team were holding their heads in their hands. This was the kind of episode that used to produce much yelling at the radio in the news-hungry World at One office, even if for many Radio 4 listeners it was part of Brian’s appeal. But as the incoming editor I was awash with views from colleagues, managerial and journalistic, that we needed to have a new presentation strategy.
Happily, the resolution came with extraordinary grace from Brian himself. I had a catch-up with him over a cup of tea when my appointment was announced. But after I had taken over in the spring of 1993 we arranged to go over to the Langham Hotel, site of my local radio training, for a post-programme breakfast. I had prepared myself to ask the question about his plans, and I had also rehearsed my response. If he said that he wanted to go on and on, which is the default position of almost every presenter, I was going to ask him whether that was wise in his early sixties and with the ghastly hours on the programme, and suggest that we had a number of proposals we could make to him about other broadcasting roles in the BBC. I am embarrassed only by thinking in those days that early sixties was quite old. But none of this was necessary. As we set to work on the vastly expensive scrambled egg, Brian told me he had decided to go. He needed a hip operation within the next year and he just didn’t fancy having the time off and all the recovery period – and then having to go back to early starts. He was apologetic: he said he would have loved to work with me for longer, but his health and his love of living in the north of England made him feel that this was the right thing to do. I was already fond of Brian, but this made me even fonder of him. Gentle waves of relief were filling my head. He did,
after all, turn out to be one of the rare breed who knows the time at which it is right to quit, and he had done so in a way that meant we could honour, rather than be embarrassed about, one of the giants of radio. If only every transition could be like that.
I had been asked during my appointment board who I would seek to bring into Today if Brian left, and it cannot have been a surprise that my answer had always been Jim Naughtie. It was known that we were personally close, and my Naughtie goddaughter was not a state secret, but my preference was endorsed, with due process, by Radio 4 and by news management. Jim had become loved by the audience on WATO, and we liked the idea of his warm Scottish tones on Today – complementing the harder-edged Welshness of Humphrys and the perfect English of MacGregor. (It is one of the more surprising facts that she was brought up in South Africa.) It was not the toughest of negotiations to get Jim to come to Today, and we duly announced that Brian would be leaving and that Jim would be joining, with the switchover planned for the summer of 1994. There was a press announcement and a photo call on the steps of All Souls in Langham Place, with Redhead, Humphrys and Naughtie sporting the forced grins that presenters have when they are not quite sure who is top dog.
Sadly, Brian’s planned transition was not to be. It became increasingly obvious that he was not well. He would limp his way into the office at 4.30 in the morning, singing tunelessly as he always did, but unmistakably in pain. He often looked awful – though there was never a flicker of that in his voice on the radio. By the time we despatched him to the Conservative Party conference that autumn, I was seriously worried. It was at Blackpool, always his sentimental favourite, but he spent most of the day in the hotel and avoided the winds and lashing rain of the seafront. We would amuse him by bringing him pieces of political gossip from the fringe meetings, which he would retail on air next day as if he had been there. But apart from a fish-and-chip supper at Harry Ramsden’s, which seemed to bring him back to his old self, there was little of the Redhead ebullience that made him such a splendid companion.
