Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Falklands War correspondent who entered Port Stanley ahead of troops, and author of Bomber Command.
On the island
Eight records
Tonight (Sheepdog and Ram)Favourite
Well, I think, yes, I felt that with something like this, that one wants to look back at the different influences in one's life and the things that meant a great deal. And father was a genuine eccentric, and in fact, the piece I've chosen from the Old Tonight programme was one of his great eccentric moments in television.
Again, there was a moment when we were sailing down there on Canberra and there were two or three thousand troops of an evening. You would get on the upper works the ships all clustered round and there were two or three incredibly moving concerts given by the Commando Forces band.
When I Was a Lad (from HMS Pinafore)
Oh, well that's uh the the first old song from Age of Us Pinafore, remembering the one thing that I really learned to enjoy at school.
I'd like something from the sixties, the time when I was learning my business. And when I was in America, and it was not a lonely time, I spent a lot of time sitting alone in hotel rooms. And a lot of that time was spent listening again and again and again to a Dion Warwick uh tape
Una furtiva lagrima (from L'elisir d'amore)
Oh, I think uh Pavarotti, um a little Donizetti.
Uh well I suppose if ever you're travelling on the M1 and you see uh a car full of children singing at the top of their voices, it will be the Hastings family singing uh Flanders and Swans hippopotamus song.
The Pipes and Drums of the Innes Tartan
Well, I've always adored Scotland and spent every spare moment that I have in Scotland uh fishing or shooting or walking on the hills and I always love the pipes, so flowers of the forest.
Soave sia il vento (from Così fan tutte)
Oh, and part of the romantic thing is that I'm one of those people who loves going to Gleinborn for the reasons that opera bluffs think the worst reasons, because I love it as a great English occasion as much as for the music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30Given your pedigree, with your father MacDonald Hastings and your mother Anne Scott-James both being redoubtable journalists, was there much doubt that you would become a journalist?
I suppose not. Obviously most of us are tremendously conditioned by the environment in which we grow up. And I always loved the business of newspapers and the business of television. And I grew up listening to the gossip of those trades, and it seemed to me the most romantic and exciting business on earth.
Presenter asks
2:24In what way did your father affect your life?
I think simply that I felt I wanted to be what he was. That when I was at school I was terribly bad at games and my left leg never knew what my right arm was doing and I was a disastrous schoolboy. And I used to read my father's accounts of riding the Crest to Run and parachuting and being cast away on desert islands. I felt, gosh, I could never do those things. And of course, when I left school, I felt the first things I had to do would go and ride the Crest to Run, do the parachute course, do some of the exciting assignments to keep up with him.
Presenter asks
5:13The Falklands made you a star. When you look back on that experience, what do you remember most of it?
The keepsakes
It sounds ridiculous to say this with hindsight, but the moment that I heard the task force was sailing, I remember standing in the kitchen at home in Northamptonshire and saying to my wife, I feel it's for this moment that I was born. … And yet for me I suppose the most fulfilling thing I've ever done in my life. And one of the things that was most fulfilling, in the nature of things, in the last 20 years in my career, I've spent a lot of time writing about things that the Brits have done badly and things that have gone wrong for Britain. And it was tremendously moving to be with Brits doing something terribly well.
Presenter asks
9:29You went on an exhibition to Oxford University to read history, but left after a year. Why was that?
Simply because I terribly wanted to go into journalism. I'd been spoilt by this few months working as a researcher at BBC on the Great War series, which I'd adored. I thought this was the most romantic, exhilarating business in the world. And I'd been happier doing that than anything I've ever done before. And I simply couldn't wait to get back to it.
Presenter asks
15:24When you go out to a foreign assignment, do you find that you're more wary, or that you get more depressed by the prospect of it?
I think most young journalists in their twenties want to go and do the exciting assignments in a rather mindless way … War is after all one of the most exciting journalistic assignments. … Yes, as one gets older, one's view changes. One gets more deeply affected and more deeply depressed by what you see, and of course more frightened. That one reason why war corresponding is a young man's game is because I passionately believe Lord Morin's view that courage is capital and not income. And whatever slender supply one has, mine was overdrawn years ago.
Presenter asks
20:43How did you manage to walk into Stanley before the British troops?
Well that was a straightforward stunt which I'm afraid upset some people. … And when nobody was looking, I thought, well, this is simply too good an opportunity to miss. And I could see no firing on our side of town, could hear n nothing much going on. It was all on the other side of town. So I thought, why not? And it was an old-fashioned journalistic stunt that I thought, well, if somebody doesn't blow my head off, I can bore everybody to death for the next twenty years talking about this. And I stripped off all my military gear and walked in.
“I think you probably agree that you need a streak of the anarchist in you to be any good as a journalist. You've got to be willing to go your own way.”
“I passionately believe Lord Morin's view that courage is capital and not income. And whatever slender supply one has, mine was overdrawn years ago.”
“I think I had a great advantage in that I had done quite a lot of war reporting and also, I must admit, in the school of journalism in which I grew up. You are playing to win. You are not playing to play the game. You are playing to get the story first and to get it back first.”