Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
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
On the island
Eight records
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:15John, 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
2:05How 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 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.
Presenter asks
6:27But 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
10:42Would 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
17:22Do 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
24:49It'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.”