And Thank You For Watching Read online

  To my family, especially Maddy, who has been to hell and back, and then had the courage to help others.

  And to Didier Drogba

  19.05.2012

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1. Trumptown

  2. Notes from a Small Newspaper

  3. Sporting Life

  4. Mandela

  5. Rwanda

  6. Journeys

  7. The Flood

  8. Terry Lloyd

  9. Getting Away With It

  10. Anchorman

  11. Maddy

  12. Journalism

  13. And Finally… From Trumptown

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Index

  A Note About the Author

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Terrible haircut, great phone, awful pose. A publicity picture circa 1988, aged 29.

  Covering the Open Golf for ITN in 1990. Graham Phillips, cameraman, and Peter Staunton, producer, in the driving seat.

  Rwanda, 1994, the most horrific story I have covered.

  Reporting the Mandela inauguration, May 1994.

  One of the great moments. A post-interview team picture in 1994 with President Nelson Mandela, cameraman Andy Rex, soundman Gugu Radebe and producer James Britten.

  Mandela would often smile and always looked you in the eye when talking to you. He also knew the importance of the message and the media.

  Mozambique floods, March 2000. Helping a winchman lift flood victims into a South African Defence Force Chinook helicopter.

  A proud moment. Andy Rex and I pick up an Emmy in New York for our Mozambique floods coverage.

  May 2000, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when British forces arrived to save the capital from attack.

  Presenting the ITV Evening News from Kuwait just days before the start of the Iraq War, 17 March 2003. Mike Inglis is the cameraman.

  Writing scripts for the ITV Evening News in a disused house in the Iraqi desert, 25 March 2003.

  Our studio in the desert during the Iraq war, 26 March 2003.

  Our convoy comes to a halt on a mined road en route to Basra, Iraq, 6 April 2003. Our mobile satellite dish can be seen second from the back. In the distance sabotaged oil facilities burn.

  Inside Iraq, 8 April 2003. Preparing for another live broadcast.

  My friend and colleague Terry Lloyd is seen making his last televised news report from the Iraqi border on 21 March 2003. A day later he was killed.

  In Basra, Iraq, 10 April 2003. A great team for a tough assignment. Left to right: Nick Edwards, me, Mike Inglis, Alan Bugby, Ted Denton, Derl McCrudden and Steve Gore-Smith.

  Antarctica, January 2007. Presenting the ITV Evening News from one of the most remote locations on earth!

  Antarctica, January 2007. Crevasse training before we could go anywhere.

  And with cameraman Eugene Campbell… checking his focus!

  With ITN Editor Deborah Turness in the ITN studio in London, 2007.

  The ITV Evening News studio with Mary Nightingale, 2009. A virtual studio without the computer graphics.

  Hurricane Sandy in America, 2012. Preparing to do an interview with US correspondent Robert Moore.

  In the News at Ten studio with Julie Etchingham, 2016.

  In the crowds on The Mall for the Diamond Jubilee, 2012. A year earlier, similar reporting duties for the royal wedding ended in farce. Mobbed by scouts!

  Meeting the Queen at a journalists’ charity reception in 2014. Mary Nightingale and Sophie Raworth also in the greeting party.

  In Rwanda, twenty years after the genocide, with Immaculate Mukanyaraya, who hid from the slaughter in the trees below.

  In a so-called Reconciliation Village in Rwanda, twenty years on. The Hutu militiaman on the left lives next door to the woman (centre) whose family he butchered. An extraordinary experiment in reconciliation.

  My two loves: cricket…

  …and drumming. Here playing the O2 Arena in London during the ‘Newsroom’s Got Talent’ charity competition in September 2010. Who’d have thought it?

  Royal Television Society Presenter of the Year, 2015.

  Great fun… A cameo appearance – one of many – on ‘Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway’, 2015.

  With my daughter, Maddy. A photo for the promotion of our documentary on anorexia.

  Love this picture. Reporting live for Sky News from the roof of the Washington bureau in 2018.

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS WAS NOT how it was meant to be. I had always wanted to play cricket for England or be a drummer in a rock ’n’ roll band. So what the hell was I doing standing on parched scrubland in the South African bush with a gun to my head?

  I had been marched into the field at gunpoint, ordered to look straight ahead and say nothing. If I turned around they would shoot. My mouth was as dry as the terrain around us. The men were angry, very angry, and kept screaming at me. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I was gripped with fear, felt nauseous and thought I was probably going to die. My young producer, standing alongside me, thought we were definitely going to die. He was shaking. It was his first major foreign assignment. And there we were, side by side, facing possible death at the hands of screaming Afrikaner militiamen. In Bophuthatswana, for God’s sake. A place no one had heard of. On a wretched story no one would remember in a few months’ time – and, worse, would not matter in a few weeks’ time. What a way to go. Wrong place, wrong time… again!

  Or not, because the two most prized boasts of the foreign correspondent are ‘I was there’ and, even better, ‘I was there first’. It is what we do. We go. We always go. It is not – in most cases – through any great bravery, or a warped desire to notch up a close scrape in a South African field. It is because we want to be there, we want to witness what is happening and we want to get the story out to the world.

  So, wrong place, wrong time? No. In fact, in this business the opposite applies. It is the madness of what we TV news people do. What we choose to do. I was actually in the right place at the right time. It may have turned out to have been the wrong place had that gunman pulled the trigger. But I was where I wanted to be, and yes, where I had to be if I wanted to get the story.

  I say this because, if you are reading a book about the life of a foreign correspondent and travelling anchorman, it helps, I guess, to understand what motivates us. It is sometimes glamorous, often exciting and frequently fascinating. But it also can be tedious, dispiriting and routine. And yet time and again we are drawn to places like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Syria and Sierra Leone. It is part competitive urge, part a need to be there, and part the desire to seek out the truth – or as close to it as it is possible to get.

  I am not one of those war junkie correspondents who thrive on the adrenaline of conflict and witnessing bad stuff. I have known many reporters – male and female – who are in their element in war zones, who love the challenge, who relish the hardship and even find the danger quite alluring. I say this not in criticism; in fact, quite the opposite. I have undiluted admiration for the journalists who do feel that way. They are brave, courageous and resourceful. And the bottom line is this: if they did not go to the godawful places to bear witness, who would do it? Who would be there to cast a light on those dark corners of the world where conflict rages, war crimes are committed and atrocities take place? The answer: no one.

  And that is just what those who perpetrate such monstrous outrages want to happen. They want to operate in obscurity, in darkness. Good war reporters don’t allow that. They shine a light. The Anthony Loyds, Jeremy Bowens, Marie Colvins (God
rest her soul), Christina Lambs, Kim Senguptas, and countless cameramen and women and photographers of this world should be saluted for the work they do.

  However, I am not someone who welcomes the danger. I have been to many war zones, but I don’t relish it, I don’t feel some sort of missionary zeal to do it and I certainly don’t enjoy it. The fact is, if you’re daft enough to agree to go to these places, and you do it often enough, you will get into difficulties. More often than not the threat is sudden and comes from nowhere, and whether you live or die can be pure luck – which road you take, which hilltop you film from, which hotel you stay in, which local fixer you hire, and who you take advice from.

  I have good friends who have been killed or seriously injured in war zones. I was with the ITN reporter Terry Lloyd the night before he and his cameraman and their fixer were killed in Iraq. That story is in this book. The BBC’s John Simpson, one of the great foreign correspondents of our age, was with his camera team in northern Iraq when they were bombed by ‘friendly forces’ who got their coordinates wrong. He survived. Terry didn’t. The lottery of war.

  I survived, or at least I have so far, largely due to an innate cowardice. In fact, I’ve found that cowardice is a much better protection than any amount of flak jackets, helmets and armoured vehicles. Cowardice has stopped me going to many places and doing many things in war zones, and I think there are many camera crews and producers who would probably thank me for that. My cowardice has served me well.

  This book is not supposed to be just about war stories or close brushes with death. I have included them because that is what I get asked about most often, but also because most intensely insecure TV reporters, particularly those who later sneak off to the comfort and sanctuary of the studio to become presenters, like it to be known that they have earned their spurs, they have seen action and they’ve been in the thick of it. I guess it’s the feeling that you haven’t made it until you’ve been shot at. It really is that pathetic. Honestly.

  But this book is also about the other big stories I have been privileged to cover in thirty years as a foreign correspondent and presenter for ITN, and now as Washington correspondent for Sky News.

  I write about the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and what it’s like to report on a story where almost a million people died at the hands of machete-wielding, grenade-throwing murderers, just because of their ethnicity. Recent African history is replete with outbursts of tribal slaughter, but this was a massacre on an altogether different scale. It was not a simple tale of mutual hatred between rival ethnic groups descending into terrible violence. This was a carefully planned, meticulously carried-out genocide. ‘Genocide’ is an oft-misused word. Not in this context, though. A green, lush, beautiful land of rolling hills and endless valleys became a vast human abattoir. It is by far and away the most grotesque story I have ever covered. I have yet to meet a journalist who was not deeply affected by what they witnessed there. My friend, the BBC correspondent Fergal Keane, to this day has nightmares about being at the bottom of a pile of rotting corpses that are moving and touching him, ‘like a mound of eels at the supermarket’.

  I have always managed to compartmentalize much of the bad stuff: detach it, file it away to be forgotten about. But not Rwanda, not what I saw there. Not then, not now, not ever. In his brilliantly written book, Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey, Fergal recalls: ‘Although I had seen war before, had seen the face of cruelty, Rwanda belonged in a nightmare zone where my capacity to understand, much less to rationalize, was overwhelmed. This was a country of corpses and orphans and terrible absences. This was where the spirit withered.’

  That is it. That is what I felt. Right there… in words I will not be able to match. But I hope nevertheless to convey some sense of what occurred in that godforsaken country.

  I also hope there is much to uplift you in this book. I spent time with Nelson Mandela just before and after he became President of South Africa. What a time to be living in Johannesburg that was. Those were intoxicating days in South Africa, a roller coaster of emotion that was mercifully to lead to one of the great moments in modern African history: the inauguration of the country’s first-ever black president. I will never forget standing on the lawns in front of the government buildings in Pretoria, looking up at the skies as South African military aircraft staged a flypast in tribute to Mandela. That’s the same military that for decades used its machines of war to oppress the entire black population. I listened as Mandela’s booming voice rang out: ‘We shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.’

  It was a magical time. And how joyous, just a couple of weeks earlier, to be up at dawn as the sun rose in the sky, to film the endless queues of people waiting patiently to cast a vote for the very first time. And how they waited. Some standing in line for hours. But they sang and chanted. and cheered, knowing that this was the day that would change their lives and their children’s lives forever.

  Yes, 1994 was quite some year in my life. Mandela’s rise, South Africa’s freedom, followed by Rwanda’s horror – all within a few months of each other. And it was a year made even more memorable by the birth in Johannesburg of our first daughter, Madeleine. Born in the new South Africa, a child of the rainbow nation, she has always held that country close to her heart, as we all have. The few years we spent living there were perhaps the most inspiring period of our lives – or at least they were for me.

  But Maddy also features in this book in a way that I would much prefer she didn’t. At the age of seventeen, she became seriously ill with the eating disorder anorexia. It nearly killed her. That it didn’t was down more to good fortune than anything else. Her ordeal lasted three years, thankfully short for a sufferer of anorexia; it can last for years, even a lifetime. So this book is, on a very personal level, about what happens when your own child becomes the biggest story in your life.

  I have written much about the terrible toll that it took. Angered by the lack of resources in this country to deal with anorexia, Maddy and I made a documentary about it. But here I try to describe what it is really like, trying to read the news in front of millions of people every night when your daughter is wasting away at home and you can do absolutely nothing about it. It is an awful condition to witness; it tears away at the very fabric of family life and it tears away at your heart. They were terrible days, watching my sticklike teenager – hollow-eyed, emaciated and devoid of life – just wither away without seeming to care. Why didn’t I just stop working? Why didn’t I just stay at home and devote all my attention to try to make her better? It’s a question I have been asked many times since I first wrote about it. And in this book I try to come up with an answer.

  Much of this book was written in the United States, in my apartment in Georgetown, Washington DC, from where I have observed the most extraordinary story in modern politics.

  The book opens and closes with the political phenomenon that is Donald J. Trump. As I write, the true extent of the Trump challenge to American democracy and to the cherished ideals and norms of this great country is still being determined. Some – those who voted for him, primarily – would say that is no bad thing. He has upended orthodoxy, changed the Republican Party, infuriated the establishment and ripped up the foreign policy rulebook. But he has done nothing he didn’t say he would do. He has been true to himself, to his campaign and to his promises. And in that, there is a core honesty to the man not often acknowledged.

  But to others, he represents a crisis of political morality of considerable magnitude that is unsettling and not a little frightening. It is not the fear induced by a clever, strategic, manipulative demagogue who is out to entrench autocratic rule, overturn the rule of law and ditch well-honed democratic principles and freedoms. No, it is the fear – or for some, the excitement – inspired by the unpredictable, the chaotic, th
e abnormal and the dysfunctional, all of which coexist in this presidency of the bizarre.

  That perfect storm is buffeting America right now. The Trump chapters thus have the benefit of being composed virtually as things happen, but such immediacy also imposes unavoidable limitations and risks. Reporting almost as it happens is imperfect for a book like this. It offers little time for proper reflection and perspective, and there will be some events that are overemphasized and others that will appear underplayed in light of new developments.

  But at least with Trump there should be no issue of memory failing me. In other chapters covering events and incidents occurring two or three decades ago, that will inevitably be the case, and for that I apologize. I write of those days as I remember them, without diary or perfect recall, and I regret error if and where it appears.

  If it sounds a rather harrowing read in parts, I’m afraid it is. But I hope it is also as entertaining and as much fun as this job can often be. There has been so much enjoyment and there have been so many laughs along the way. The crazy journeys, the tales of the unexpected, the mistakes, the humiliations and the great moments of sport I have been lucky enough to witness first-hand – these have all made it an enormously eventful but enjoyable career so far.

  When things go wrong in television news, which they often do, we tend to take ourselves far too seriously. I know I do. We think it is the most important job in the world. We hate losing to the opposition, we hate falling short. But I’ve come to learn that perspective is one of the greatest qualities a journalist can possess, but one that is most often in short supply.

  My wife – an A & E doctor – is far more rational. She really does work in a world that is life and death on a daily basis. She does it quietly and undramatically. And she will always throw the same words at me when I bang on about a failure or a mistake or a job badly done.

  ‘Yes, it’s important,’ she will say, ‘but in the end, it’s only television.’

  And she’s right.