Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A journalist and war reporter, best known as the white-suited MP who stood against sleaze and won.
On the island
Eight records
Adagio for Strings and Organ in G minor
It's played by Vedran Shmailovitz, who was in Sarajevo during the war. He was a concert pianist of European renown, trapped like hundreds of thousands of others in this siege. And one day in the summer of'ninety two he got out his old his white tails, and he played his cello in the most poignant way at the scene of one of the city's massacres. And at other street corners other musicians with trumpets, violins were playing the same thing. It's like an anthem for a doomed city.
Amazing GraceFavourite
The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards
The second record has to do with the Gulf War. I was attached to the Seventh Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats, with the Queen's Royal Ayushazars, and the Staffordshire Regiment, and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. We were in the desert waiting for the start on on on Burnsday, actually, and the Haggis was brought in by helicopter.
The next record has to do with my father. There was a programme called Down Your Way, which many listeners will remember, with Franklin Engelman. And they came to Suffolk, to Beccles when he lived there. And he was certainly one of the more interesting citizens in Beccles. He was then quizzed about what he did in life and his views of this and that. Then he was invited to choose a record. The record he chose was an East Anglian song of The Foggy, Foggy Dew, which happens to be about an unmarried father. This was in the mid-60s, and the BBC was not about to have a record about an unmarried father on the airwaves. So can I please, 35 years later, have The Foggy, Foggy Dew by an East Anglian singer?
I was twelve years in the in the States. I was there even before in in'68 I was covering the campaign of uh Hubert Humphrey. ... And on my desert island I have to have Mahalia Jackson singing Rock of Ages.
In the Bosnian War I forced my crew every day to listen to the love songs of Willie Nelson both sides. It was one of my superstitions, and I felt it helped to keep us alive. And the first track on that record is the sort of, I don't know, the anthem of war correspondence everywhere, on the road again.
Recognize 6 comes from my African days. I did a lot in Africa, Angola, Rhodesia as it then was. ... Biafra, of course, which had a very profound effect on me as a very young reporter. I loved Africa, I hated Africa. Simultaneously, you couldn't be neutral about it, and I will remember that on my desert island with Under African Skies by Paul Simon.
I spent an awful lot of time as MP for Tatten stuck in the permanent car park, which is between junction six and ten on the M six outside Birmingham. And to get me through the angst of this, I started listening to Classic FM. Then after about two years I couldn't stand their oleaginous self-promotions any more. So I bought a one of these compilations of light classics. And when the traffic was particularly bad and totally immobile, I loved to play this next record. It's by Arthur Sullivan. It's the most over the top Victorian ballad there ever was. It's the lost chord sung by another Beckles boy, Stuart Burroughs.
While I was in Washington I I covered a lot of the independence ceremonies in some of the smaller Caribbean islands which had been British. ... And I've had a calypso sung not just about me, but against me. It comes from St. Lucia. It's done by the True Tones, and it's called Foreign Journalists.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:41What tears were they [when you didn't win Brentwood and Ongar]?
I felt a sense of hurt on behalf of the people who had worked with me and for me, and it was the young people who came on board. It was so inspiring, and I felt that by losing although narrowly I'd I'd let them down.
Presenter asks
5:37Is that [bonding and common cause] the hook that kept you doing it for thirty three years?
I think a sense of having a front row seat at the making of history. There's a little bit of that. And I will admit that Bosnia was quite addictive from that point of view because there were very few of us there. ... And so there was a sense of sharpened reality, which I, after that, nothing was the same again. I I and I I found it very difficult to adjust to more humdrum news, and a lot of others did too.
Presenter asks
19:39What were you seeing [in Bosnia] that they weren't broadcasting or wouldn't broadcast?
This was about six months after the Bosnian war began, and new guidelines were introduced in the name of good taste ... a point was reached early in 93, we were able to show almost nothing of what we saw. You could see the uh slightly romantic figures of camoufl camouflage clad soldiers rushing around the ruins, blazing away with their kalashnikovs, but nothing at all of what was there at the other end, the the maiming and the killing and and even the grief of the bereaved.
The keepsakes
The book
Adrian Bell
which is a lyrical account of his apprenticeship on a Suffolk farm in the early twenties
The luxury
Presenter asks
24:18Why did you agree to stand as an independent candidate?
I said yes, um on a whim, and mostly because all the regrets in my life have not been about the things I've done, but about the things I haven't done, the path not taken and the challenge not accepted. And I thought I would kick myself for the rest of my days if I hadn't given it a go.
Presenter asks
27:50How much do you miss the Commons?
Not that much. Listening to overlong speeches, not at all. Fudging in committees, uh not at all. I suppose I miss being able to move causes along by being an MP, like helping the former prisoners of war, the Japanese. That was worth doing. That was absolutely worth doing.
“I described myself somewhere as a battle-softened veteran, so that's where I am now.”
“I call it the art of writing silence, which is knowing when to shut up.”
“At that point, you stop being an impartial journalist and you become an ambulance driver.”
“All the regrets in my life have not been about the things I've done, but about the things I haven't done, the path not taken and the challenge not accepted.”