Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
A BBC journalist who reported on momentous events from Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall and was the only journalist to stay in Baghdad during the
Eight records
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
I'd take Proust, I suppose. And if you gave it to me in French, that'd take me longer to read.
In conversation
Presenter asks
John, it sounds an exciting, adventurous, not to say glamorous career. Are those the adjectives that you'd use to describe it?
I was trying to recognize my rather humdrum existence in this very exciting sort of description. I suppose if you take the as it were the chapter headings and stick them together, it's that, but of course there's an awful lot in between.
Presenter asks
How much of a surprise is it to you that this is the job that you're making your life's work? I mean, had you told John Simpson, aged seventeen and three quarters, on his way up to Cambridge, that he was going to end up being a foreign correspondent, doing it on television, would you have been surprised?
I suppose I would have. I mean, I didn't really um set out exactly to do that. I don't think I set out to do anything like a lot of people. I didn't know what on earth I wanted to do. But yes, if if I had to do anything, I think I always would have wanted it to have been a foreign correspondent. And certainly when I started in journalism, I wanted to do that. I wanted to write and I wanted to travel. And those two things have come together in being a foreign correspondent. I suppose I could be also writing the brochures for travel agencies as well.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 4
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
Speaker 4
The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 4
And the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My castaway this week is a journalist. He confronts danger but avoids histrionics. He writes and speaks with humanity, but he remains objective. He's a BBC man, having started his career twenty-five years ago in the radio newsroom, before graduating to the excitement of foreign assignments. He's told us about most of the momentous events of recent years, from Tiananmen Square to the release of Nelson Mandela, from the fall of Ceaușescu to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Presenter
Most recently, he was one of the few journalists who remained in Baghdad when the Allies began their bombardment of Iraq.
Presenter
He survived threats on his life, blackmail attempts, and smuggled journeys into dangerous places. In January the Royal Television Society honored him as Journalist of the Year. He is John Simpson.
Presenter
John, it sounds an exciting, adventurous, not to say glamorous career. Are those the adjectives that you'd use to describe it?
John Simpson
I was trying to recognize my rather humdrum existence in this very exciting sort of description. I suppose if you take the
John Simpson
as it were the chapter headings and stick them together, it's that, but of course there's an awful lot in between.
Presenter
But patently it's a way of life for you, isn't it?
John Simpson
It is a way of life. I can't now stop it, to be honest. I mean, I know that sounds as though it's some form of banned substance, but uh I I remember, for instance, in nineteen eighty I was appointed the BBC's political editor.
John Simpson
And um I used to wander up and down the corridors of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, nearly going mad with the fact that I couldn't get out, that I was with all these people that thought of nothing except British domestic politics.
Presenter
But foreign affairs just totally absorbs you.
John Simpson
Yes, there's an awful lot of them, of course. There's a lot of places to go to. There's a lot of things to happen. Every time you think that history has come to an end, history starts up again somewhere else. And you know, I was that's my stock in trade. I'm very glad it does.
Presenter
How much of a surprise is it to you that this is the job that you're making your life's work? I mean, had you told John Simpson, aged seventeen and three quarters, on his way up to Cambridge, that he was going to end up being, A, a c foreign correspondent, and B, doing it on the television, would you have been surprised?
John Simpson
I suppose I would have. I mean, I didn't really um set out exactly to do that. I don't think I set out to do anything like a lot of people. I didn't know what on earth I wanted to do. But yes, if if I had to do anything, I think I always would have wanted it to have been a foreign correspondent. And certainly when I started in journalism, I wanted to do that. I wanted to write and I wanted to travel. And those two things have come together in being a foreign correspondent. I suppose I could be also writing the brochures for travel agencies as well.
Presenter
So what does John Simpson, now aged forty six, intend doing with himself on the desert island?
John Simpson
Well, on a desert island, I think John Simpson, aged forty six, would like to get off before he's aged forty seven. I don't fancy the idea, to be honest, of being stuck on one of these things. It's quite nice to be able for a few days to sit down and do absolutely nothing and to look at the ceiling and allow the the mouth to to fall open and the mind to go blank. That's quite pleasant. But I think to allow it to happen for any long period of time and have to wear skins and and things like this and build bothies, I don't fancy that at all.
Presenter
What about the music? How how have you chosen the eight records that'll keep you company?
John Simpson
I have actually rather advanced tastes in music, which puts off almost everybody I live with. I I like people like Shostakovich and Bartok, and I suppose I should use my desert island to blast away with them, but in fact I've rather chosen things that summon up memories of the past and the the kind of things that I've done as well.
Presenter
What's the first one?
John Simpson
The first one is part of Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhapsody, No. One, which seems to me to sum up all those quiet virtues and beauties of the English countryside and that part of it where I was brought up in in East Anglia. And I carry this around with me everywhere I go, and if I can, I like to play it first when I land in some new place.
Presenter
Part of Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhapsody, Number One, in E minor, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thompson. Well, now, if if roaming the world's hot spots is a hobby, obviously going home to Suffolk is as well, isn't it, from what you say?
John Simpson
It is. Yes. Suffolk is really, I I have to say an adopted home. I was brought up, in fact, in London. But my family came from Suffolk in the first place, and that was always regarded as the proper end of things and the place that one had to go to. And then my father, when our family fortunes revived a bit and he went into partnership with with a um a very good friend of his and mine called brian brooks we then bought a house all together up on the suffolk coast
Presenter
So the image I have of you of the the only child spending this slightly lonely childhood in Suffolk, trailing his shrimping net along the beach is not strictly accurate.
John Simpson
Well, I d it's only accurate in that I didn't trail the shrimping net, but I did I did sort of go for long walks and yes, I mean, it was a very lonely childhood, to be honest, and it just uh was always the way that we were rather quiet and set apart from each other.
Presenter
But you were brought up for the most part by your father, weren't you?
John Simpson
Yes, I was. My father and mother separated when I was seven years old and uh then by my choice, in fact, I can't now remember the full circumstances, but I chose to stay with my father. I think probably it seemed a sort of uh a reasonable share out since my mother had two children by her previous marriage and she went to look after them and I I think I stayed with my father because he didn't have any children. So whether this was a good thing for him or not, it was certainly very good for me.
Presenter
Then off you went to Cambridge, which you loved.
John Simpson
Which I loved, yes. I quite liked school. I went to St. Paul's School in London. But I really loved Cambridge. I suppose everybody, or most people, do really. I had a very happy time there, quite a successful time in some ways. I was the editor of
John Simpson
the magazine Granter, which now is something else altogether, but then was a quite a reasonably good student magazine. I had very good friends and I got married in my last year, which was absolutely delightful and uh one of the pleasantest times of my life.
Presenter
I've always thought, actually, that that it would have suited you to have been an academic, or or perhaps a spy, or perhaps both, I mean some
Presenter
Famous people have been both. Have I got you entirely wrong?
John Simpson
You've got me entirely wrong on the spy. I don't think I ever wanted to be a spy, although I must say many other people aside from yourself have accused me of being one, and usually in nasty places, not nice ones.
Presenter
The Czechs tried to recruit you once as a spy, didn't they?
John Simpson
I don't know quite how much they wanted to recruit me. They certainly set a f an extremely attractive young woman onto me, and I think they really wanted me to be what they called an agent of influence, or what is called an agent of influence, which means that you say and do things that that uh the country which has recruited you would like you to say and do.
Presenter
You broadcast favourable things about them.
John Simpson
Yes, and do that sort of thing, yes. I was a bit alarmed by this, really, but then I thought, well, the greatest protection is to not make any secret about it, so I've talked about it quite a lot.
Presenter
So you refuse to succumb to the charms of a female foreign agent. I mean, is that is that a rule you've made for yourself?
John Simpson
No, it is a rule, absolutely.
Presenter
What do we know it is?
Presenter
Uh
John Simpson
Uh Uh
Presenter
Check.
John Simpson
Who might first?
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Record number two.
John Simpson
That would be very much taking me back to my time in Cambridge. We put on a performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in the Senate House in Cambridge, which was a delightful place to have it. And really to hear the the the duet Fear No Danger is just simply to transport me back instantly to Cambridge in that whole very pleasant time.
Speaker 4
It's your goodness or not, such as grip as you
Speaker 4
It's not who are both as well as you
Speaker 4
Again, forever smiling, and all cares are thy joy in earning.
John Simpson
Leave on it.
Speaker 4
He would not say that you
Speaker 4
Yes.
Speaker 4
Gather from within marks, in the midst of
John Simpson
Need a day!
Speaker 4
Her mountains witness you.
Presenter
Patricia Clarke and Eileen Poulter singing the duet Fear No Danger to Ensue from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Anthony Lewis and memories of Cambridge for John Simpson where he got married in Maudlin Chapel. That marriage ultimately broke down, John. It's impossible obviously to allocate blame in these situations, but would you say the strains of the job were partly responsible for that?
John Simpson
Yes, I think that the job really was in entirely responsible, I'd I'd say. And blame is perhaps not the thing, but I think if there was blame it was mine. I I don't think it was uh a very easy job to be in, really, travelling around the place, always going off to the next place, getting restless after just a few days back in London. Not very easy to be married to somebody like that, I think.
Presenter
Would you go as far as to say that a a dedicated foreign correspondent perhaps shouldn't be married? It is desirable that he is a single man.
John Simpson
Well, I think that is true, really, yes. Um I I would always be in favour of employing people either early on in their lives or else later on in their lives and uh simply because they don't have those sort of commitments. If you've got children, you you're always going to be much more careful about what you do, and quite rightly so. And if you're married, you're always going to have to consider
John Simpson
The person that you've got to come back to and that you don't always want to be away for long periods of time or doing silly things around the place.
Presenter
But do you like it like that now? I mean, is it something is that independence something that you want and enjoy and relish, not having any dependence, as it were?
John Simpson
Not having
John Simpson
It certainly is. I feel much happier about it. I don't have any anxieties now, really, apart from purely selfish anxieties about what may happen in a certain place. I don't have that terrible worry what's going to happen to my daughters, my wife, my parents, or so on. I'm afraid that life has rather stripped these things from me. It is therefore.
Presenter
It is therefore, I mean, as we were saying earlier, totally a way of life for you. I mean, do you have any other kind of in between assignments? Do you have friends who aren't in the business? Do you do other things, think about other things?
John Simpson
Oh, yes, I do. I hang around a lot at the Chelsea Arts Club and I got a lot of friends there. And uh I go to the cinema a great deal. I live with somebody who's in in the business, as it were, Tira Schubart, who's a an American television news producer, and uh who thoroughly understands the restlessness, the desire to get away, which which a lot of people wouldn't understand, I think. And uh but no, I mean, I lead uh on those few days when I'm at home, which hasn't been very much recently, I have to say, I do lead a perfectly normal life.
Presenter
Record number three.
John Simpson
I went to Ireland as the B B C's first correspondent in Dublin in nineteen seventy two, height of troubles and things there, and uh I took my family with me, and they and I had a marvellous three years there, which left me with all sorts of good memories and so on. And uh
John Simpson
I'd like to remind myself of those very sprightly years and times, and that marvellous country and its people, with Shauna Rioda's version of Ignona al Falantini. I'm sure I pronounce that terribly badly, but it means in English the Palatine's daughter. It's a folk song from Ireland.
Speaker 4
And I'm like
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Right.
Speaker 4
Craig and poem, pepper and leaf
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Marianne the painter, the left side Miss Empire and Wayne Governor, right eye up
Presenter
Sean O'Rearda and the Palatine's daughter. I'm not quite clear, John, how you got into journalism in the first place. Has it always been the BBC?
John Simpson
It always has, actually, that's a terrible thing to do.
Presenter
That would
Presenter
Twenty-five years.
John Simpson
I know, it's disgusting. It's like um like admitting that that you've always lived with your mother or something like that, or you've never left home. It's I I I have mixed feelings about the BBC. I mean the the hatred is mixed sometimes with partial liking. I'm terribly proud of it, terribly proud of it, and and I announce it to everybody wherever I go, and of course it has the most tremendous effect in most countries of the world. Still, it has its drawbacks sometimes. It can be a very tiresome place to work for.
Presenter
And you found it very tiresome, I think, in the beginning, in the radio newsroom, where you were, by all accounts, wonderfully careless and inaccurate.
John Simpson
Well, by my own account, I think probably mostly, I think everyone else forgot about me quite quickly as fast as they could. But I was not a good sub-editor. I spiked the Torrey Canyon story and I wasn't easily forgiven from this. And I had to escape from the place. I loathed being there. I was only there for about 18 months, but I had to escape from it as fast as I could.
Presenter
So you ended up in 1975 in Brussels. You were the common market correspondent, weren't you?
John Simpson
Yes, I went there after I'd had my three years in Ireland. I then went to Brussels for two years, where I lived a rather sort of fat existence and earned a lot of money because the life was good in those days, and uh but didn't exactly sort of improve my knowledge of the world very much.
Presenter
It says in your notes, shortly afterwards he was sent to Angola, but it wasn't quite like that, was it?
John Simpson
It wasn't no, it wasn't indeed. When I was in Brussels, Brussels turned out to be the staging point of British mercenaries coming through British and American mercenaries coming through to go to fight in the Angolan war.
John Simpson
And I went to the airport and um
John Simpson
I saw all these mercenaries going through and they were all terribly upset about being spotted and they didn't like this at all and somebody said he'd kill me when he got the chance and so forth.
John Simpson
And on the way back I thought
John Simpson
How marvellous to know what happens to these fellows
John Simpson
And
John Simpson
Uh it was an incautious thing to say really, because one of my colleagues said, Well, you could get on a plane and go out there and follow them and I did. I did that night, went off on another on another plane to Zaire and followed them and uh it was extremely risky. I don't think it was a very good idea to have done that at all. I mean I really came very close to being killed several times by them.
Presenter
Well how did th they actually physically tried to kill you?
John Simpson
Mm.
Presenter
Oh yes.
John Simpson
In different ways. Well, mostly in the Intercontinental Hotel Kinshasa, actually. In various ways.
Presenter
And what were they trying to kill you with, their bare hands, or?
John Simpson
Oh, various things. Yes, guns, mostly. Guns.
Presenter
Were you frightened?
John Simpson
I was absolutely terrified. I was terrified. I've never been so terrified. I I lay down on my bed once and wasn't able to do anything, I remember, with with sheer fear. This man, uh, Colonel Callan, who who started murdering his own colleagues, was the chief of the murderers. Then uh, after a bit, the fear evaporated a little bit, and um I managed to sort of get on with the story a little bit.
Presenter
That, of course, is far from being the only brush with danger that you've had. I mean, let me ask you a possible question. Do you think you're naturally quite brave?
John Simpson
Not at all. I tell you what I do think though, and I suppose it s comes from being educated in the nineteen fifties perhaps, I I've got a very strong sense of duty. I don't feel brave at all, but I do feel that if I'm sent to a place I've really got to do the job. I'd feel bad about it uh if I didn't do it, and I feel a great duty towards the BBC. If if it's nice enough to pay me to go somewhere, then I feel it ought to get its money's worth.
Presenter
Next piece of music.
John Simpson
The composer Bartok is one of my favourite composers, and he spent a lot of time travelling round Eastern Europe collecting folk songs, which is something that I think it's too late to do it now probably, but it sounds like a marvellous thing to do. And he travelled round Romania, where I spent some happy, difficult and rather unpleasant times collecting folk dances. And it would be very nice to hear, I think, his third Romanian folk dance.
Presenter
Chrisa Osostovich and Susan Tomes playing one of Bartok's Romanian folk dances.
Presenter
Tell me about being in Baghdad, John, when the war broke out. You'd actually been ordered out by your BBC bosses, hadn't you?
John Simpson
Yes, they tried to. We had a discussion on the phone.
John Simpson
And various things flashed across the ether from London to Baghdad and back again, like resignations and and accusations and reassurances. And in the end we we came to a happy conclusion, which was that we were indeed ordered to leave.
John Simpson
But that if anybody chose to disregard the order, they wouldn't be punished.
Presenter
Sounds a bit sounds bitter.
John Simpson
Very civilized.
Presenter
Why did you want to stay so much?
John Simpson
Well, I suppose there there are some easy reasons. I was writing a book and uh you know you didn't want to get to chapter nineteen and then say the end very much.
John Simpson
And I felt, to be honest, that
John Simpson
The the world's premier news organization shouldn't be conspicuous by its absence at a time like that.
Presenter
Even if its bosses said it should.
John Simpson
Well, we had a disagreement about it.
Presenter
I mean, to put it in context at the time, uh I mean, the chances were that you might lose your life. The Americans we knew were going to carpet bomb Baghdad. I mean, you were in in mortal danger. You were choosing to remain in mortal danger.
John Simpson
Yes, I I don't know whether I'd I'd have put it like that quite at the time, but um certainly I think all of those of us who did stay three B B C people stayed at the end I think they all felt that they were gonna die, yes, yes, I I certainly did.
John Simpson
Or might die not going to, but might die.
Presenter
How did you then come to terms with that? I mean, why how do you rationalize that? It's no good saying that it's'cause you wanted to write a book,'cause if you were gonna die, you wouldn't write the book anyway.
John Simpson
I suppose I'm a bit of a chancer, really. I mean, it it seemed as though it wasn't one hundred per cent certain, it just was a chance. So I stayed.
Presenter
The irony, I suppose, of it is that you even though you stayed, you didn't get an interview with the villain of the peace, Sadame Hussain. How much did that hurt?
John Simpson
Oh, it hurts terribly. It still hurts. It still hurts. I I really would like to have met the man.
Presenter
But you you would have got one if you'd agreed to his terms, wouldn't you?
John Simpson
Yes, he wanted simply he wanted really nothing more nor less than opening the airwaves to him and uh no editing, no this, no that, and it just wasn't wasn't even conceivable, I'm afraid.
Presenter
Isn't there a precedent for this refusing an interview with John Simpson?
John Simpson
Well, there is. There's two rather disturbing precedents from his point of view, because both the Shah of Iran in the latter days of his reign and Nikolai Sharsescu in the last days of his both refused John Simpson. So I I I felt I needed to pass this on to Saddam Hussein's people, who took it reasonably well in the circumstances.
Presenter
Record number five.
John Simpson
Record number five takes me back to Argentina, where I I spent some marvellous times in nineteen eighty three.
John Simpson
I was the first British journalist to get back to Argentina after the war.
John Simpson
And although that doesn't seem a very important thing to say, it in fact was terribly important to me because I'd spent the whole of the war over over the Falklands in Montevideo in Uruguay, just across the river, and I felt
John Simpson
That I had to get back to Argentina, and I went back, and I just got there.
John Simpson
at the time when things were starting to open up and where the all the terrible crimes that had been committed under the right wing military dictatorship, which came to power in nineteen seventy six, were starting to be
John Simpson
Just a little bit hinted at, and people were aware of them and starting to talk about them.
John Simpson
Mercedes Sosa, who is a very great singer of folk songs, came back to Argentina to give a concert.
John Simpson
And she was singing a fairly ordinary song, which is called Volvera los agnes siete, uh, to be seventeen again.
John Simpson
when she suddenly mentions and you can hear it in this recording, I think, the release of the prisoners, and the crowd goes wild.
John Simpson
And it brings back those marvellously heady times when people were just getting away from dictatorship and cruelty and into some form of freedom.
Speaker 4
So sore so.
Speaker 4
Tetianilus perigrino.
Speaker 4
Rivera los Christians.
Speaker 4
Hello, Argon Susa Smer.
Speaker 4
Alvier Jollovoi Albany
Speaker 4
Y almano solo tar, lo pued la puro y since.
Speaker 4
7
Speaker 4
I did go.
Speaker 4
Como a club clapper.
Presenter
Mercedes Sosa singing Volvera los años siete. It's obviously something you find very moving, John. Do you find that you become bound up with the peoples that you're reporting on? I did.
John Simpson
I do, yes, I do feel a lot of emotion in these sort of circumstances.
John Simpson
These things seem to me not not merely a matter of opinion, not merely a matter of uh a balance of of chance and favourability. They seem to me to be a matter of right and wrong, and
John Simpson
Killing people and arresting them for the way they think seems to me to be absolutely one hundred percent wrong, that there's nothing that you can argue in favour of it.
Presenter
You got involved in in China in Tiananmen Square, not just emotionally but physically, didn't you, when you came to the rescue of a man who was being murdered?
John Simpson
Yes, but it was absolutely typical of me to get involved on the wrong side, or at least on the side of the
John Simpson
The people that were doing the bad things rather than the people who were having them done to them. We were in Tiananmen Square on the night of the shootings, and the first thing that happened was that the army sent in two armoured personnel carriers to try and cut the crowd up. In fact, I think to be sacrificial victims, actually. And the crowd attacked them. These weren't really the students. These were mostly the kind of peasant element and the kind of working class element from Peking. People who felt terribly strongly about things and that they didn't have the overview that the students managed to get. They were much more bitter about how they'd been treated for forty years. And they started to they stopped these things and they started to break into them and then to kill the people inside. And we were very close up. We had a marvellous, marvellously brave camera crew and we were right close up against it. And we saw a couple of these people being killed and beaten, pulled apart really. And they started on the third one and I just felt I couldn't stand there and watch it anymore.
John Simpson
So I sort of horned in.
Presenter
And what happened?
John Simpson
Well, he got away actually. I think they were they were so surprised to see this rather sort of large
John Simpson
um, Westerner suddenly erupting into their midst and telling them to put those bricks down and things like this that I think they let him go out of sheer surprise. He got away anyway. I j I really just don't like to see large groups of people
John Simpson
picking on one individual or two individuals. And I uh there's something inside me that wells up and says, Stop it and I go wading in and uh and try to stop it. I I don't make a habit of it, it just has happened once or twice.
Presenter
But when you're not doing that, when you're there doing your job, do you sometimes feel
Presenter
Depressed by the fact that you're there, depressed that that is your job, that as an observer, as a reporter.
Presenter
There's really so little you can do about it except tell the world, which may be quite a large thing.
John Simpson
That seems to me to be the most important thing that I could do. As far as I'm concerned, really I think to to bring things out into the open and talk about them and make a public issue of them is as much as I could possibly hope to do.
Presenter
Next piece of music
John Simpson
I in nineteen eighty four went to live with with um this American television producer, uh Tira Schubard, and my life became very different and very pleasant and um
John Simpson
became
John Simpson
A lot more sort of laid back, really, as a result of living with her. She's a very easy-going person. She seems to me to sum up, really, all the great virtues of the American nineteen seventies, a very relaxed time when anything goes or anything went, I suppose. And um.
John Simpson
where really the the the great stresses and strains of life could largely be set aside in favour of something nicer and and easier. And one of the pieces of music that she introduced me to was uh a song by the singer JJ Kale, it's called Magnolia.
Speaker 3
We're but we're saying
Speaker 3
Soft sound breathe
Speaker 3
Makes me think of my baby
Speaker 3
What
Presenter
JJ Kale and Magnolia. You said that reporting for television per se is not particularly important to you. Would you be.
Presenter
happier even to to earn your living by the pen alone.
John Simpson
I would quite like to earn my living by the pen alone. On the other hand, television is more fun than anything else. It's the most difficult medium of all, and I've worked really for all the various mediums now.
John Simpson
And I know that this is true. It's the most difficult to get a coherent thing together. It's it's so difficult to land in a place with a camera crew and then just go and get the pictures which illustrate the story properly, which take the story on, and so on. Very, very difficult indeed. That's what's fun about it.
Presenter
But then again the the space and the room to express your opinions and to hone your script is perhaps attractive.
John Simpson
Yes, but you know, the Chinese made a whole science of of uh writing poetry in as few syllables as possible. I mean, I think it can be done. Uh it makes me feel sometimes like a Tang dynasty poet to be writing, you know, in a minute and a quarter or or something like that, but I do my best. Actually the complaint that most of the editors have against me is that far from sticking to a minute and a quarter with my haiku order it is, I spread it out to about three minutes.
Presenter
Record number seven.
John Simpson
I'd like to hear Juliet Greco and the song that she sings about the the Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris, Ignat Pleu d'Apré, it just
John Simpson
To listen to it takes me back instantly and settles me down in the Boulevard Saint Germain. There I am, and I go and have a little coffee perhaps in the Deuxage, and perhaps a meal at the Brasserie Lip, and it's, as far as I'm concerned, the nicest spot on earth.
Speaker 4
Ileni à ple d'a pole, à saint géma depoula.
Speaker 4
Feuda for Rey de Ma, Feuda for me.
Speaker 4
Il Niya, conjuring, conjeur As Saint Jerames lespre som seuratois, somm surra pou noir, Ilenias.
Presenter
I played all the f
Presenter
Juliette Greco singing Ilnia Paple d'Aprè.
Presenter
You've talked about your your sense of duty, which you've stressed, really, and and obviously that's very deep in you. I mean
Presenter
There are obviously also alongside that traditional value the others of of of honour, a a desire to behave well. Is that a strong part of you?
John Simpson
Well, it it sounds terribly awful for me to say yes to any of those questions, doesn't it? I I don't know. I would hope to behave well. I'd certainly hope to behave well.
Presenter
But it's something that's very important to you, something you think about.
John Simpson
It's very important to me not to behave badly, yes. Yes, I do think about it actually. I have to confess, yes, I do think about it. I do want to behave.
John Simpson
In the right way.
John Simpson
These times, the times of of difficulty, and indeed not not other times. I haven't behaved very well, of course, in my life. Like
John Simpson
Antony and Antony and Cleopatra I've not kept my square, but I've I don't want to
John Simpson
regard myself, perhaps, as somebody who behaves badly at times of crisis.
Presenter
So I mean even when nobody's looking, these are the values that weigh heavy on you.
John Simpson
I can see what your your idea of me is wearing a my dinner jacket on my desert island. I I can see and eating off silver plates. I shouldn't be like that at all. I should be in my goat hair shorts in no time.
Presenter
Obviously, I mean, you've you've watched history in the making, I mean, over the past decade and before, but I mean, in that sense, the past few years ha have been momentous for the the revolutions. You must have been present at practically every one, haven't you?
John Simpson
Yes, I think I was. And uh it was wonderful. Um
John Simpson
The release of Nelson Mandela is something I shall never forget. I mean standing there with tears running down my cheeks. I get very emotional at these times. The idea of being a free man is something which is very important to me, and therefore when I see other people either becoming free or being bound, it affects me very strongly. I I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe in the eighties.
John Simpson
Um in Czechoslovakia I got thrown out of. I got thrown out of most places really. Uh Romania I spent quite a lot of time in and um uh East Germany and so on. And
John Simpson
Seeing people at their lowest point, really, people that shouldn't have been bound like that, and uh.
John Simpson
Then watching them freeing themselves, not even being freed, but freeing themselves, was just a wonderful experience. I find it quite difficult now to think of all that time without getting quite emotional. In fact, when we had to do live broadcasts a great deal from Czechoslovakia, for instance, in November 1989 during their revolution, and I was doing the live links a lot, and I kept on thinking, This is going to be frightful, I'm going to disgrace myself. Floods of tears when they come to me. And I'd have to really control myself quite a lot. I only managed once, I remember, by sleight of hand, really, by saying to somebody I was doing a live interview with who started to say the kind of things that really were very moving. And I had to say to him, What's that over there written on that wall? And he was able then to translate it. It said, It's over, checks are free.
John Simpson
And it was a wonderful moment.
John Simpson
Last record then.
John Simpson
Well, the last record
John Simpson
Sums a lot of that up.
John Simpson
really for me. It was Leonard Bernstein's version of of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which he went to Berlin the newly united Berlin on Christmas Day, nineteen eighty nine to conduct.
John Simpson
And he made a change which was very important to me as well as clearly to him.
John Simpson
To change then that wonderful last movement where the bass, I think it is, cries out Freude, which is joy, and the whole thing is after all an ode to joy, he changed it to the German word Freiheit, freedom, and that really is is as great a statement, I think, of human freedom as one could possibly wish.
Speaker 4
I must find this point as I free I love this point I love it I must hear
John Simpson
Uh
Speaker 4
Wood must be a hope you scare voice each of us.
John Simpson
Mm-hmm.
Presenter
Part of the recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. nine made in Berlin on Christmas Day, nineteen eighty nine, with a variety of assembled orchestras and choirs, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Presenter
So which of the eight records will you need more?
John Simpson
I think I'd take Juliet Greco and then I'd be in Paris every time I listen to it.
Presenter
And your book, You Got the Bible in Shakespeare waiting?
John Simpson
Yes, that's the hardest part of the lot. I'm a a fanatical book reader, book buyer, book everything. And uh I'm the kind of person that can't have
John Simpson
breakfast without reading what's on the packet of the of the uh corn flakes.
John Simpson
I'm just at a loss, really. I mean, I'd take Proust, I suppose. Uh and if you gave it to me in French, that'd take me longer to read.
Presenter
And your luxury, what's that?
John Simpson
Well, when I was in Baghdad, I'm afraid I really was converted to the idea of the satellite telephone. Could I have?
Presenter
The one?
Presenter
Oh, I don't think so, Nani. That'd be far too useful.
John Simpson
Oh, well, I promise not. No, I just use it to, you know, ring up friends. And I wouldn't, I promise not to.
Presenter
To covering up friends from the desert island defeats the whole object.
John Simpson
Well, that's what my idea was, to defeat our logo.
Presenter
No, no, no, you have to.
John Simpson
I'd I'll take a flute then. I I used to play the flute and I like to play the flute.
Presenter
Right, a flute it is. John Simpson, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.
John Simpson
Thank you for making it such a pleasant instead of a difficult experience.
Speaker 4
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.
Presenter asks
But you were brought up for the most part by your father, weren't you?
Yes, I was. My father and mother separated when I was seven years old and uh then by my choice, in fact, I can't now remember the full circumstances, but I chose to stay with my father. I think probably it seemed a sort of uh a reasonable share out since my mother had two children by her previous marriage and she went to look after them and I I think I stayed with my father because he didn't have any children. So whether this was a good thing for him or not, it was certainly very good for me.
Presenter asks
Would you go as far as to say that a dedicated foreign correspondent perhaps shouldn't be married? Is it desirable that he is a single man?
Well, I think that is true, really, yes. Um I I would always be in favour of employing people either early on in their lives or else later on in their lives and uh simply because they don't have those sort of commitments. If you've got children, you you're always going to be much more careful about what you do, and quite rightly so. And if you're married, you're always going to have to consider the person that you've got to come back to and that you don't always want to be away for long periods of time or doing silly things around the place.
Presenter asks
Do you think you're naturally quite brave?
Not at all. I tell you what I do think though, and I suppose it s comes from being educated in the nineteen fifties perhaps, I I've got a very strong sense of duty. I don't feel brave at all, but I do feel that if I'm sent to a place I've really got to do the job. I'd feel bad about it uh if I didn't do it, and I feel a great duty towards the BBC. If if it's nice enough to pay me to go somewhere, then I feel it ought to get its money's worth.
Presenter asks
It's obviously something you find very moving, John. Do you find that you become bound up with the peoples that you're reporting on?
I do, yes, I do feel a lot of emotion in these sort of circumstances. These things seem to me not not merely a matter of opinion, not merely a matter of uh a balance of of chance and favourability. They seem to me to be a matter of right and wrong, and killing people and arresting them for the way they think seems to me to be absolutely one hundred percent wrong, that there's nothing that you can argue in favour of it.
“I was absolutely terrified. I was terrified. I've never been so terrified. I I lay down on my bed once and wasn't able to do anything, I remember, with with sheer fear.”
“I suppose I'm a bit of a chancer, really. I mean, it it seemed as though it wasn't one hundred per cent certain, it just was a chance. So I stayed.”
“Well, he got away actually. I think they were they were so surprised to see this rather sort of large um, Westerner suddenly erupting into their midst and telling them to put those bricks down and things like this that I think they let him go out of sheer surprise. He got away anyway. I j I really just don't like to see large groups of people picking on one individual or two individuals. And I uh there's something inside me that wells up and says, Stop it and I go wading in and uh and try to stop it.”
“The release of Nelson Mandela is something I shall never forget. I mean standing there with tears running down my cheeks. I get very emotional at these times. The idea of being a free man is something which is very important to me...”
“It said, It's over, checks are free.”