Is Anything Happening? Read online

  IS ANYTHING HAPPENING?

  MY LIFE AS ANEWSMAN

  ROBIN LUSTIG

  For Ruth, Josh and Hannah

  Who feared us?

  People in positions of power who abused that power.

  Do-nothing officeholders and bureaucrats. Politicians with dirty money and conflicts of interest. Businesses that violated regulation and operated counter to the public’s safety and welfare.

  Those who would harm the helpless and the voiceless.

  Grifters, grafters, cheats, scammers, influence-peddlers, abusive cops, bad doctors, bent lawyers, look-the-other-way inspectors, under-the-table lobbyists, polluters, fakes, frauds, flim-flammers and fly-by-nights.

  They feared us for good reason.

  THE LAST PRINT EDITION OF THE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, 17 MARCH 2009

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 The Day the World Changed

  Chapter 2 From Scud FM to Wills and Kate

  Chapter 3 The Good, the Bad…

  Chapter 4 War and Peace

  Chapter 5 Departures and Arrivals

  Chapter 6 A Suburban Childhood

  Chapter 7 From Kampala to Campus

  Chapter 8 Agency Man

  Chapter 9 The Observer

  Chapter 10 Tiny vs Tiny

  Chapter 11 Are You Jewish?

  Chapter 12 At Last the BBC

  Chapter 13 Lahore, Lagos and Louisville, KY

  Chapter 14 Quite Big in Boston

  Chapter 15 On Being William Boot

  Chapter 16 En Route to My Roots

  Chapter 17 And Finally…

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  JOURNALISTS’ MEMORIES ARE NOTORIOUSLY unreliable, so I have tried wherever I could while writing this book to check my recollections of long-ago events with people who were with me at the time. I am immensely grateful to them all, although, as most of them are also journalists, it may well be that their memories are no better than mine.

  I cannot name them all, but I would particularly like to thank Deb Amos, Shyam Bhatia, David Boddy, Margaret Budy, Alice Cairns, Gillian Dear, David Edmonds, Linda Grant, Duncan Greenland, Peter Griffiths, Richard House, Nikki Johnson, Paul Lashmar, David Leigh, Magnus Linklater, Bob Low, Heather Maclean, Philippa Mole at the Guardian and Observer archives, Kylie Morris, Jeremy Mortimer, Anne Sebba and Vicky Taylor. I am especially grateful to my old friend Professor Ivor Gaber for his invaluable comments on an early draft of my final chapter. None of the above-named, of course, is in any way to be held responsible for any errors that are contained in the text that follows.

  I also want to thank my former BBC colleague Dan Isaacs, who allowed me access to his extensive collection of photographs of me doing improbable things in improbable places.

  Wherever possible, I have provided references for articles or broadcasts referred to, to enable sceptical readers, if they are so minded, to double-check that I have not made it all up. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my father, whose pathological inability to throw anything away meant that I had invaluable access to all of the letters that I wrote to my parents while I was living overseas in the 1960s and ’70s.

  I am also deeply indebted to Iain Dale of Biteback, who first suggested that I should write a book, and to my editor Olivia Beattie, for her meticulous professionalism, enthusiasm and support.

  INTRODUCTION

  News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.

  SCOOP, EVELYN WAUGH

  IN THE DAYS BEFORE the internet, mobile phones, Twitter and 24-hour news channels – in other words, in the days just after dinosaurs roamed the earth – there was only one way for British foreign correspondents to find out what was happening on their patch.

  The procedure was to phone the local office of Reuters news agency – after a boozy long lunch or a weekend on the beach – and ask the poor bastard who was on shift: ‘Is anything happening, old boy?’ That is how I started: as the poor bastard answering the phone in the Reuters office. Decades later, I had the dubious pleasure of being able to turn the tables: as a BBC radio presenter on an evening news programme, I developed a new way of asking the same question when I phoned in to the office every lunchtime: ‘What’s going on in the world?’

  Different words, same question. And it pretty much defines the essence of journalism, or at least of what my journalism has been for more than four decades: a quest to find out what is happening, and then to tell everyone else. This book is an attempt to describe how I did it, why I did it, and what happened to me while I was doing it. I am the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, I did not go to a private school, or to Oxford or Cambridge, yet somehow I still managed to carve out a modestly successful career, usually surrounded by those who were both far better educated and much better connected than I was. (Spoiler alert: it was mainly luck.)

  I find it hard to believe that when I started in 1970, reporters out in the field still had to use coin-operated public telephones to make contact with their offices. (Finding a phone that worked was an absolutely essential journalistic skill.) Even in the 1980s, when I was based in the Middle East, I often had to make a booking for an overseas phone call, and it could take several hours for the connection to be made. Writing about it now, in the age of instant information, always makes me feel as if I am writing about Noah assembling his ark.

  My journalistic role models were William Boot, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, who was sent overseas by mistake to report on a war he knew nothing about, and Charles Wheeler, the craggy-faced, white-haired BBC correspondent who carried on working until well into his eighties and whose integrity and professionalism exemplified all that is good about journalism. I have to admit, though, that on the Boot–Wheeler spectrum, I have usually been a lot closer to the former than to the latter.

  I have always thought of myself first and foremost as a reporter, even if during my twenty-three years at the BBC my main job was sitting in a studio in London asking questions. I would always leap at the chance to fly off somewhere, preferably somewhere off the beaten track, the further away the better. And if it was somewhere I had never been before, that was always a bonus.

  There are plenty of faraway places in this book, and plenty of stories about what can go wrong when the demands of editors in London clash head-on with the technological and logistical challenges of reporting from some of the world’s poorest countries. But the book starts in a BBC studio, because there is often plenty of drama in a studio too. The main difference between the life of a presenter and the life of a reporter is that presenters can be relatively confident of going home to sleep in their own beds when the day is done. Believe me, it is no small thing.

  In the UK, I became mainly known for my work presenting The World Tonight on Radio 4, which I used to describe as a broadsheet programme for broadsheet listeners. (Now that there are hardly any broadsheet newspapers left, I am somewhat stuck. But if I tell you that in the days when we shared an office, Jeremy Paxman used to call us the ‘senior common room’ – it was not meant as a compliment – you will get the general idea.)

  Outside the UK, however, I was best known for my work on the BBC World Service. For more than two decades, I was one of the regular presenters on the flagship news programme Newshour, and I also presented a global phone-in programme called Talking Point, which for a while was broadcast simultaneously on radio, TV and the internet. The potential audience could be m
easured in the tens of millions, and when I presented the World Service’s UK election night broadcasts, I liked to claim – I hope accurately – that I had a bigger audience than all the Dimblebys put together.

  Throughout my career, I have suspected that someone, somewhere had made a terrible mistake, and that it was not really me who was meant to be having so much fun. So far, no one has owned up to having made that mistake, even though they know perfectly well who they are. I hope that even if they read this book, they will still have the decency to keep quiet.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED

  To the journalist, every country is rich.

  SCOOP, EVELYN WAUGH

  I DO NOT DO jetlag. Or, rather, I have always claimed that I do not do jetlag, mainly because if you are flying round the world chasing news stories, there simply is no time for such indulgences. Editors do not, in my experience, take kindly to the notion that just because you have been awake for thirty-six hours, you have had nothing to eat, and your brain is refusing to function, you would rather not wait up till 4.30 a.m. to do yet another two-way conversation with Radio Ulster. (Please note: I have nothing against Radio Ulster.)

  Never has my foolish boast been more sorely tested than in September 2001. I had flown overnight from London to Johannesburg to record an hour-long programme with Nelson Mandela. From there, I had flown to Tokyo, via Taipei, to produce a series of reports about the Japanese economy. I had arrived back in London, still claiming – absurdly – not to suffer from jetlag, on the evening of 10 September.

  The following afternoon, as I was stumbling about in the kitchen at home trying to find something to eat, the phone rang. It was a colleague at the BBC World Service, sounding seriously stressed. ‘Robin, a plane has just flown into the World Trade Center in New York. How soon can you get to Bush House?’ Less than forty-five minutes later, just as the first of the Twin Towers crumpled to the ground, I was on air at the start of what was to become several days of round-the-clock live coverage. It was 3 p.m. in London, 10 a.m. in New York.

  I remember asking, as I rushed into the studio, if someone could find out how many people were likely to have been working in the two towers. When I got the answer, my blood ran cold. I was told it could be as many as fifty thousand – and I knew that I could not, must not, say that on air. Not until we knew for sure. (My caution was justified; the figure I had been given was a huge exaggeration.)

  Live broadcasting often teeters on the edge of either absurdity or disaster. Sometimes both. Everyone involved – producers, sound engineers and, yes, even presenters – put themselves through ridiculous bouts of adrenalin-fuelled stress, often for no better reason than to make sure that the last item in the show will end at precisely the right second. On the BBC World Service, there are ‘hard posts’ that need to be observed – moments in the programme, accurate to the precise second, when the presenter has to stop talking so that radio stations around the world can opt in to, or out of, the BBC output to make way for their own commercial breaks or news headlines. It is fiendishly complicated, causes immense headaches for all concerned, and the listeners – if it is done properly – are blissfully unaware.

  But there was nothing absurd about what happened on 11 September 2001. If your reason for being in journalism is that you want to tell people things that they would not otherwise know, then an event on the scale of what happened that day is about as big as it gets. And I am well aware of the danger of sounding horribly crass when I talk about broadcasters’ stress in the context of what so many thousands of families went through that day. The truth is that, just as is the case for emergency workers and medical teams, journalists’ professionalism and skill are tested to the full when disaster strikes – and it would be dishonest to pretend that we do not relish the challenge. It is not necessarily a pretty sight, and it is not easy to admit, but journalists get a particular professional satisfaction from doing a job well in the midst of turmoil.

  Something very strange happens when you are broadcasting live about a major, unexpected news event – your brain discards all extraneous information and processes only what it needs for the business in hand. With my eyes glued simultaneously to the television screen on the studio wall and the mass of information scrolling across my computer screen, I could not have told you what day of the week it was (I have just looked it up: it was a Tuesday), or even which city I was in. All I knew was that I was broadcasting to millions of people and something truly dreadful had happened.

  Try to imagine what it is like to be an editor in charge of a live news programme on the day of a major disaster. It could be an earthquake, a tsunami or a plane crash – the challenges are exactly the same. Which correspondent is closest to the scene? Who else is there? Do we have their phone number? How soon can we put them on air? What can we do while we are trying to find them? Is there anyone in the building who might know something – anything – about what has happened? What is our Plan B? Do we have one? Why the hell not?

  You probably get the picture. Now try to imagine being the presenter, sitting in the studio on the other side of the glass window that separates you from the control room. Every time you look up, you see scenes of panic through the glass. Stay calm, you tell yourself, stay calm. Through your headphones comes a constant babble of information and instructions. Rarely does it make much sense.

  ‘We’ve got Pete. He’s next. Go to him now. No. Wait. We’ve lost him. Read the headlines. No, hang on. He’s back. Go to him now. Now! Two minutes with him because tele need him. Oh, shit, they’ve grabbed him. Sorry.’ (At no point, you will have noticed, have you been told who, or where, Pete is.) Now imagine listening to all that while you are interviewing someone else, on a terrible phone line, who has only a rudimentary grasp of the English language.*

  The events of 9/11 have been told and retold so often that it is not easy now to imagine a time when they had not already happened. For the first few hours after the planes hit the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, we had no idea if there were more hijacked planes heading for more targets. At one point, the White House, the US Capitol and the State Department were also thought to be under attack – and it was to be several days before the final, terrible death toll could be calculated. Nor did we know whether other, similar attacks were imminent in other cities in other countries – I remember feeling grateful not to be working that day in one of the high-rise office buildings in Canary Wharf.

  Working for the BBC on such a day is an awesome responsibility. Both in the UK and around the world, it has a well-deserved reputation for being a reliable source of news. But no organisation is better than the people who work for it, and people working under pressure can sometimes make mistakes. One of the jobs of the news presenters is to try to catch those mistakes – and not to make too many of their own.

  Bush House was the internationally known home of the BBC World Service for seventy years, from 1941 until the end of the midday news bulletin on 12 July 2012. (‘This is the BBC World Service, broadcasting from Bush House in London.’) It was built by, and named after, an American industrialist, Irving T. Bush, who was also responsible for the building of the Bush Terminal (now Industry City) in Brooklyn, New York. Originally designed as a trade centre, when Bush House opened in 1925, it was said to be the most expensive building in the world.

  It is certainly an impressive edifice, not unlike a Greek temple on the outside, with its colonnaded portico and imposing main doorway. Inside, though, the BBC, which never actually owned the building, had not been kind to it: decades of refurbishments and changes had turned it into a muddled warren of identical corridors and boxy offices and studios. Only the marble staircase, the bronze-doored lifts and the chutes that in years gone by had taken letters down to the mailroom in the basement (one chute for ‘London and Abroad’, the other for ‘Country Letters’) served as reminders of its past splendour.

  I grew immensely fond of Bush House, much as one might grow fo
nd of an old piece of furniture, and, like all World Service veterans, I was sad when we had to move out to join the rest of the BBC at the newly extended Broadcasting House, just up the road from Oxford Circus. To me, Bush House represented the home of more knowledge and expertise about more places than anywhere else on earth. In its heyday, more than forty different language services were broadcast from its studios, ranging alphabetically from Albanian to Vietnamese – and each one was staffed by journalists from the country to which they were broadcasting. If there was anything you needed to know about the remotest, tiniest pinprick of a place on the map, you would almost always be able to find someone in Bush House who had at least visited it, and quite possibly had been born and brought up there.

  So where better to be on 11 September 2001? Through the third-floor studio, as the hours turned into days, came a procession of BBC experts on Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. It was like being in a seminar in the best university in the world, and, of course, this being the BBC, there was also a correspondent right there on the scene, at the World Trade Center, as the planes struck. (To his immense good fortune, he was on the ground floor, so he was able to get out well before the towers collapsed.)

  At some point during the afternoon, a message flashed across the top of my computer screen. It was from a very senior BBC executive, and it said: ‘Don’t forget this is the biggest story you will ever cover.’ Thanks, I thought, I needed that. No pressure. Then I was told that an increasing number of US radio stations were picking up our output, at least in part, apparently, because the National Public Radio network, on which they would normally have relied, had lost their transmitters when the Twin Towers came down.