Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
TV news correspondent and four-time Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year, reporting from warzones and hotspots.
On the island
Eight records
And she was a stonking anti-apartheid civil rights activist from Johannesburg, which is where I'm living at the moment. She brought a Zulu song to the West and made it cool and highlighted so much injustice in the world at that time, particularly in South Africa.
Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)
Shakira featuring Freshlyground
Oh my god, what a song. I love it because we were just arriving, my family to live in South Africa around about the time this was coming out. We missed the World Cup, unfortunately, there. But this song felt like it was our anthem in Africa. I just love it.
Lulu was one of my father's favourites, not just because she was Scottish, but also because she was someone who'd made it from a pretty poor background. And she represented hope, she was really feisty, she had this incredible voice, and he just loved everything about her, and that meant we did too.
We were in India for about five years, myself and my family. It was my first foreign posting and Slum Dog Millionaire came out when we were there. It was quite a controversial film in India because the Indians felt it was unfairly representative, but actually it was a cracking film. My um and partner Richard was in hospital at the time and we were sitting there on the day of the Oscars and the doctors just kept on coming in, We've got four, we've got six. So, um Chai Ho is the the big song of the movie and it's brilliant I think.
Big Girls Don't Cry by Fergie. I mean I love Fergie and this was the song that was on my iPhone when I was travelling through Afghanistan endlessly, on trip after trip after trip. And it just reminds me of that time when we were driving through all this jagged countryside and going off to meet armed fighters and poor people in the far reaches of Afghanistan.
What a Wonderful WorldFavourite
Flo Edmondson (Alex Crawford's daughter) / Louis Armstrong (orig.)
Bob Thiele / George David Weiss
This is one of my most favorite songs in the world. It's like incredibly optimistic. I want to cling on to it and and wrap it round me all the time. And my daughter Flo, my youngest daughter Flo, the thing is when you when you have children, I'm sure you've found this yourself, you sort of think, first one's wow, you've not heard anything like it and you think the second one will be you've cracked it and the second one will be exactly the same as the first one and then you realize they're nothing like the first one, it's like starting all over again. And now I've got to the fourth one and she is so bright and positive about absolutely everything and she loves singing, so I thought. I want her to sing my most favourite song in the world, and she does it really well.
Jessie J, Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj
I liked this, not only because it's a foot-stomping, fantastic song, it also seemed to me that I really liked the collaboration of the three women who are all really different and yet managed to do it in an incredible arms through each other way, you know, in a real sisterhood sort of way.
Beyoncé featuring Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I chose this particularly because my three girls are I mean I'm struggling to find an adjective that actually encapsulates how strongly they feel about being feminists because they are like the most ardent, the most fervent and this bit of music encapsulates what they feel about the world, the irony that Beyoncé uses and the reading in it is their kind of mantra. And I sort of think, okay, I might be the worst mother in the world. I might not have a maternal instinct in my body, which is what one of them says to me. But if they think this is the way to be, whoa.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:48How much pain is safe to feel?
I think when it gets too painful, you'll realise that you can't cope. And I remember one of my editors, my foreign editor, told me, right at the beginning when I was just starting my sort of foreign correspondency stint of my career, he said, you've got to be careful because you will fill up. And so that's filling up with the emotional impact and the sadness, presumably. There's a lot of sadness that wells up. You can't escape the scars that are left after seeing people die or get horribly hurt or maimed. I mean, you'd have to be a robot not to be affected by that.
Presenter asks
2:36How come you got [to the Libyan front line] and [other journalists] didn't? What had you done?
I have no idea why I was there and they weren't. I really don't. And I saw all these armed trucks going and they were saying they were going into Tripoli. We were on the outskirts, which was slightly safer. And I said to my producer, listen, you stay and we'll go. And then the producer, at the last minute, jumped on. And thank God he did, because everyone played a really fundamental role. And he was the one who came up with the idea of attaching the B-gambler. So that little satellite dish, it's a tiny piece of kit, and it was pretty unpredictable. It's about the size of a laptop. And for that signal to work, you need to be stationary. We found ourselves in this long traffic jam of rebels which was getting more and more busy and full as we drove into the center of Tripoli. And so he said, well let's try and fix it up using the cigarette lighter as power, because also it drains battery, so you need to have power. And he just kept manually moving it and repositioning it and somehow it worked.
The keepsakes
The book
Harper Lee
This is also one that I struggled with, but the one that I remember that made a real impact on me when I was a child and now my own children are studying. It's probably a a massive cliche, but I loved To Kill a Mockingbird.
The luxury
Can I take a scuba diving kit with me? Yes, because. I thought about uh photographic albums and I know my my whole family will be appalled that I haven't gone for the full works of you know Nat, Frankie, Maddie, Flo and Richard all huddled round various different parts of the world. But that that's in my head. I thought a scuba diving kit, which is the thing that I love most about doing with my family. Plus, down there, even I can't talk. And it's beautifully calm.
Presenter asks
20:43Having been through something like [being trapped in a mosque under fire], do you continue to do the job you do? Why not say?
I'm shutting the door on that part of my life. I've seen that now, and I don't ever want to go back there. I'd rather not see something like that again, that's for sure. But I think if I shut that door and didn't do the job that I think is a worthy job if you do it well, I feel like I was failing. I don't want to fail.
Presenter asks
21:21How much do you think you've been marked and changed by the job you do?
In a b the bad way is I'm really irritable and sort of a bit intolerant of people, I'm gonna work on that. The good way is when I see people who are really brave. like the doctors who took us out even. Like the nurses who were helping people. That is incredibly inspiring.
Presenter asks
23:31When you return from those intense postings, how easy is it for you, and how easy is it for your husband and children to welcome you back?
I don't think it is easy. I think it's harder for them actually in a lot of ways. I think my children have gone through different phases of being angry, fed up, ignoring me. I remember when they were younger, particularly my older daughter now, used to say, um, you don't like us as much as work which that really stings. Really stings'cause uh they're they are my world. And that the child would go so quickly. I looked back and I remember my partner, Rick, saying that you're going to regret it and a lot of me does regret it spending too much time away from them when they were little. It goes so quickly.
Presenter asks
26:48If you were to die doing that job [giving a voice to people who wouldn't have a voice], do you feel that the equation would have been worth it?
I don't want to die. I definitely don't want to die. I've got too much in my life with my children, my family. I definitely don't want to die. I think there is luck and I've been very, very lucky. And I'm aware that that luck only goes so far. We're an essential pillar of freedom and democracy. That's what we should be. You know, we should be the people that are finding out the uncomfortable truths, who are going the places where no one goes because there's something that needs to be found out about. I thought whenever I was going out when my children were very small, every story I had to do, and I think even more so now, but every story that took me away from them had to really be worth it. Otherwise, it was not worth being away from little ones crying at night or teenagers going through really difficult period at school. It has to be worth it. Otherwise, why on earth am I doing it? You know, if you just make a difference to one little girl who's been kept in sexual and domestic slavery, you come out of that and you think that actually makes you feel that you've actually influenced and changed someone else's life course.
“You can't escape the scars that are left after seeing people die or get horribly hurt or maimed. I mean, you'd have to be a robot not to be affected by that.”
“It's very hard watching people get killed, and there were a lot. And it was also very, very frightening. We were right next to the perimeter wall of the mosque, and outside there were at least two tanks.”
“It's not hyperbole to say it was terrifying. When we got out of there,'cause this fighting stopped, there was a lull in the fighting. And they took us out in an ambulance and raced us through and they fired at us in the ambulance. You know, so it's like terror upon terror, fear upon fear.”
“I thought, Oh, you miserable, selfish idiot, why did you spend so much? And I'd uh you know, occasionally I'd sort of wallow in this nostalgic sort of You should have done this, should have done that. But I have girlfriends who are stay-at-home mums, and my close friend tells me, You you'd be exactly the same, you know, if you were a stay-at-home mum, you'd still feel guilty. I think it's just a cross that we have to bear.”
“Every story that took me away from them had to really be worth it. Otherwise, it was not worth being away from little ones crying at night or teenagers going through really difficult period at school. It has to be worth it. Otherwise, why on earth am I doing it?”