Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Channel 4 News international editor and foreign correspondent who has reported from every continent except Antarctica, covering major conflicts for four decades
On the island
Eight records
I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen since the early 70s. And yes, I am a creature of my generation. And I chose this song because there's a great line in it, which is, there's something happening somewhere. Baby, you just don't know where it is. And I feel that that was very much how I felt through certainly through my teenage years and maybe most of my life. I've always been looking for the place where there's something happening.
CareyFavourite
As a teenager, I was very into Joni Mitchell and of course I experienced every agony that she did and I analyzed all of the the love I had in me for various useless long forgotten boys and all the rest of it. But I've chosen one of her happy songs because it's about being carefree and it's about being young. ... This is a song about being on an island. It's a Greek island, not a desert island, and just living for the moment.
I had a good time. I had a lovely group of friends and the Starlight Club on a Saturday night. This was the one that got us out there dancing. It's Orchestra Supermazembe and Shariyako. Shariako means it's your problem. It's the story of a young man who says to the woman he loves, look, I'm poor, I've got nothing, and if you don't like it, shariako, it's your problem.
Her favourite song was Summertime, as I think she and my father had seen Porgy and Bess in a production back in the 40s or 50s. And so we played this at her funeral. And the version I have chosen is the one by Billie Holiday.
One of the things that journalists can do or should do is expose injustice and racism and sexism and prejudice and all the terrible things that happen. But sometimes songwriters do it better. And this is an example of that. Reuben Carter's very famous case of a black boxer who in the sixties was framed by the police in New York for a murder that he didn't commit. Now that was reported by journalists, but in nineteen seventy five Bob Dylan wrote the song Hurricane. He told that story better than any of us ever could.
One of the stories I did was about violins and classical music. ... It ended with one of the greatest violinists in the world, Liu Su Ching, who played for us, especially for us. Can you imagine what an honor is that? Butterfly Lovers, which is the Chinese Romeo and Juliet.
Marie always had a broken heart, and I also had a a fairly tumultuous love life, certainly early on. ... But I've had a broken heart too, and this song it's one of those heartbreak songs. It's not a sad one, it's an angry one, and you have to play it very loudly. It's Janice Joplin, and take another little piece of my heart.
It's a bit sentimental. It is about getting older and about time, which we all think about as we get older, and it was written by someone when they were nineteen. And I find that sort of extraordinary and wonderful, that the most profound song I know about aging was written by someone when she was a teenager and who never aged, because this is Sandy Denny and she tragically died at thirty one. It's Who Knows Where the Time Goes.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:46You have said it's not difficult to get the truth, but it's hard to get the whole truth. Tell me about that.
People just end up feeling despairing, so I feel it's always important to try and understand why things are happening as well. So to combine that frontline reporting with analysis and with history and with context. It's not always easy on television because you don't have much time, but that's what I'm trying to do.
Presenter asks
6:07You grew up in Malvern in Worcestershire, born in 1958, the youngest of two daughters, to your physicist father, Cyril, and your French teacher mother, Betty. So by the sounds of that, I'm guessing education was very much valued at home, was it? And was it a serious household?
Oh, very much so. And, you know, in the evenings, quite often, my father would go back to work and my mother would be marking books, and my sister and I would be doing our homework. And I can remember going to friends' houses at some point and being surprised that people didn't work all evening. I thought that's what everybody did. ... No, it was also a lot of fun. Certainly, education and debate was important. ... Pretty much everything. You know, politics, religion. My parents were not religious. My father was brought up Jewish. My mother was brought up going to chapel. They both rejected that. And in fact, I can remember, I suppose I must have been about nine or ten or something. I was in the back of a friend's car and the friend's father was driving. And in my annoying, precocious, piping little voice, I said, Well, I don't believe in God. And I can remember the father saying, I don't want that kind of talk in my car. And I had no idea what I'd done wrong. Because in our household, everything was up for discussion.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Poems of W.H. Auden
W.H. Auden
The Complete Poems of WH Orden [Because] Auden, I think, is a great poet and he deals with a lot of the same things that I have been concerned about in my life, but then there are also some quite delicate love poems and so on in there. So I think there's a lot of variety which will keep me going.
The luxury
Presenter asks
11:13You've described your time at school as grim and miserable and boring and unimaginative. Tell me more, what was so bad? And did you rebel from feeling hemmed in?
It was all of that. Look, I went to a girls' grammar school and I didn't get a bad education. I can't complain about that. But I think I was always chafing against it. I didn't really like being a child. I thought being a child was dull. I wanted to be a grown-up because grown-ups seemed to have more freedom. But I was a child, and therefore I had extremely bad judgment. And then when I got to be a teenager, I got had even worse judgment. ... Well, I was suspended from school. I wasn't expelled. ... I went down the river with the King School boys and a bottle of wine instead of going to school. I was fifteen.
Presenter asks
17:15It was while you were working in Kenya that you heard the news that your mother had become ill. You went back to see her and spent three months with her in the UK before she died. She was only sixty one. You were twenty nine. It must have been a very traumatic time. How did you deal with what was happening?
It was awful. to lose my mother. I was very close to my mother. She had been out to visit me in Guatemala when I lived there. She and my father had come out to visit me in Kenya. We wrote to each other every week. It was awful. And she had basically hidden from me that she was ill because she didn't want to worry me. So when I came by the time they had to tell me I came back, she was quite ill, she had a brain tumor. But I think that I was very lucky to have those months with her and before she died.
Presenter asks
22:05In 1994, you left the BBC to go freelance, and you'd taken a job as an aid worker in Rwanda. Then just two months after you got there, on the night of the sixth of April, the plane carrying Rwanda's then President and his Burundian counterpart was shot down, everyone on board was killed. And this event became the catalyst for a horrific civil war and genocide that began to unfold within a matter of hours. What do you remember about that night and the days that followed?
I was at the house of some people I knew, and we heard the plane crash, and we ran out into the garden, and we could see a glow over the horizon. And of course, we didn't know what it was. We knew it was in the direction of the airport. I then drove back to the house where I was staying. I was sharing with a friend, but she wasn't there at the time. And the phone was ringing, and I got to the phone, and it was my then partner ringing to tell me that the plane carrying the Presidents had crashed. ... I thought I'd better go to the airport, I'd better you know, I'd better be a journalist, that's what I do and I rang the local BBC stringer and I said, I'm going to go to the airport and he said, Don't go to the airport, the roadblocks are already up. He said, Don't go. So I didn't go? ... I knew that it would be bad and I knew that there would be killings. And I understood that it would not be a good idea to drive out by myself through the dark. And in fact, I didn't go out for a couple of days. My phone never stopped ringing because, of course, I'd been living there for two months, and so I knew quite a lot of Rwandans. And they started to ring me to tell me that they were going to be killed. And could I come and save them? ... It was very difficult, because I couldn't. And so I took down Monica's last words. Her husband, Marcel, was away and she wanted me to give them to him and to her children, her four children. In fact, Monica survived, but the four children were killed. So those were very difficult days.
Presenter asks
40:44You've said that war correspondents hate being asked about the emotional toll of what they're exposed to and you're shaking your head already, but I do have to ask about it because it's a reality of the job. How do you deal with the memories that you can't unsee?
I don't consider myself a war correspondent. I think I'm a foreign correspondent. Of course you see horrible and difficult things. And I've talked about this whole issue of sort of sometimes feeling the weight of you know other people's pain on you. And so what you have to do is try and balance things out. I spend a l quite a lot of time in spring and summer in my garden. It's a very small garden. It's absolutely full of flowers. I could enter it for the Chelsea Flower Show for a special category, which is largest amount of money spent on smallest space. There's nothing sensible in there, like vegetables. So it's all colour. And actually colour, you know, colour is an amazing thing. Clothes. I love clothes. Well, you always have a scarf on, I don't know. I love scarves. ... My favourite place is the sofa in my kitchen, from which I can see my very colourful garden, and I can lie there with a glass of wine reading an a novel, an absorbing novel.
“I am a coward because ... I suppose what I really fear is something happening to one of the team I'm working with? Because I love the people I work with. ... If something happened to one of them that would be the worst thing because you form these incredibly strong bonds. And, you know, love isn't too strong a word.”
“And then eventually I thought I have to I have to go out and see for myself. So I got in my car and I drove to the Red Cross. And then I committed a war crime, which was that I impersonated a Red Cross worker.”
“And then I will never forget like it seared in my brain. He came back carrying something. It was with orange spots. What was that? It was a little girl in an orange spotty dress, called Zara, with her hair dangling down. She was seven years old, and they had shot her in the head.”
“I don't consider myself a war correspondent. I think I'm a foreign correspondent.”
“Look, that's me and Lise thinking that as we get older, you always have this concern, ooh, you know, they say that women, as they get older, maybe should not be on the television any longer. ... So, more old bats on the box is part of our determination to keep going.”
“I would gather some sticks and I would make myself a little shelter and I would be very proud of myself for doing it. And then the first breath of wind it would blow over because I think I'm much better practically than I really am, unfortunately.”