Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
BBC international editor and war reporter, best known for covering the Middle East and his award-winning interview with President Assad of Syria.
On the island
Eight records
Let's Stay Together, Al Green, because it reminds me of Sarajevo, the war in in Bosnia. I had this bulletproof Land Rover and I would drive it. There was a backway, but it became too tedious to go that way. So I'd drive down the main road, and I had a cassette of Al Green. And if I put on this track and drove at the correct pace, I could get from the TV station to the Holiday Inn.
Symphony No. 2 in E-flat major, Op. 63Favourite
Well, it's Elgar's second symphony, and I've chosen this 'cause it does remind me of my father. He was the most musical person of my parents and in our family used to sing in a choir. ... He also asked for the second movement to be played at his funeral. So for me, yeah, it does remind me of my dad.
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Vladimir Ashkenazy, London Symphony Orchestra
I first heard this piece of music, or a fragment of it, after the terrible tragedy of the Lockerbie attacks, where a jumber jet came down on this Scottish town. ... one of my colleagues played The very famous piano refrain from Ratmaninov's second piano concerto. I said, Blimey, that's nice. What's that? He said, Haven't you heard it? It's really famous. And so when I got home, I bought a CD and I listened to it.
on family trips, used to play Simon and Garfunkel quite a lot, still doing the car. And I went to university as a postgraduate graduate school in the US. And I remember one trip particularly. I'd been to see a friend in Chicago and it was the winter. I was on a Greyhound bus going back overnight to Washington DC where I was a student. And I bought myself a Walkman, well a kind of imitation Walkman, and I had a Simon and Garfunkel cassette. And I remember looking out over the frozen wastes of the Midwest. And this was playing.
Plácido Domingo and Montserrat Caballé
I spent a year as a postgraduate at university in Italy, in Bologna. I shared a flat with three guys ... One of the things that students did in Bologna at that time was there was a great opera house, the Teatro Comunale, and you could get subsidized season tickets, and they would have a quite a lot of intervals, and we would have a bottle of the local sparkling wine, which is called pinoletto, in every interval. So we're quite, we enjoyed it no end. We had a great time. And so from La Bohème, Puccini's La Bohème, O suave fanciulla, which is one of the great songs of opera.
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
memories of Baghdad during the war of 1991. There were three of us in our office. My esteemed BBC colleague Alan Little, good friend. Rory Peck was the cameraman. Rory had a knackered old cassette player with about three home recorded tapes. It was all the music we had. And in the evening, when we'd more or less finished and we were trying to cook something on a horrible primer stove and bombing was going on outside, the windows were shaking, you could see the tracer. And we'd play this music. And the one I liked best of Rory's crap collection of tapes was the Brahms German Requiem, and particularly the section where it's all flesh is grass.
When I was a small kid, we lived in part of Cardiff called Whitchurch, and my dad had this gramophone. And they had a whole lot of records, a lot of them were 78s from the 50s. But they did buy a copy of Hard Day's Night, which we played no end. And I always remember the smell of that. You lifted the lid of the gramophone, and they had this smell of dust and green bays that was on the inside, and probably a bit of wood or something, and you'd turn it on, and there'd be this thrum as the valves inside warmed up. And I haven't actually chosen something from Hard Days' Night. I've chosen In My Life by the Beatles because it reminds me of that time when I was a kid, and I like listening to it.
When I first came to live in London, I lived in North London when I was a student. Then I was abroad for a few years and I came back and temporarily moved to South London. That's about 40 years ago, and I'm still there. ... I'm choosing as my final record Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks because there isn't one called Camberwell Sunset where I live but Waterloo is quite close.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:59What impact does reporting wars in real time on social media have on the way you work and your approach?
I think it's made journalists themselves more exposed. It's more dangerous, I think. ... I think when I started it was much easier to be seen as a non combatant. ... But I think they weren't targets in the same way that they can be now.
Presenter asks
2:51Are you scared in a way you didn't used to be when you go to a conflict zone?
This may sound a bit weird, but I don't get scared so much. I'm familiar with the pattern of emotions. The day before you go, I think, oh my god, what am I doing? ... And then you've got this conflict of wanting to get and do the story, but also thinking, oh my god, this might be awful. But I know from experience it's never quite as bad when you get there.
Presenter asks
3:32Why do you keep going back to cover conflicts?
I think if I've got any credibility with the people who've watched what I've done and listened and read what I've done over the years, it's the feeling that I've actually seen it for myself. I'm not looking at a screen and extracting someone else's thoughts. I'm actually going there myself. And so I'm a big believer in the value for everybody of eyewitness journalism, which is what I try and do.
The keepsakes
The book
The Collected Works of George Orwell
George Orwell
Not that relaxing, but immensely stimulating.
The luxury
A manual typewriter with paper, ribbons, and Tipp-Ex
I'd like to take that with paper, ribbons, tipx, and I'll try and maybe write that novel that I've been meaning to write and haven't quite got around to yet.
Presenter asks
14:46What was your attitude to risk when you covered your first war?
I had no idea what it was, in a way. The first time I heard shots and I was and they were near me, I was excited, I think. I was very excited. ... I felt indestructible. I mean that later on changed. But at the time that was very much how I felt.
Presenter asks
19:48What effect did having your integrity questioned in that way have on you?
I didn't think, Oh my God, what if I did get it wrong? because I knew I was right, because I'd been there and I'd seen it, so I had no doubts in my own mind that my journalism was good.
Presenter asks
28:34How have you coped with the trauma of your work over the years?
I think I'm reasonably well adjusted. I think I'm able to see things in context. There have been some very difficult moments, you know. I ended up with a few years ago with some very severe depression. I took time off work, I took meds. I think you've got to count your blessings in life and not get too tied up in things. And I had cancer a few years ago and touch wood. I've been in remission now for four and a half years, and it was quite a serious tumor. So I think that has also helped me get a sense of perspective on life because I've always been a fairly glass half full rather than half empty person, and that maybe changed for a while. And I think actually having had cancer brought back the more optimistic Jeremy.
“It used to relax me, I think. Probably it was a good therapy as you drove along thinking, Well, I hope I'm not gonna get shot.”
“My father going off, disappearing for a few days and coming back with his trousers caked in this black slurry that had come down from the tip onto the village and onto the school.”
“I felt indestructible. I mean that later on changed. But at the time that was very much how I felt.”
“I was really gobsmacked actually because then when I was on air talking about it and we had just started to do live rolling news at that point at the BBC, I was asked by Peter Sissons, I was describing what had happened, and he said ... Something clicked in in my head and I said, Look, I can only go by what I have seen with my own eyes and I have seen the bodies.”
“I do feel I bear some responsibility because I decided to stop. However, had we kept going, they might have killed us all in the car.”