Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Foreign correspondent for Daily Mirror, known for his harrowing reports from Cambodia on Khmer Rouge that raised millions for victims.
On the island
Eight records
I saw Buffy St. Marie sing this moving song in Los Angeles when I was working in the United States and in Vietnam in nineteen sixty eight. And uh I've spent a lot of time with soldiers, young soldiers, in trenches and uh no matter the uniform they were wearing, I always had an affinity with them and uh I think she expresses this rather well.
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
My father loved overtures from operas of which the body of the music had long been forgotten. Thieving Magpie is one of those. And he would play it on a wind-up gramophone and we would all listen to it. And it would give him great joy. I must say that the story to this was that his grandfather, who started an orchestra in a small outback town in Australia, played also The Thieving Magpie to his pet magpie. And the magpie used to go for his grandchildren's legs as they were made to listen to it. But otherwise, the memories are sweet.
Blue Moon of KentuckyFavourite
The Elvis song that uh helped me uh not quite win, but uh I think I got third place in a jive contest at uh the Paddington Town Hall in Sydney. My girlfriend and I were enthusiastic jivers and uh like surfing. I still like jiving. So he's Elvis.
The song itself is about the uprising of seventeen ninety one. I've chosen it because my origins in Australia are thanks in part to one Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer, both of whom were transported... They were my great great grandparents... They came from County Roscommon.
It means they shall not pass. And I suppose I've chosen it because I've always felt that as a reporter that too often we report most of humanity, which we call the third world, only when a disaster strikes... A Nicaragua in nineteen seventy nine broke that stereotype... under great barrage from the United States has maintained some fundamental decent human principles... And this song, They Shall Not Pass, I heard sung in a small place called El Regadillo in Nicaragua, and it was a moving occasion.
My Son, Sam ... almost seventeen and I share a love of Motown music. A little while ago we went to New York, the two of us, for a week. And the highlight of this was to go to Radio City Music Hall. And see the temptations, sing my girl. ... I suppose it's in there because um Sam is uh of my two children, I also have a daughter, Zoe, who is five. Sam has been very central in my life. In being away a great deal, in having sometimes difficult times, Sam has been a constant. And so this song is for him.
It's There Because My Mother. who, like my father, died only last year, And She was a great ally of mine. She was a French teacher. A very courageous woman who gave up uh a lot in her life, perhaps foolishly. for principle and love I took her to Paris when she was seventy. She'd never been to France before. She showed me Paris. She knew where everything was. She also engaged Parisian taxi drivers in French that had a wonderful Australian accent to it. They loved her for that and uh She loved anything sung in French, and so this is for her.
I was first introduced to Robert Cray by somebody who is very important in my life and who has given me and return to me happiness during a difficult time. And uh for whom I feel a great deal.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:06A lifetime travelling the world more or less on your own as a foreign correspondent must mean that you're entirely self-reliant and very resourceful, yes?
No, no, I'm not self reliant. I depend, as you do and everybody does, on on other people. But I suppose I've developed the skills of being self reliant, of having to go to difficult places, of places of great upheaval. and take care of myself, and also at the same time do a job as a journalist. Uh in the early days that was very difficult, because I was terrified. Indeed, uh when I started as a young journalist in Australia I became known as the young cadet reporter who passed out at virtually uh every story he went on. I passed out in the morgue, I passed out when a bee stung me. ... I had to get over this this problem of uh the sight of blood. which uh I think I did, uh not entirely.
Presenter asks
6:46But they came to envy you, didn't they? The journalists, I mean Fleet Street journalists, I think, in the end envied you the freedom that you got when you worked for the Daily Mail, the space, the time, rare freedoms that you won for yourself.
Yes, sir, but a freedom fought for. I was given a great freedom by Hugh Cudlip and Lee Howard at the Mirror. Tony Miles, Mike Malloy and others, but it was a freedom that, with every article, I had to fight for for the space. And I think perhaps with some of my colleagues I was doing the stories that many of them wanted to do. and perhaps amongst a very few of them that excited an unfortunate emotion.
The keepsakes
The book
Joseph Heller
I take Joseph Heller's Catch Twenty Two... Having made my way through the many theatres of the absurd... Heller in his wonderful book did it for me and I could read it many times.
The luxury
I think my typewriter... I think I'd want to write... not to write would make life on the desert island pretty unbearable, so that's my luxury.
Presenter asks
10:07Is journalism or writing in your blood? Did you always know it was what you should do?
Oh yes. Uh although I did start out wanting to be an artist for some curious reason, because I wasn't very good at it. But I gave that up very quickly, especially when I started at Sydney High School, its first student newspaper called The Messenger. And I had the bright idea of writing to famous people asking them would they contribute and this was poo-pooed by the teachers. They'll never have anything to do with you. But it was interesting. Most of them wrote back and said they would. So The Messenger prospered until its main benefactor, the father of a friend of mine, decided to stop financing it, introducing me very early on to the Robert Maxwells of this world. And from there on I was passionately interested in newspapers and in news. It was it's a lot to do with being an Australian. I was interested in the world because the way I'd been brought up was that I ... Brought up with with somebody else's history, almost with somebody else's culture. Ours was a sort of second-hand Europe, and that somehow we were. Not quite on the planet. We are a long way away from where we ought to be.
Presenter asks
13:12So why did you choose to escape the Menzies, as it were, and come to Britain, this place that you'd been taught about, but obviously resented terribly?
But I think I left because the great moving belt of my generation was leaving. I was sorry to leave, and when I arrived in London it was the I remember it was the the worst winter since seventeen ninety two. There were snow drifts in Hammersmith, and I had just two pairs of shorts. And I had mixed feelings about this country for some time. I think the reason was that I had no money. But it was it was the world, and it really, I suppose, said much about the the restricted view that my generation had of ourselves, that we should regard another part of the planet as really our world, when it wasn't at all.
Presenter asks
20:47But you actually witnessed [Robert Kennedy's] assassination, didn't you?
Yes. I'd interviewed Kennedy two days before, and uh he invited a few of us to go with him after the California primary, which he won. In june sixty eight, And we were after he'd made his uh victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was moving out through the kitchen with those of us who were going to uh a disco with he and his family. when Sirhan Sirhan leapt from behind. a serving area, and shot him. This has always haunted me in many ways because I saw Sir Han Sirhan before Kennedy was shot. In fact, somebody pointed him out to me. So look at that strange man. He was waiting. He was moving about. He was obviously getting a position in the kitchen to shoot Kennedy. He knew Kennedy was coming through there. Now I didn't know Kennedy was going to walk through the kitchen. In fact, that was the way out to the back door where he could escape the crowds. I thought he would walk through the ballroom. Serhan Serhan clearly had spoken to somebody in the K Kennedy camp, and I remember seeing him. And I remember his hand inside his shirt, and it was clearly holding the gun. And this was some time, a good half an hour before Kennedy was shot. And when he was shot, four or five shots rang out, and Kennedy was then on the floor, and then it was Mayhem. It was an extraordinary tragedy, because Kennedy would have become President. I don't know how good a President he would have been if he would have been any different from all the others, but he would have changed the course of recent American history, and certainly the history of much of the world which the United States influences, because we wouldn't have had Nixon, we wouldn't have had Carter and we wouldn't have had Reagan.
Presenter asks
25:35You were twenty years with the Mirror, but you lost that platform in 1985 when Robert Maxwell took over. I take it you didn't appreciate each other's style.
That that just about says it, I think. I think my horror on this desert island would be who might pick me up, and if I saw a [ship] arriving with Captain Bob at the helm, I think I would hide under the palm tree.
“I passed out in the morgue, I passed out when a bee stung me.”
“I've never in wars, for instance, been interested in writing about cricket scores of uh aeroplanes shot down and bombs fallen. I've been rather more interested in the victims of the war, the people running the other way, perhaps, from the war.”
“I saw Sir Han Sirhan before Kennedy was shot. In fact, somebody pointed him out to me. ... I remember his hand inside his shirt, and it was clearly holding the gun.”
“I think my horror on this desert island would be who might pick me up, and if I saw a ship arriving with Captain Bob at the helm, I think I would hide under the palm tree.”
“It's just a great privilege being a journalist, and I'm always reminding myself of that. You are allowed into people's lives.”