by Nick Bryant
Had I been more philosophically minded, I might have been tempted to answer the ‘Is this a question?’ teaser, which now sounds like the sort of thing Bill Clinton might have said under oath during a deposition. Yet I played it safe and was offered a place conditional on me passing my A-levels, which was a formality, and demonstrating a rudimentary knowledge of a foreign language, which was anything but. Shamefaced as I am to admit this, languages have never been my forte, and it required the combined forces of a French teacher, the head of modern languages and even one-on-one sessions with the headmaster to pass muster. Unused to getting pupils into Oxbridge, my comprehensive school on the outskirts of Bristol went all out, and lavished upon me the kind of attention now reserved for contestants on an extreme-makeover show.
Perhaps it was the panic of being compelled to learn French in the space of a few months that made me forget it almost as quickly, which helps explain what to this day remains my most embarrassing moment on air. It came in Paris during the 1997 French elections, when I launched into a live interview with a guest who had arrived just as the presenter in London crossed to me and who did not speak a word of English. This became apparent immediately when he stared at me blankly at the end of my first question – my second, too – and responded with a baffled ‘pardon?’. Just about all that my surviving French vocabulary would facilitate was the daily procurement of coffees and pastries in the patisserie next to our Paris bureau. Needless to say, my most awkward interview doubled as my shortest, and I handed back to London more quickly than my guest could say ‘je ne comprends pas’.
I had gone up to Cambridge to read architecture, that most multidimensional of subjects, and floundered from the outset. Judged solely on their aesthetics, my proposed buildings were rather eye-catching. At least, I thought so at the time. Structurally, however, they were calamitous. Like foreign languages, maths and physics were weak subjects for me at school, but they were twin disciplines that any budding architect needed to master. Fearing I would never do so, I sought refuge in the history faculty, which was housed in a startling modern building designed by Britain’s most celebrated architect, which was continually being plugged for leaks.
My new history tutor, who regarded me as an academic dilettante, was not particularly welcoming and often started supervisions by looking me up and down with utter disdain. ‘Nicholas,’ he would say sternly, ‘you look like you have come straight from the sports field.’ Here, however, he was only half-right, for I had often stopped off on the way back from a football or cricket match via the offices of the university newspaper, where I had handed in my latest copy or picked up my next assignment.
Promiscuous as a student journalist, I covered everything from the usual undergraduate rent strikes to a crazed boffin, never to be heard of again, who believed he had come up with a cosmological construct rivalling Einstein’s theory of relativity; and from visiting politicians at the fag end of the Thatcher years to the KGB’s recruitment of Cambridge undergraduates in the dying days of the Cold War. With the Berlin Wall about to tumble, along with the statues of various eastern European tyrants – and at a time when post-war history dons started lectures by brandishing their now redundant study notes and theatrically tearing them into pieces – these were thrilling days for the news business. Yet, however much I would like to claim the 1989 revolutions as the crucible moment in my professional life – my very own perestroika moment, if you like – the move towards journalism was more gradual and less epiphanic. Perhaps after years spent poring over newspapers, drinking coffee, propping up bars and occasionally having to write something, it seemed as good a way as any of prolonging my student life.
For now, though, I had come up with a simpler strategy for remaining a student, which was to remain a student. Much to the surprise of my history tutor, for whom I was always something of a backslider, I became a born-again academic: a Damascene conversion that set me on the road to Oxford, where I enrolled as a PhD student in American politics.
Studying President John F. Kennedy’s record as an undergraduate, I had started to suspect that my childhood hero was not quite as heroic as history had cast him, particularly when it came to dismantling segregation in the American south. So, as a postgraduate, I set about trying to debunk the myth that Kennedy should be spoken of in the same breath as Abraham Lincoln, as the second Great Emancipator. JFK’s response to the March on Washington, where King successfully subpoenaed the conscience of white America with his ‘I have a dream’ speech, was a case in point. Fearing its violent potential, the Kennedy administration first tried to persuade King and his cohorts to cancel the protest. When that failed, it ordered up one of the biggest peacetime military mobilisations in American history to ensure that it did not degenerate into a mass brawl.
On the 30th anniversary of King’s speech, a newspaper column on ‘The Race Riot That Never Was’, as the subeditors headlined the piece, gave me my first byline in a national broadsheet. By now, however, I was making regular trips up the motorway to London, where I had been given my first part-time job in what was still known as Fleet Street, even though all the newspapers had moved out.
Bizarrely, and for reasons that we will touch briefly upon later, it came at a high-society gossip column in London, for the Evening Standard newspaper. Here, the idea of a scoop was to reveal that the Duchess of Devonshire’s crocuses had bloomed unseasonably early or that some doddery viscount had tripped on the steps of The Athenaeum Club, sprained his wrist and discovered that he could not lift a shotgun for at least three weeks, thus ruling him out of the start of the grouse season.
Since the sparse details of these stories could usually be recounted in the space of the opening paragraph, or often the opening sentence, the skill was to pad them out with reaction from other toffs, who would provide quotes that were sympathetic, incredulous or, best of all, witheringly snotty. Then the prominence attached to each story would be determined by either the rank of those involved or the standing of those who volunteered quotes – where they fitted within what I suppose could be described as a sliding scale of social hierarchy, so long as it is understood that the slides took place, like slowly shifting tectonic plates, over many hundreds of years.
With British celebrity culture now in full flower, other parts of the paper focused on A-, B-or C-list celebs. Maintaining a quaint fastidiousness, ‘The Londoner’s Diary’ was obsessed instead with the title that preceded the name – unless, of course, the letters spelt out HRH. It was a recondite world in which dukes would always lord it over a marquess, a viscount would always trump a baron and a royal, however minor, would always be guaranteed the banner headline. With no contacts within the upper echelons of high society, and little chance of making any, I came brandishing high-table tittle-tattle from Oxford. I also had nuggets of gossip ground from the rumour mill of Westminster, much of which started out as pillow talk courtesy of my girlfriend at the time, who worked as a parliamentary researcher and ended up in the Cabinet.
The diary’s ruddy-faced editor, who was charming to the point of unctuousness in the company of the aristocrats who appeared in his pages, was a tyrant towards those who worked for him – or under him, as he preferred to think of it. His great early-morning ritual, which was conducted in courtly silence, saw him move from one desk to the other, listening to each frail-voiced reporter as they opened up their notebooks and sketched out their freshest yarn. Then, after a sometimes interminable pause, the editor would deliver his verdict: a cackle of high-pitched delight that sounded like an orgasmic hyena, or a violent tantrum in which his complexion changed from red to beetroot to rosewood. Then, he would move to the next desk, the blood having drained from his face, and repeat the entire spectacle again. Needless to say, the punishment meted out to new recruits was always especially cruel, particularly those who failed to arrive with any gossip worth publishing – an egregious lapse that automatically disqualified them from ever being invited back again. Withering scoldings were the norm. Tears were not
uncommon. Once, an empty-handed new recruit was dispatched to the basement, mop in hand, where he was instructed to wash the editor’s car, still caked in mud after a weekend hunting trip.
Happily, I never became the target of his tyrannical rants, nor the victim of a management technique modelled on the public-school fagging system. On reflection, I think it helped that the editor, who had always struggled to locate my classless accent, thought I was Australian, which granted me a kind of diplomatic immunity. By the time that I corrected him, classlessness had become so fashionable in modern Britain that he considered me a useful addition to his stable, which at that point only included thoroughbreds with pukka bloodlines.
Despite being made to feel unexpectedly welcome, then, I was determined to bid farewell to the world of high-society gossip before the Duchess of Devonshire’s crocuses could bloom again. After finishing my PhD and moving permanently up to London, I started to plot my next upward move.
It came via an escalator that took me to the tabloid newspaper on the floor above, the Daily Mail, a still more brutal environment where the editor was so profligate with his use of a certain swearword that his mid-morning conference became known as ‘The Vagina Monologue’.
Thankfully, I found refuge opposite the paper’s industrial correspondent, a castaway from Fleet Street who smoked so many cigarettes that he produced almost as many emissions as the few surviving industries left for him to cover. When I arrived, just about his most glamorous assignment was a week in Blackpool covering the Trade Union Congress annual conference, but in years gone by he had navigated much more exotic and turbulent waters. Not only had he been one of the first British journalists to yomp into Port Stanley to see the Union Flag hoisted again over a newly liberated Falkland Islands, but he had also been imprisoned in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution and was rumoured still to be living off the overtime. Folklore had it that when finally he made it back to London he could empty any pub in Fleet Street by wailing the Islamic call to prayer that used to wake him in the morning and prevent him sleeping at night.
The man was a tabloid genius, his fingers dancing over his ash-specked keyboard, a cigarette always dangling from his mouth, as he produced near flawless copy on virtually any given subject. One day, he was instructed to produce a colour piece on the plight of a Cornish fishing village labouring under some new missive from Brussels, an assignment completed by early in the afternoon with aplomb. The smell of fish was the smell of life itself, according to his first paragraph, in a piece rich with character and local colour. However, his evocative opening had been filed, like the rest of the story, not from the quayside in Cornwall but from his desk in Kensington High Street. For months afterwards, colleagues pinched their noses as they walked past our desk, complaining about the stench of rotting mackerel. ‘They asked me to be creative with my copy,’ the industrial correspondent would harrumph, in his thick Lancastrian burr, ‘so I hope they won’t mind me being creative with my expenses.’
For all the tabloid tomfoolery, there were few better places to learn the rudiments of journalism. To begin with, the editors and subs were absolute sticklers for accuracy. Consider the night that a Conservative member of parliament was found dead at his home in Chiswick, trussed up in a complex series of wires, levers and pullies, dressed in stockings and suspenders and with his teeth clenching a citrus fruit. Was it a tangerine, a nectarine or a satsuma that had contributed to his autoerotic asphyxiation? It was the job of the paper’s squadron of crime reporters to find out definitively, having been told that ‘a small orange’ simply would not suffice.
There was the single-minded pursuit of the stories, fuelled by the career-enhancing hope of front-page glory and the career-ending fear of returning empty-handed to the newsroom. Then there was the assiduous cultivation of contacts. The crime boys regularly went on after-work benders with officers from Scotland Yard, the cantankerous motoring correspondent was clearly a buddy of Stirling Moss’s – the only time his face showed anything resembling a smile was when his hard-pressed secretary announced that Stirling was on line one – and the royal correspondent was a close personal confidant of Princess Diana. One lunchtime, I watched in admiration from a local coffee shop as he descended into an underground car park near Kensington Palace for what I assumed must be a Deep Throat-style rendezvous with Her Royal Highness. When the paper hit the news-stands the following morning, he was the author of the front-page splash, yet another of his Diana exclusives.
Though I had the lowliest of jobs at the paper, there were odd occasions when I could cause a flurry of mild excitement on the newsdesk. While the England cricket team was on tour in the West Indies, I discovered that the captain’s then girlfriend might also be playing away – a story that wound up on page three. It meant that at the very moment a menacing quartet of West Indian fast bowlers were aiming bouncers at Mike Atherton’s head, a home-town tabloid had aimed a beamer squarely at his heart.
But my biggest scoop belonged on the front page: the tale of how a Labour Party frontbencher, a household name to boot, was regularly bonking his secretary. Impeccably sourced and legally watertight, the story could have made my tabloid name. Alas, I could never bring myself to share the details with the news editor. Working on the Street of Shame had already aroused feelings of uneasiness, and to have done the dirty would have brought on an even worse bout of existential torment.
Years later, the News of the World revealed that the new foreign secretary Robin Cook was leaving his wife to be with his long-time Westminster mistress. Yet, in common with a surprising number of tabloid hacks, who regularly withhold embarrassing secrets out of compassion for their prospective victims, I opted for valour over glory. From that moment on, in the time-honoured custom of British tabloids, I realised that I would have to make my excuses and leave.
All along, the BBC had been the target of my ambitions. Arriving late one afternoon at JFK airport in New York at the end of a trip to the Galapagos Islands, I heard from my flatmate back home that the corporation wanted me to sit a written examination in London the very next morning. With only an overnight flight’s worth of time to prepare, I did what any self-respecting British journalist would do: buy a copy of The Economist and read it forensically from cover to cover. It was exactly the kind of ‘cuts job’, in fact, that I would routinely perform as a foreign correspondent.
By the time I touched down at Heathrow, I was not only fluent in the gross domestic product of all the Benelux countries, but I could also quote their seasonally adjusted rates of inflation – factoids that proved to be entirely superfluous when I sat my test but served the useful purpose of giving me almost bullet-proof self-confidence. Fortunately, the examiners looked kindly on my answers, as did a ‘board’ of interviewers drawn from the upper reaches of BBC management who cross-examined me the following week. My curriculum vitae, no doubt like theirs, was embellished with degrees from the usual suspects, along with the names of some illustrious academic referees: precisely the kinds of adornments that the BBC always favoured. However, the clincher for my new employer was unquestionably my sojourn with a tabloid.
If my time at the Evening Standard and Daily Mail sharpened my news senses, my first months at the BBC were spent straightening out my syntax and grammar. I, like my seven fellow trainees, came under the tutelage of an old hand from the radio newsroom, renowned throughout the correspondent corps for his grammatical punctiliousness. War reporters filing from the most perilous of hotspots were regularly stopped in mid-flow at the mention of a split infinitive or dangling participle, even if it meant the hurried refile was punctuated instead by the sound of ricocheting bullets. Clamouring for a slice of this kind of action, we, too, hoped soon to be shouting into microphones over the din of exploding ordnance, but for now we were held captive in a first-floor classroom at Broadcasting House in London, the inspiration for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, grappling with the basics of the English language in our own version of Room 101.
Our escape came
when we were dispatched, like fresh-faced subalterns, to the regional outposts of the BBC empire for a week in local radio. I opted for Liverpool, partly because the city had become something of a production line for improbable stories and partly because BBC Radio Merseyside had such a strong reputation for packaging and distributing them. Its office was also located on the dreamy-sounding Paradise Street, which seemed in my mind at least to rival other great Liverpudlian landmarks such as Strawberry Field and Penny Lane, and thus sounded vaguely providential.
Old Radio Merseyside hands who had graduated to The Network, as London was reverently known, warned me to expect a tough, hard-hitting newsroom full of jaundiced old hacks who despised London and looked upon news trainees from the capital in much the same way that Romans used to watch Christians sent up from the dungeons of the Colosseum. But whereas I arrived expecting the Boys from the Blackstuff, I was greeted instead by Carry on Broadcasting.
As I walked through the doors on Paradise Street and took my seat in reception, a chirpy disc jockey, aided by his fabulously camp sidekick, was halfway through his daily general-knowledge quiz in which the good people of Merseyside were invited to hold their plums. Later, I learnt that ‘Hold Your Plums’ – a double entendre plucked from the fruit machines – was as much a Scouser institution as The Cavern Club or the Mersey ferry, and that one listener had enshrined herself in local folklore by replying ‘Heil’ when asked to provide Hitler’s first name. But for now, as I waited to be introduced to the news editor, ‘Hold Your Plums’ served the useful purpose of vastly inflating my own testicular fortitude. If Radio Merseyside could hold its plums, then perhaps it might even take a nervous young trainee to its heart.
