Clive Myrie

Your mum was brought up as a Catholic and very devout, but you weren't raised a Catholic. Why not?

My mum taught in a Catholic school in Jamaica. She came to this country with a letter of introduction from the priest in her hometown. And this was her letter of introduction to the priest nearest to her home in Bolton. And she took the letter to the priest. He read it and he said, well, I'm sorry, but this church falls outside the diocese in which you should be going to church because your address is this particular address. But the church was within, I don't know, less than half a mile from my mum's front door. And the nearest Catholic church within the diocese of the area where the priest said she should be going to worship was about three or four bus rides away. To this day she would never suggest that this was racism. [What do you think about that?] Oh, it's it feels to me as if he decided that um my mother, being a woman from the Caribbean and being black, shouldn't be in his church. That's what it feels to me.

How did you set out to position yourself once you started out in journalism at the beginning of your career?

I didn't want to be seen as a black journalist. I wanted to be a journalist who just happens to be black. I didn't want the BBC to fall into lazy thinking, which was so easy at the time. Nottinghill Carnival, send the black guy. Riot out on the street, you know, in some inner city area, send the black guy. I didn't want that. I wanted to do those stories, but I didn't want those stories to define who I was at the beginning of my career. I didn't want someone else defining who I am. I didn't want my colour to define who I am. And the BBC understood that, and as a result, my first posting was to Japan.

Why was the election of Barack Obama in 2008 such a special broadcast for you?

I was in Morehouse College in Atlanta and Morehouse is one of the historic black colleges. Martin Luther King went there and the hall, main hall in the college was full of undergrads, alumni and some of the people who'd been on civil rights marches with Martin Luther King. They were quite elderly but they wanted to be there. And then it was announced that he got the number of electoral college votes needed, over 270. He was the President-elect of the United States. And I'm reporting from the South. Forty, fifty years earlier, black people were being lynched wholesale. And I'm appearing on the American Election Special Programme. David Dimbleby's presenting and he comes to me, Clive, paint a picture of the scene. And I just say, David, everyone's in tears. The whole room is in tears. And Barack Obama is basically standing on the shoulders of so many of the civil rights marchers who are here today, all that kind of stuff. And then for some reason at the end of it I decided to say and I have to say, David, for me being a black man, to be here at this moment in time in history in the South. is quite a moment and uh David turned away and went on to something else. And I thought, oh my god, I've gone over the top here. I've managed to make one of the most important events in modern American history all about me. How did that happen? OD. And of course, you taught on your journalism course, exactly. Never put yourself at the story. The story is not about you, it's about the people you're talking about. And I felt a bit stupid, really, and thought, damn, I've messed this up. And then I looked up and I saw the correspondent for ABC News, one of the big American networks. He was broadcasting live to, I don't know, 25, 30 million people, and tears were streaming down his face. He had no problem, and I thought, I've got no problem. I haven't crossed any line at all. This is how it is, you know.

When you're reporting from dramatic scenes, have you ever wanted to stop being a reporter to intervene and help someone?

You do what any human being would do, and at the end of the day I'd like to think that I'm a human being first and a journalist second. And you know, I remember covering the flight of the Rohingya, Muslims who were being burnt out of their homes by Buddhists in Myanmar. And it became known as the Rohingya Crisis. And I remember some of the stories that were being told of babies being thrown on fires by the Myanmar military, people being burnt alive in their homes, torched by the Myanmar military. And there was a little girl who was wandering around the streets of the town. Just across the border and wandering around the refugee camp with a baby on her shoulders. She must have been no more than seven or eight. But she was carrying this baby. And I thought we've got to do something about this. So we put down the cameras. And we went up to her and we talked to her and found out that her parents had been killed and she was left with the baby. And so we took her to the authorities in the camp and told her story. After we tried to do something about her personal situation. That was the most important thing. And I'd like to think that, you know, I would do that in in in any other circumstance. You know, look after the human being rather than look after the story. The story is important and it's my job, but there are some things that come before that.