​IAN MORRISON MEMORIES OF MY TIMES WITH COI
 
In terms of my working life, the period running from late 1966 to the early seventies was dominated for me by my experiences at the COI, an organisation about which I knew virtually nothing when I first joined it on a thirteen week contract.  Because I’d spent four years in Africa after graduating, I’d had remarkably little exposure to the civil service mind and it came as something of a shock when I did. 
What was even more curious was that, for the most part, I discovered that the Films Division was markedly different from the rest of the COI and had some quite distinct types of people in it.  First, there were the people who did much of the work.  Elsewhere in the Civil Service, these would have been the clock-watchers, the time-servers.  When you’re dealing with films and television, it can never quite be that, because the creative element in the work goes all the way down the chain.  Then there were the rebels, like the producer Adam Leys.  I came to work with him a lot.  He was prepared to fight the system to a standstill to get what he passionately believed was needed on screen.  A sub-set of the rebels were those who paid lip service to the system, but got their own way not by open rebellion, but by a combination of deviousness and luck.  A lady called Helen Standage fell into that category.  

In contrast to all classes of rebel were the cunning operators, like John Hall.  John had a capacity to find ways round the rules that was enviable.  He had learnt how to turn any situation to advantage and had an uncanny capacity for making long-serving career civil servants believe he was on their side when he wasn’t.  Well, not really.  When it came to it, he was always on the side of the programmes he was responsible for.  What’s more, he did this without ever losing sight of his broadcasting roots, which had been as an editor on the Tonight programme for the BBC.  He’d worked with directors like Jack Gold and Mike Tuchner, who went on to have outstanding careers in the cinema.  It was a million miles away from the COI, but if, like John, you have a flexible mind, you take it in your stride.  There is, incidentally, elsewhere in this account a picture of John with the London Line team.  He was thirty four at the time and looked pretty much then as he does now at eighty four.  Wish I could say the same.

A note about what follows.  Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve always written down things of interest, usually in very basic note form, which three or four times a year I would write up into a rather more lucid format.  For this exercise I’ve identified the COI material from my scribblings and edited it accordingly to give it some coherence.  All of it is based on the notes I took at the time.  Where it isn’t, it’s either obvious or I say so.
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It was the beginning of November 1966.  I was working on a rewrite of the script of the feature film "Battle of Britain" my contract came to an end in five weeks’ time.  Then I saw an ad for a job as a researcher on something called Adwa London, a television magazine programme designed for the Middle East.  Made in Arabic by the COI on behalf of the Foreign Office, it covered all sorts of subjects – everything from a lot of science and technology stories to sport, music and fashion.  I duly applied for the job, turned up when asked at the ghastly fifties office block the COI inhabited in Hercules Road in Lambeth and was interviewed by three people: John Hall, Janice Willett and Don Etheridge.  Well, I say three, but as Don never asked a single question and had been introduced as being “from Establishments”, I concluded that he was there as a kind of civil service minder.  Not that I had a clue at that time what Estabs, as it was more generally known, did for the world, but I could make a guess.  The interview went well, mostly, I suppose, because my experience of television in the Sudan was not exactly run-of-the-mill stuff and because, since I spoke a little bit of Arabic and had travelled to a number of other Arab countries, I had a useful sense of the cultural context in which the programme would be seen.

A week later, I got a phone call from John Hall. Would I be interested in the Programme Editor’s job if it became available?  Would I be interested? Hah!!  When I said yes, he promptly went and fired the existing Programme Editor.  I never met the guy, but I was told he was American and, apparently, everybody thought he did a lousy job.  Naturally, I didn’t learn about that for months.  
There were some interesting people working on Adwa London.  One of the presenters was Nadim Sawalha, a Jordanian actor, though he preferred to be called Palestinian, who was at a relatively early stage in his very long career.  He played character parts in an endless succession of major television series and a great many films.  He was in three Bond movies and I have a particular fondness for his critically acclaimed cameo in A Touch Of Class, for which Glenda Jackson got the Best Actress Oscar.  He and his English wife had two daughters, Julia and Nadia, both of whom became actors, with Julia becoming very well known for her role in Absolutely Fabulous, the long-running television series that starred Jennifer Saunders and Joanne Lumley.

Rosemary Clarke was one of the researchers on the programme and had an excellent instinct for what made a good story.  In her mid-forties, she was a tall, willowy woman of impeccable gentility who, by her very presence, demanded that men behave at all times like gentlemen.  She came across as fey and fragrant.  Which was the superficial bit.  Underneath lay an iron will and a very sharp mind.  She had for years been at Granada Television ever since it was first started in 1954 by Sidney Bernstein and his brother, Cecil.  When Granada got the ITV franchise for the North of England, Rosemary was Sidney’s secretary.  She then moved into programme research and finally into production.  How she came to be at the COI, I never found out, because she would never say.  I always concluded that it had something to do with a man, but I could be wrong.  

The programme’s Arabic consultant and supervising translator was Denys Johnson-Davies, who became widely known and respected for his translations of Arab literature.  It is now generally acknowledged that he single-handedly put Arab literature on the global cultural map.  When he died in 2017, his obituary was featured around the world in major newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times.

When I joined the programme at the end of December 1966, I spent a morning reading through old scripts and an afternoon looking at the last seven programmes to have been completed.  I found them dull and knew I could do better.  It took a while and I had to work hard to get things moving in a different direction, but gradually over the next six months I felt I was improving the programme fairly significantly.  There was no way of measuring these things with any accuracy at that time, but people told me that viewings appeared to have gone up sharply, so it left me feeling fairly comfortable about what I’d been doing. 
 
Then there was a small thing called the Six Days War and suddenly programmes in Arabic from London were not exactly de rigueur in the Middle East.  My second thirteen week contract was anyway only a week from ending and I started to look for another job.  I was still putting together my CV when I was sent for by the Head of Overseas Television Services, Ray Fleming.  He was a tall, slim, balding man in his forties who rarely smiled and whose jet black eyes gave him a cold, distant feel.  As I was to learn later, this was merely the front he used for work.

“As you know,” he started, “the Arabic programme has been cancelled for the time being.  What are your plans?”
“I’m starting to clear my desk and I’m looking for another job,” I said.
“Well, I’d like you to stop doing that immediately.  I’ve told them to give you another contract. You’ve taken a programme that was a complete disaster and turned it round in a remarkably short time, so I want to keep you around.”
“Thank you,” I said.  “But keep me around to do what?  I don’t have a programme any more.”
“I’ve got some money squirrelled away for this year and I want you to produce a couple of 10 minute cinema shorts with it.  Would that interest you?”

I’d worked on writing for the cinema, but I hadn’t been involved in actually producing something for it so, yes, I was very interested and said so.  Incidentally, the idea that any senior executive would have money squirrelled away is so alien today that it almost makes no sense at all.  A lot can change in fifty years.

Incidentally, there’s a footnote to Adwa London.  Once the dust settled in the Middle East, it was restarted as Adwa wa Aswat and went on being produced for many more years. 

How I became a television journalist is, I suppose, a story worth telling. It was at the end of 1967 and I was in the middle of cutting one of the short films for the cinema that Ray had asked me to make.  This one was on the hover principle.  One day I joined Adam Leys, Margaret O’Donald and a couple of other people from the office next door for lunch in the COI canteen.  They were putting together a weekly television magazine programme called London Line, to be produced in colour, distributed to the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and.  Why on earth would I mention that it was in colour?  Well, when all you have is three TV channels and only one of them, BBC 2, is in colour, it’s not without significance.  Adam Leys was the producer and he’d advertised in the national press for a freelance film director and a freelance TV journalist to work on the new programme.  I asked him what sort of response he’d had.

“Amazing,” he replied.  “I don’t understand it.  It’s the television journalist and presenter job that’s so astonishing.  Everyone’s applied.  There are people from every part of the BBC, people from all the commercial stations – even the Daz Man’s applied.  I just don’t get it.”

“Well, I get it,” I said.  “Look at all these people.  They’re stuck with their labels.  They’re our industrial correspondent, our sports editor, our political reporter – they’re locked in little boxes.  This job covers everything.  You could be interviewing the Prime Minister one day and Pink Floyd the next.  It’s a great job.  It’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t have minded doing myself under other circumstances.”
“I hadn’t looked at it like that,” said Adam.  “Maybe you’re right.”
At about half past eight that evening, the phone rang and I picked it up.“What other circumstances?” enquired a voice.“Adam? Is that you?  What are you on about?”
“You said it was the kind of job you wouldn’t mind doing yourself under other circumstances.  What other circumstances?”

“Oh, little things like the two films I’m working on at the moment, like the fact that I have no experience and indeed, haven’t done anything like this before.  Just little things like that.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Adam said.  “Your audition piece is in the post.  That’s a studio demo, which you’ll have to learn.  I need you to write a three minute piece on either the International Monetary Fund or the Age of Majority which you’ll have to do to camera, and be prepared to do an interview with a man on Canada’s centennial year.  And I’ll see you in the studio at 4.30 next Wednesday.”

Sure enough, in the next day’s post was my audition piece.  I read it through and could see no problems, even though it was pretty complex.  The script was a bit clunky in places and needed tweaking, which I immediately started to do in my head, but there was nothing intrinsically difficult about it.  I then decided that in a choice between the IMF and the Age of Majority White Paper that had just been published, Age of Majority won hands down.  I knew that much of it had been written by Katherine Whitehorn, a features journalist I really admired.  I reckoned that if I could capture something of the lightness and humour she had brought to the White Paper, I’d be fine.    As for the interview, I decided I needed to find out as much as I could about the interviewee.  When I got into the office, I ran into Adam and asked him who was doing it.
“Oh……Naps,” he said and rushed off.

It so happened that I not only knew who Naps was, I was temporarily sharing an office with him.  His surname was Barran and his initials were JNR, which stood for John Napoleon Ruthven.  His father was a baronet and a general, who’d had two sons, to both of whom he gave the names of famous generals.  Hence, Naps had been christened Napoleon and his brother, Wellington.  Napoleon was irresistible to everybody and in its shortened form of Naps was the name by which everyone knew him.  He’d been educated at Eton.  Of course.  And when, in 1974 his father died, Naps inherited the baronetcy, became Sir John Barran and was immediately promoted to a position of some seniority in the High commission in Ottawa.  In those days, people were still impressed by titles.  If Naps had a gift, it was that he could talk for Britain – an entirely appropriate talent if you’ve worked for a number of years for BIS, or British Information Services, where that’s your job.  As I saw it, my biggest problem was going to be shutting him up.  He wasn’t the sort of person you had to coax information out of.

When the day of the audition turned up, I took myself off to the Granville Studios on Fulham Broadway as instructed and, having reported in, was sent up to make-up.  As I walked through the door, there on the monitor was the Daz man.  I couldn’t hear what he was saying, since the sound had been muted, but I watched him…..and felt terrified.  He looked so smooth, so self-assured and so competent that he instantly robbed me of any confidence I might have had.  Sitting in make-up was also a new experience and reinforced the feeling that I was way outside my comfort zone.
Then I had a stroke of luck.  The studios were the same ones that had been used for the Arabic programme.  From talking to the make-up girl, I realised that I knew the crew, pretty much all of them.  That meant I wouldn’t have to work with strangers.  Except that the more I thought about it, the more the whole thing struck me as ludicrous and I thought it would be better not to embarrass myself.

“Right, Ian,” said Dick Ewan, the floor manager for the day, “you’re on.”“Dick, I’m having second thoughts about this.  These guys are pros.  They know what they’re doing.  I don’t.  It makes absolutely no sense for me to go down there and make a complete idiot of myself.  There’s no way I can be in the running for this.” “Don’t be silly,” he said.  “You’re going to get this job.”

“Dick, you’re absolutely lovely, but you can’t give me a single reason why.”“Yes I can.  Simple.  I’ve done three auditions this year.  Each time I knew one of the people that was auditioning.  Each time it was the bloke I knew that got the job.  You’re the only one I know out of this bunch, so it’s got to be you, hasn’t it?” It was so ridiculous that I had to laugh.  Dick took me by the arm.
“Come on, mate,” he said.  “The boys’ll help you.  They know it’s a tough one for you, so they’ll do everything they can.”

When I got down to the studio, the three cameramen all grabbed me.  They were great.  They told me what everyone else had got wrong and showed me how to get it right.  They advised me on the pacing that worked best.  Best of all, they made me feel that I could do it, that I had what it took to get in amongst all the pros who’d been auditioning throughout the day and actually compete for the job.  We recorded the first piece, which was the somewhat complex demo, and it went rather well.  Next I did my piece to camera on the Age of Majority.  I’d been quite pleased with it when I wrote it and hoped the humour I’d injected into it would work.  When I’d finished, Dick Ewan, the floor manager, sidled up to me.“That was great, Ian,” he whispered.  “First time I’ve understood what everyone else was banging on about.”

He took me over to the interview set and as I settled into my chair to interview Naps, I was feeling pretty good.  After all, this was going to be the easy bit.

It was a disaster.
The man I’d been sharing an office with, the man with permanent verbal diarrhoea, just sat there and delivered replies that rarely got beyond five words.  It hadn’t occurred to me that he would have been instructed to behave like this and I was mentally unprepared for it.  It was supposed to be a four minute interview and it took me two minutes to get past the shock of what was happening.  I tried to rescue the situation by giving Naps a hard time and chasing him with questions that should have got him out of his monosyllabic routine, but didn’t.  As an interview it was a complete nightmare and I knew it.  Certainly, no programme editor would have used it.  Afterwards, as I was waiting for the all clear from the gallery, I thought I’d been incredibly naïve.  That, I thought, absolutely finished any chance I’d ever had of getting the job. When I’d gone into it, thinking I hadn’t done too badly with the first two parts of the audition, I was kidding myself.  I was a bloody amateur and it had been as embarrassing as I’d thought it might be.  
As I walked out of the studio, I ran into Adam and the executive producer, John Hall, both of them laughing.

 It was only a couple of weeks later that I discovered that Adam had just given voice to his reaction to the day’s auditions.“You do realise, don’t you, John, that we’ve just spent several thousand pounds of the taxpayers’ money on advertising this job, bringing all these people here, putting them up and hiring this studio - when the person we wanted was in the office next door.”

I couldn’t believe I’d got the job.  When I asked Adam why, particularly in the light of the interview disaster, I’d got it, he was surprisingly forthcoming.
“Getting you to do that interview was unfair and we didn’t realise just how unfair it was until it started.  We all know how Naps is, but you shared an office with him, for God’s sake, so there’s no way you could have expected what we’d got him to do.  And if it’s any consolation, you handled him rather better than some of the other supposedly experienced reporters we auditioned.  You’ve got a good voice and you look fine on camera.  Not everybody does.  As for the demo, you’d improved the script and handled the whole thing really well.  Again, you were better at it than almost all the others.  But it was your piece to camera that really did it.  It was clear and it was funny.  It was a great piece of communication and understood exactly the kind of message we always try to get across.  You write really well and you wrote better than any of the others by a country mile.  Yes, it was your writing.  That’s why you got it.”

That cheered me up a fair bit and as I started to get stories under my belt, I realised that it would take me about six to nine months to know whether or not I had the potential to do the job really professionally.   As it turned out, I’d got that prediction pretty much right.  I can’t remember what the story was, but it was quite complex and as I looked at the finished programme and watched my piece go through, I felt it met the basic criteria for a reporter.  But the test of whether I could call myself a pro came in late 1969 when I turned up at the studio at nine o’clock one morning to record a link for Tomorrow Today, the science and technology magazine programme which was the successor to London Line.  It was produced in two versions, one presenter-led and the other, Living Tomorrow, not.  I waltzed in, thinking it was going to be an easy morning, only to find everyone in a state of near hysterical crisis.
 “Oh, thank God you’re here,” said Janice Willett, the show’s producer.
“Why? What’s happened?”
“We’ve just discovered that we don’t have the studio next week.”
“What?  Why not?”
“The bookings were messed up.  Right now it doesn’t matter how or why.  I’ll deal with that later.  But what it means is that we’ve got to produce two shows today instead of one and the second one hasn’t even been written yet.”
“What have the researchers got?” I asked, as the enormity of the disaster suddenly became very clear.
“They’re working on it,” came the discouraging reply.
All I remember about that day was that when we all finally staggered out of the studio, I had worked for eleven hours non-stop writing scripts, presenting items, recording links and doing interviews.  What’s more, I’d done it well, with no hint of the panic that was flooding all around me. 
“Thank you, Ian,” said Janice when we finally finished.  “I don’t know anyone else who could have done that.  It was amazing.  You’ve got us out of a really nasty hole.”
It was a lovely, generous thing to say and as I took it on board, I suddenly realised that I could finally call myself a professional presenter and television journalist without fear of contradiction.  As to whether it was a role in which I should continue – that was far too early to tell and I reckoned it would be another two years before I had any perspective on that.

Janice, incidentally, had originally joined COI as a studio director, a job she had originally held at ABC Television.  She’d been a Production Assistant there, but one day, when the director was drunk, she just took over and directed the live show herself.  She kept the job.  These days, technology means that very little television is done live, but then, it was more likely to be the norm than the exception.  Unless you’ve done a live show, you cannot have any idea what it’s like.  It’s certainly one of the more nerve-wracking experiences I’ve ever had and you needed nerves of steel to do it well.  In the mid-sixties Janice had gradually switched from directing to producing.  She was one of those people who had the kind of calm, rational mind that all producers need at some point and her judgment was pretty solid.  She was less inclined to take risks than I was, but for the COI that was probably a good thing.

 I’ve jumped a couple of years to include that story but going back over that time, I found myself covering an endless succession of stories for London Line that ranged, as they always do on magazine programmes, from the mediocre to the fascinating.  I interviewed two of my literary heroes – Tom Stoppard and Kingsley Amis, the latter several times.  I persuaded Tom Stoppard, whom I was interviewing about his latest play at the time, The Real Inspector Hound, to let make-up trim his hair and tidy it up a little.  It was going through a phase when it just looked wild and unkempt, which had yet to become the accepted social norm.  I knew that this would distract from what he was saying, since that kind of look wasn’t one with which people were familiar at the time – especially in America, Australia and Canada.  I told him that the choice was his, but explained why I thought tidying it up made sense.  It took him all of three seconds to think about it and agree.  We then did a great interview and he remains one of the most articulate and intelligent people I ever interviewed. 

Kingsley Amis was different.  I first interviewed him about his spoof Bond novel, Colonel Sun, which he wrote under the name of Robert Markham.  Charismatic and also highly intelligent, Kingsley was very much a party animal.  For reasons that I didn’t understand at first, he really enjoyed arguing with me and on a number of occasions we would be the only two people left at a restaurant table long after the rest of the party had gone.  He then explained it.“Christ, young Morrison,” he said in exasperation, “how is it that you’re so logical?  You never let me get away with anything.”“I did three years of logic as part of my degree,” I replied.  “It scars you for life.”

 I enjoyed his company enormously.  He had a sophisticated sense of comedy, using words with rapier-like precision to create the kind of humour that manages to give acute perspective and deflate pomposity at the same time.  He was a genuinely witty man and I greatly regretted seeing him so rarely once I’d more or less given up presenting.

Kingsley was in strong contrast to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, a somewhat difficult interviewee.  When I first started talking to her to set up the shape of the interview, she came across at first as moody, distant and closed-up.  I also sensed an iron will behind the surface and a marked tendency to be manipulative.  She was a seriously heavy smoker.  Sixty a day did nothing for her life expectancy.  It was a chance remark by one of her assistants that led me to guess what could be really helpful when it came to doing her interview.  A couple of glasses of very good red wine made a lot of difference to her willingness to communicate and I finished up with a much better interview than I’d dared hope for.  When we started our shoot at her studio in St Ives, the quality of the work set out in her walled garden spoke for itself, but I had despaired of getting her to say anything worthwhile at all.

One particularly fascinating interview was with the poet, John Betjeman, which again I did for London Line.  He had become desperate to help save the historic buildings and monuments that a small army of barbaric Philistines calling themselves planners had decided were superfluous to requirements.  I had always thought of the UK as a country where corruption was rare, but the more you met architects and construction people at that time, the more you realised that, in order to get their wicked way, developers were prepared to use significant sums of money for the personal benefit of councillors and council employees.  Betjeman was in the thick of the fight to help preserve London’s heritage and this was the reason for the interview I was doing with him.  Towards the end of our conversation, but still mid-interview, he suddenly leapt to his feet, drew my attention to the ceiling of the Granville Studios where we were recording and extolled its delightful quality.  None of us had ever noticed the ceiling before, but it was a beautifully painted creation, with portraits of some of the great classical composers, and reflected its origins as a Victorian Music Hall.
“The last time I was here – it must have been 1933 or ’34,” said Betjeman, “was when it was called the Walham Green Hippodrome and I came to see something called ‘Ladies Night at the Turkish Bath."

The gentle enthusiasm of Betjeman was in strong contrast to the violent reaction of Stirling Moss when I was filming him for Tomorrow Today testing a car called the Austin America on a motor industry test track outside Nuneaton.  There were a number of cars there just doing laps at constant speeds, which must be one of the most boring jobs in the world.  I had got Stirling to do a running commentary on the car’s performance.  As he came off the Belgian pavé to re-join the main track, he said he was going to do a brake test.  Which he then did.  One of the cars doing boring circuits just wasn’t expecting him to stand on the brakes for no obvious reason and crashed straight into the back of the Austin.  Stirling knew it was his fault.  He just hadn’t looked before braking.  I counted later on the sound track that he used the same expletive seventeen times, each time with a violence that suggested it was just as well there was nobody there for him to kill.  I suggested we broke for lunch and when he’d had something to eat, he just uttered a distant goodbye and walked out.

Then there was Patrick Moore, whom I interviewed a few times for London Line and who insisted that his interview was scheduled so that we could have lunch beforehand.  For some reason, he loved talking politics with me.  Not sure why, because he was somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun in his thinking, and that isn’t political ground where I’m exactly comfortable.  I think he just liked the fact that I disagreed with him in a non-emotional way and without trying to cram ultra-left wing propaganda down his throat – a not uncommon tendency among television folk at that time.

There was an endless succession of musicians, mostly pop stars, almost all of whom sank without trace within a few years.  One exception was Cliff Richard, who turned up with his Mum to chaperone him – a new one on a television crew whom it took a lot to surprise.  

A musician from a very different field was Colin Davis, the newly appointed conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who turned out to be one of the toughest interviewees I ever encountered – again for London Line.  I didn’t understand why he was so hostile towards me until after he’d gone, when I learned that a couple of the cameramen had told him he looked just like me.  Yes, well, there’s not a lot I can say to that.

Then there were the actors.  They ranged from the charming, like Peter Finch, whom I interviewed for ABC, Australia, under a deal to share the material with COI, to the offensive, like Oliver Reed, whose drunkenness made him even more unpleasant than I was told he normally was.  Then there were the legendary, like Laurence Olivier.  

At that time, Olivier ran the National Theatre and I’d gone to a meeting with him on behalf of London Line to establish how we might structure a story that could be used as widely as possible around the world.  The idea was to help promote what was then a relatively new institution, still housed in The Old Vic and still seven years from moving into its permanent home on the South Bank.  In those early days, The National was frequently in the news, often for the wrong reasons, and the press was always chasing Olivier for a quote. 
 
On the occasion I went to see him, there was an ongoing row over a play called “Soldiers”, written by Rolf Hochuth, a close friend of David Irving, from whom he had got the original story.  The play, which was originally scheduled to be produced at the National in the autumn of 1967, suggested that during the War, Churchill had been implicated in the supposed assassination of the Polish General Sikorsky.  Incidentally, the story was later proved to be a complete fabrication and Irving was successfully sued for libel over it.  He promptly turned his attention to the Holocaust and achieved considerable notoriety as the great Holocaust denier.

The play was originally postponed, but even though it had only just been cancelled a couple of days before, there were still demands for the resignation of the Chairman of the NT over the whole issue and it continued to be a running sore for months.  While we were talking, a smart young woman came into the room and whispered something in Olivier’s ear.  His head never moved, but there was a tiny flicker from his eyes.

“Ah, right,” he said, before shifting his head slightly towards me.  “It seems, dear boy, that we’re going to have to complete our conversation in a local hostelry.  Some of the vermin have got into the building and if we stay where we are, it’s going to get noisy.  Come with me.”  He turned fractionally to the smart young woman.  “Tell them you can’t find me and that I’ve probably gone to the pub.”
He grabbed a rather shabby looking raincoat from the back of the door and a copy of the Evening News from his desk and we left, heading through a couple of grubby corridors and down an unlit back staircase until we reached a side door on to an alley at the back of the building.  Olivier was still struggling into his raincoat as we walked down the street and went into a pub less than two hundred yards from the Old Vic.  As we approached the door, an extraordinary thing happened.  Olivier put on fifteen years.  He ruffled his hair slightly, adopted a slight stoop and shuffled up to the bar.  He sat on a bar stool, opened his paper and whispered without looking at me.
“Get two pints of bitter, dear boy.  Find a paper if you can.  Or a book.  Anything you can read.  Put your back against the bar and ignore me.”

I did as I was told.  When the two pints arrived, Olivier emptied about a third of his into an empty glass sitting on the bar and then just sat there, pint glass in hand, reading his newspaper.  I borrowed an Evening Standard from the barman and waited, just grabbing the occasional surreptitious glance at Olivier.  The transformation was extraordinary.  There was no way this seedy little nonentity, huddled in the corner of the bar nursing his pint, was the Director of the National Theatre.  No, he was just a lowly clerk from a bank or an insurance company.
And when the press pack turned up, that’s what they saw.  They all looked at him, as they did everyone in the place, and saw what he wanted them to see – a nobody, a person of no account.
“Right, dear boy,” he said when they’d gone, “now where were we?”

Some thirty five years later I heard Derek Jacobi tell a similar story about Olivier and it occurred to me that this was probably a little trick he loved to use.  I’d been privileged to see a master display his craft in a way that left me in awe of the sheer dominance of his skill.  And he was special.  I once went to see a production at the National of the Feydeau farce A Flea In Her Ear, which Olivier directed and in which he had a minor role.  When he made his first entrance, his costume and make-up were such that I didn’t recognise who it was.  All I know is that the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.  He had presence to an extraordinary degree.

Given the broad-ranging nature of London Line’s remit, the work on the programme could never be described as dull.  For example, there were scientists and engineers in abundance.  People like Desmond Morris, the zoologist and expert in human behaviour who wrote best sellers like The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo.  A calm man of outstanding rationality, he revealed over lunch that his secret passion was painting and that as a result of his surrealist work, he had become friends with Henry Moore and Joan Miró. 
  
Then there was Eric Laithwaite, who had invented the first full scale linear induction motor, an engineering invention that subsequently found its niche in the development of urban transport systems.  He was a fascinating interviewee and was so good that when the Pacemaker series was being considered, his was one of the first names on the list. 
 
Another extraordinary experience was filming and interviewing in 1968 a man who worked for Standard Telephones & Cables.  They’d given him a laboratory, staff and a budget for the rest of his working life.  His name was Geoffrey, which he insisted everyone call him, and I confess that as a result I’ve forgotten his surname.  He had taken the basic invention of Pulse Code Modulation, which at the time served little or no purpose, and developed it into equipment that allowed thousands of phone calls to be transmitted down a single copper wire rather than the dozen or so that had been traditionally possible.  It was a revolutionary development.  The equipment he developed for Standard Telephones came to form a key component of the UK telephone system and made them an awful lot of money.  No wonder they gave him his own lab and told him that all they required from him was some more blue sky thinking.   In that interview in 1968, he predicted the development of both the mobile phone and the internet.  That still strikes me as an extraordinary piece of foresight
. 
Politicians, and there were dozens of them, ranged from the impressive to the bizarre.  Among the impressive was Dennis Healey, who was then Secretary of State for Defence.  I thought he was the best Prime Minister we never had.  He had a phenomenal memory and a mind like a steel trap, with classy judgement to match.  I never saw anyone out-think him.   He had a farm down in East Sussex and I saw him on the train to London a number of times.  The first time, he looked up as I got on the train and looked slightly puzzled.“Don’t I know you?” he asked.“I’ve interviewed you a few times, Mr Healey,” I replied.“Join me,” he said, gesturing to the seat opposite him.
I’ve had lots of conversations with people on trains down the years – some of them very interesting.  None of them came close to the ones I had while talking to that remarkable man.

Of the actual Prime Ministers, Harold Wilson was cunning in a way that few top politicians manage, while Alec Douglas-Home, whom I interviewed long after his tenure of office, came across as a very nice man who lacked the deviousness and ruthlessness that were common qualities at the top end of politics.    Prime Minister Edward Heath, whom I interviewed for Television News Features, ranked at the bizarre end of the scale.  However good or bad he was in any other respect, any man who can cut himself shaving, put a piece of tissue on the cut to staunch the bleeding and then, when asked if he wants Make-Up to remove it, denies it’s there.  What was particularly astonishing was that none of his aides wanted to tell him.  They were clearly terrified of him.  

It was one of the fascinating things about London Line.  It delivered endless variety to keep you mentally, and occasionally intellectually, alert.  The politics behind it didn’t really trouble us at all.  The FCO left us to get on with it and we, the foot soldiers, were only occasionally aware that BIS in New York were watching us much more closely.  So when, one day, John Hall called me on the phone and asked me to pop along to his office, I had no inkling of what was about to happen. John told me that Adam needed to take a break from the program and said that while he’s away, he would like me to take over as Producer.  Would that be all right? I didn’t hesitate.“Yes, of course,” I replied.

 I left, wondering just how easy or difficult doing Adam's job was going to be.  I found out soon enough.  I’d sat at his desk for just twenty four hours before I knew exactly why he was taking a break. That was the problem of producing a weekly programme with BIS New York looking over his shoulder.  Ultimately, the problem was dealing two people at BIS – Alan Waple and Paul Wright.  Before taking over Adam’s job, I’d never had to deal with either of them.  I soon learned.  Alan Waple was the day to day contact point. He had been with BIS for several years running his own show  He used obscure language wherever possible and I concluded that he did it because it made him feel superior.  It gradually became clear to me that he thought he was much better qualified to do my job than I was.  The fact that he had absolutely no feel for an audience and, if given his head, could wreck a story in 30 seconds – that was irrelevant.  He was a senior civil servant and could turn his hand to anything. Television?  Dead easy.In fact, his ignorance was total.  
 
Paul Wright was a different set of problems.  Rather more arrogant than Alan Waple, he was Head of BIS and advised the Ambassador in Washington .  In other words, he had genuine power to back up his sense of self-importance. You were never supposed to speak to Paul Wright.  He was simply there to dispense his diktats from on high, apparently answerable to nobody.  

Every week Alan Waple would conduct a conference call at which we would all have a final discussion on the London Line script which was about to go into the studio a couple of days later.  The way it worked was this.  We would send the script to New York on one day.  We sent it, as I recall we were told, to make sure we weren’t saying anything that would be incomprehensible to an American audience.  They didn’t see it like that at all.  Confident of their own skills, they would rewrite it and send it back on the second day.  What they wrote was pretty much always awful.  We would then try to identify the points they were trying to make and turn them into English that didn’t sound as though it was a Whitehall paper and did sound as though it bore a passing resemblance to human speech.

Then came the conference call.  Officially, Paul Wright wasn’t on these calls, but on at least two occasions he suddenly interrupted and I realised that he sat in on these calls every time to make sure his wishes were adhered to.  

The first, and most memorable occasion, was when we were planning a major item on a race from Trafalgar Square in London to Times Square in New York.  I think it had been organised by one of the national newspapers..  I wanted to go big on this, because I saw it as a great opportunity to showcase British technology, with the main part of the journey being done via a Harrier jump-jet.  Nobody else had anything like the Harrier at the time and between us we’d planned a great story.  To me it was a no-brainer.  New York didn’t see it that way.  I think they found it populist in tone, with the intellectual depth of a game show.  When Alan Waple started to ridicule the whole story, we had what I believe is known in diplomatic circles as “an exchange of views”.  Actually, as I discovered, he wasn’t that good at that kind of game and started contradicting himself, which gradually allowed me, in the nicest possible way, to paint him into a corner.  He floundered.  And then a voice interrupted. “It’s Paul Wright here, Ian.”The tone was distinctly hostile.
“Understand that what Alan was saying had been agreed by us all here.  It has my full backing and support and it is what you are going to do.” “I see,” I said.

Tina Cowan, the Unit Production Secretary and part-time researcher who made notes of anything important that cropped up in the call, could see that I was about to explode.  She put a hand on my arm and shook her head.  She was, of course, quite right.

I look back on that exchange now with a degree of shame, but not that much.  I recognise the frustration that I was unable to contain then and would probably be only slightly more subtle at dealing with now. 
A footnote to Paul Wright.  We had all known that he was due to get an embassy as the next step in his career and we learned from some of the people we knew that there were a couple of European embassies he had his eye on.  It was childish of us, of course, but there was a certain frisson of glee that ran through the ranks when it was announced that he was swapping the sophistication of New York and Washington for the British Embassy in Congo Kinshasa.

By the time Adam came back I’d produced eight or nine programmes.  Adam was creative, with a lively enquiring mind.  He wasn’t remotely equipped at that time to deal with the Paul Wrights of this world.  But then, if I’m honest, nor was I.  Only John Hall amongst those of us working on London Line had the capacity to pour oil on the kind of troubled waters a Paul Wright or an Alan Waple could stir up.  He was also brilliant at taking the heat out of some of the situations we found ourselves in.

Meeting so many fascinating people was always a privilege, but it wasn’t the only benefit from working on London Line.  Every now and again, you were faced with a big national story as your assignment.  One such was the QE2, which was the last great ocean-going liner to be built, and had been decreed as a single issue of London Line, the programme I was working for.  Years later, of course, the QE2  was ousted by the big cruise ships and indeed, did its own spell as a cruise liner.  Because there were only four berths available, I had to double up as director as well as reporter, a task I was looking forward to immensely.  I’d done a little directing while I was out in Africa and had always wanted to do more.  Suddenly, out of the blue, I wasn’t just being given the chance of directing a five minute piece, but I was getting a whole 15 minute programme to direct. 
 
I missed the launch on 20 September 1967, and somebody else covered it, because my first daughter, Zoë, was due to be born on that day.  As it turned out, she didn’t turn up until the next day, but I wasn’t to know that in advance.  So it wasn’t until December 26th 1968 that I found myself at Gatwick Airport waiting to get on board a plane full of the press headed for the Canary Islands.  It was a typical press jolly.  The idea was that we were to spend a pleasantly idle 24 hours in the Canaries before setting off for the ship, which would be sitting out in the harbour.  Just before our flight got called, someone got hold of an early edition of the Evening News. In the Stop Press section on the front page were a couple of lines about the QE2, which said that it was rumoured it had a problem. 

Then came the first hint that the Evening News may have been on to something.  The Chief Cunard PR man suddenly announced there would be no stay on the Canaries and that we were going straight to the ship.  

We all got on the coach and headed down to the harbour, where we had our first sight of the QE2, all lit up and at anchor in the bay.  It looked stunning.  There were three spanking new launches waiting to take us out to the ship, all with those Plexiglas covers over the top of them. to protect journalists from any spray that might be thrown up.  The first launch was quickly filled, moved away from the quay and roared across the bay towards the QE2.  I got into the second with my crew and we did the same.  The third launch was for the baggage.

We’d only been going for a few minutes when we hit the swell.  It was only running at about four or five feet at first, but getting bigger the further we went out into the bay.  I was glad we were under serious power as the swell increased to about twelve feet.  It was then that I made my mistake.  Running the length of the launch was some rather elegant wooden boxing.  It only protruded an inch or so above the decking and presumably covered the prop shaft.  Just next to me was some sort of much larger boxing that I guessed housed some gearing.  I never found out exactly what it was housing, but it meant that if I stood on it, I could get a much better view of the ship as we approached it.  I duly stood on it and did indeed get a wonderful view.  Two minutes later, I got something else.  I was lifted off my feet as the housing underneath me exploded with a deafening bang, all the lights went out and the cabin was filled with acrid smoke.

Once I’d picked myself up, I looked at the chaos around me, with journalists coughing and spluttering, and decided the cabin was no place for me.  I was aware the launch’s crew was running around trying, presumably, to fix things.  Because I was closest to the exit, I got out first and was just in time to hear the following exchange between the rather twee Cunard officer in charge and the petty officer standing beside him.“We don’t seem to have any lights, Johnson.”“No, sir.”“Make sure the emergency lights are working, won’t you?”“They’re not working, sir.”“What about the radio? That at least must be working.”“No, sir.  Nothing’s working.  No power.  No leads to the batteries.”
There was a silence as the twee officer digested this.“Perhaps we’ve got a torch.  Have we got a torch, Johnson?”“Not been able to locate one so far, sir. “Well, we’d better put up a flare, hadn’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”

And a flare was duly fired.  Meanwhile, as we awaited rescue, we were just going up and down on the swell and a lot of the journalists were beginning to wish they’d been less lavish with their alcohol consumption.  When, eventually, the first launch came back for us, things got worse.  They threw a tow rope across and it was then that the crew discovered that there was nothing in the bow of the launch to which the tow rope could be lashed.  The solution was to open one of the port holes at the front of the Perspex cover, feed the rope through and lash it to something in the cabin.  This had two consequences.  First, it meant the exhaust fumes from the first launch came straight in through the port hole and, second, our launch wasn’t just bobbing up and down on the ever-increasing swell – it was also swaying from side to side on it.  Under any circumstances that’s going to make you feel queasy, but if you’re as pissed as some of those guys were, life gets very unpleasant.  
The next hazard was getting on board.  By this time there was a fifteen foot swell running, which meant that getting across from the launch to the large wooden platform jutting out from the side of the ship wasn’t that easy.  As the swell took you up next to the platform, you had to step across.  It was just a question of timing it right and most people managed it without too much trouble.  A few had to be pushed across and since there appeared to be no crew available, my cameraman, Gordon, and I found ourselves with this particular job.
 
By now it was one o’clock in the morning and the last thing we all needed to hear was that we had to go immediately to a press conference.  The journey there was a bit of a shock as well.  There had been no hint that the ship was unfinished, but we found ourselves going down uncarpeted corridors with handrails only partly installed and a clear lack of finish to much of the final décor.  However, that was nothing compared with the shock we got when we went into the press conference.  Sir Basil Smallpiece, the Cunard chairman, got to his feet and announced that they were refusing to accept the ship until it was complete and in proper working order.  He then revealed that there was a problem with the steam turbines and that instead of cruising at 28 knots, the ship could only go at half that speed.  Among other things, it meant that we wouldn’t be getting back on New Year’s Eve, as arranged, but on January 3rd.  For the journalists, this was a disaster.  They’d thought they were going off on a jolly.  Suddenly, they all knew they’d have editors screaming for additional copy and their lives would become rather more pressured than they’d anticipated.

For the television crews it didn’t make a lot of difference.  They were going to have to get the pictures anyway and if anything interesting happened, well, the newspaper hacks would tell them what was going on because in those days there was no satellite for beaming reports back to base, so no competition.  

I was sharing a cabin with Richard Lindley.  At that time Richard was a reporter for ITN, a few years before he joined the BBC to work on Panorama.  On that first night, having finally got to bed at about three, we were disconcerted to be woken again at five when our luggage was delivered.  It turned out that the third launch had suffered the same fate as the one we’d been on and had only just been towed out to the ship.  Given that we had another press conference at eight, it was a fitting end to a day when you’d begun to think that there was nothing else that could go wrong.
The rest of the trip went pretty well from my point of view.  We discovered that the number of people from Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and their contractors was way beyond what we’d imagined and the suspicion grew amongst the press that some of the delays in completion might not be unrelated to the shipyard workers’ wish to be on this particular voyage.  There was a further rumour that every shipyard worker anywhere near the Clyde had refurnished their houses with QE2 carpet, furniture and assorted fittings.  

New Year’s Eve on board was the last thing that had been in anybody’s plans, but to be fair to Cunard, they gave us the run of the Grill Room and, much more importantly from my point of view, to its wine list.  Having maintained that all wine tasted the same to him, even Richard Lindley had to admit that the Chateau Latour 1955 with which we saw in the New Year was a whole new experience.  

As we sailed up Southampton Water, the barman told us that it was the only time a Cunard liner had been drunk dry.  There was no wine, no spirits and no beer.  The only thing available was a particularly nasty liqueur, at which even the press drew the line.  To finish the film, I then went on the maiden voyage across to Le Havre as a recce for the final shoot, which took place on a trip across the Atlantic to New York at the end of May 1969.

It was my first documentary not just as a reporter, but a director as well and the fact that it went on to win a few awards was quite encouraging.  As people began to trust me to direct, it meant I got a number of other projects under my belt over the next couple of years, some of which were beyond interesting, including one that started innocently enough.

At some point towards the end of 1974, I got a phone call from Helen Standage, the Head of News Features in the Film Division.“Ian, darling,” she began, “I want you to go to Northern Ireland for me.”“To do what?” I asked.

It was an odd story.  The owner of a television station in San Francisco, who was originally Irish, had attended some event in Boston.  This had turned out in effect to be an IRA fundraiser, though the station owner didn’t really realise it at the time.  But then, like most Irish Americans, although he would never acknowledge it, his understanding of current Irish matters was virtually non-existent.  He had, however, bought into the idea that what was going on in Northern Ireland was the 1916 uprising all over again and that it was the duty of Irishmen everywhere to rally to the cause.  What he hadn’t worked out was that Noraid, the IRA’s fundraising arm in America, wasn’t a charity designed to help the Irish victims of British persecution, but an arms purchasing organisation that smuggled weaponry and explosives into Ireland and then took them across the notoriously porous border with the North.  In a welter of sentimental enthusiasm for the old country, he had agreed to screen a film made by the Provisional IRA entitled ‘A Place Called Ardoyne’.  This he duly gave to his Head of News with instructions to screen it as soon as possible.

Three days later, in the early evening, his Head of News went to see him.We can’t screen this, he said.  “his isn’t news it is propaganda.  I’m no expert on what’s going on in Northern Ireland, but even I know that some of this stuff is just plain lies.You’ll do as I damn well tell you, said the station owner. But a reputation for impartial news is a key part of what we’ve built this station’s success on, protested the Head of News.  Why would we want to destroy it?

In the end, there was a compromise.  It was agreed that the IRA movie would be shown so long as there was a matching piece from the British government.  At which point the fun started. Helen said there wasn’t anything to offer.  Not so much as a frame.  The Foreign Office had shied away from doing anything at all on such a controversial subject.  So when this cropped up they  phoned her and told her to do something.  Fast.  The reason I phoned you was because I thought you were the only person we worked with who would have the first idea how to tackle this.“Flattery will get you most places, Helen,” I said.

“No, darling,” she said.  “Be serious.  There was another reason.  The first thing I did was to phone that Head of News in San Francisco, ask him what he was looking for and explain what my budget limitations were.  I suggested that they should pay for the director, whom we would nominate.  He baulked at that.  If he was paying for him, he was going to choose who it was.  He said they hardly ever did any shooting overseas, but that they’d hired a Brit director and crew about eighteen months before.  The director they’d hired had been recommended by a friend of his in New York.  He said the guy had been pretty good and  asked me if I knew a director called Ian Morrison.  I said that that was the person I was going to recommend he hired.  

“Anyway, that’s the story,” Helen concluded.  “That’s why I want you to go to Northern Ireland and that’s why your fee would be being paid by San Francisco.  Mind you, we haven’t discussed it yet and the top people here would have to confirm that it’s what we would pay you.”

My first reaction was to say no to Helen for two reasons.  Northern Ireland’s a dangerous place and this was no ordinary story.  I would therefore want double my normal fee, because the risk to me is considerable.  Even if I did it  and it’s okay by San Francisco, it will have to go through the mill here both with COI management and the FCO.   The second reason is that  I have no problem with showcasing British industry and inventiveness and I’m happy to put this country’s genuine intellectual strengths and creative energies in front of the rest of the world.  I draw the line at British government political propaganda.  Because that’s what the FCO will want.  What I would want is to tell the story the way I see it.  It would be a normal documentary as far as I’d be concerned.  Under these circumstances, the only way I’d do this is if I have total creative control.  And that means script control as part of it.  You’re not about to give me that.  You wouldn’t be allowed to.  We both know that.  

“Will you at least think about it?” Helen asked.“Of course.  But I’m not going to change my mind.”

The following morning, Helen phoned. “They’re not happy on the seventh floor, but they’ve agreed.  You’ll get your fee wherever it comes from and you’ve got creative control.  The only thing they ask is that they see it before it goes out and that you’ll listen to any comments they have.  You won’t have any obligation to change anything if you don’t want to.  And one other thing – you don’t tell anybody.”

“Fair enough,” I said and thought for a moment.  “Okay, I agree.  I’ll listen to anything that’s stands a chance of making it better.  So long as they’ve taken on board that it’s just going to be a straight documentary report.”

Which is how, the following day, I came to be on a plane to Belfast.  I had five days to put together a script for an eighteen minute film, four days to shoot it, two days to get back to London, get the rushes processed and in sync ready for the editor, and a day and a half to cut it ready for screenings in the final afternoon.  No pressure, then.

A number of incidents stick in the mind.  One of the triggers for what came to be known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland was housing.  Publicly owned housing was controlled by the Protestant majority.  They looked after their own.  Catholics didn’t get much of a look-in.  It was only after Northern Ireland moved into the civil war phase that there was some slight change.  I wanted to film on one of the estates that reflected what had happened in the past and what changes were beginning to happen.  To get permission to film meant going through the Housing Executive. 

Eventually, I met up with a man of about sixty called Charlie who told me that we would have to get agreement from “some people”.  This would mean meeting them in a pub.  So far so good.  I turned up, as did the man from the Housing Executive.  I thought he seemed a bit nervous, but I bought him a drink and hoped he was all right.  Then a couple of heavies in suits walked in.  They headed straight for us and were introduced as – I kid you not – Pat and Mike.  Since it took me all of fifteen seconds to spot the bulges under their left armpits, I concluded I’d been blessed with a visit from the IRA.  They proceeded to ask me a heap of questions designed to establish who I was and what I wanted.  I told them I’d been hired by a TV station in San Francisco to supplement the film they were going to show entitled ‘A Place Called Ardoyne’ with some more recent footage. 
At this point the man from the Housing Executive went pale.

To be fair to Charlie, I hadn’t told him any of this, because it had never occurred to me that it would come up.  After all, he hadn’t told me that I had to pass muster with a pair of IRA hoods.  But then, all he knew was that I’d been handed over to him by the government’s press office, which could mean anything. At the end of the conversation the two men said “Let Charlie here know what time and place.  It’ll be okay.” Which it was.

What proved much more difficult was getting people to say on camera what they were prepared to say to me privately.  Given that America still thought it was 1916 when it came to Ireland, I was all too aware that for the most part people there were completely unaware of the split in the IRA and what each organisation stood for.  I believed that was a gap in America’s knowledge that needed to be filled.  In the end, the only way of doing it was for me to say it to camera.  I did it on an island in the middle of the Falls Road, one of the main streets in the Catholic part of the Belfast tribal map. 

 Since, at that time, the moment you put down a tripod anywhere in Belfast, you could guarantee a crowd gathering, I briefed the crew how we were going to do it.  All the gear except the essentials for shooting was to be loaded into the crew van, whose engine was to be left running.  I would do the piece to camera in one take with no rehearsals and the moment I said “cut” we would walk quickly away – no running – and get out.  

My piece to camera went something like this:
“Since we started filming in Northern Ireland, a number of people have told us things in private that they weren’t prepared to say in public.  I can do no better than quote one man who told me that the rest of the world hadn’t yet taken on board that, after the split, the two IRA organisations represented quite different views.  The Official IRA, he said, was a Marxist organisation which, under the cloak of Irish nationalism, was obsessed with creating the next socialist nirvana.  The Provisional IRA, he said, was essentially fascist.  The Provos not only ran most of the crime in the Catholic parts of Belfast and the rest of the country to raise funds, they were ruthless in their enforcement of their authority.  The Prods, or protestants, are way behind at the moment, he added, but it’s only a matter of time before people like the UVF get organised and start doing the same kind of thing.  But if I go in front of the camera and tell you this, I can say goodbye to my kneecaps forever.”

I delivered this piece and we left.  The crowd had been growing extremely restive as I got to the end and I think if we’d tried to leave any later, we’d have been torn to pieces.

Back in London, once the film had been developed, the sound transferred and the syncing of the rushes was complete, the editor, Mike Wilcox, and I had thirty six hours to cut an eighteen minute film and have it ready for the screenings.  You’d normally have had a minimum of two weeks for such a task.  We did it and I can’t remember ever feeling quite so exhausted.  At one viewing, Helen’s boss, Arthur White, suggested changing one word, on the grounds that the way it was written was open to misinterpretation.  He was quite right and I duly changed the word. 
 
The last screening was the really interesting one, because it was for the Foreign Office.  They sent over two people, one of whom, Peter I’d met before.  The other man was older and one look at his face told me he was potential trouble.  When the screening finished, this older man exploded.
“We can’t show that,” he shouted.  “It’s critical of the Army and it’s critical of the government. That film goes out over my dead body.  It’s an outrageous condemnation of government policy.”  He turned to me.  “Are you the person who demanded control over this film and got it?”“Yes, I am.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” he said, his face suffused with anger.  “You’re a disgrace.  Why on earth have you said some of those highly critical things in your script?”“It’s called journalism,” I replied.  “It’s a reflection of what people are saying and thinking………”
“Journalism of the gutter,” he shouted, “and it’s out of the question that………”

At which point, Peter  held his hand u“Stop right there, David,” he said firmly.
“But we can’t possibly allow….”“I said stop.”  It had never occurred to me until that moment that the younger man, Peter, was the more senior, but it soon became clear that he was.  He turned to me with a half-smile on his face.  “Don’t change a frame or a single word, Ian.  Well done.  It’s perfect.  I know what pressure you’ve been under.  That’s one helluva job you’ve pulled off.  Thank you.”
“Peter, what are you talking about?  Why are you saying this?” came the agonised cry from the older man.

“Because it’s true.  The IRA have a propaganda film.  You’re saying you want us to be the same as them, which means we’re asking people to judge whether our propaganda is better than their propaganda.  What this film does is to move the whole thing on to a quite different level.  This film has balance.  It’s objective.  Theirs isn’t.  Yes, it’s critical of us in places, but then, we didn’t see this one coming and that’s been shown in the way we’ve handled it.  Besides, it’s critical of everybody – nobody comes out of it outstandingly well.  Which means, above all, it’s fair.  That’s its strength.”
He got to his feet and turned towards me and Mike Wilcox, the editor.
“Congratulations, gentlemen.  And thank you again.”

There was one other footnote to that story.  A couple of weeks later, I learned that the film had been seen by the great Walter Cronkite, who had been the anchor for CBS News for more years than most people could remember.  He’d also been voted the Most Trusted Man in America.  He decreed that CBS News should screen my film over two nights and got one of his assistants to get in touch and tell me that he thought it was a fine piece of work.  It’s not every day that you get that kind of acknowledgement from a living legend of your trade.  I was walking on air and went to tell Helen Standage what had happened.  “Don’t tell anyone,” she said immediately.“Why not?” I asked, not unreasonably. 
 
“Because the seventh floor has hated the very idea of giving someone else editorial control,” she replied.  “Spread this around the place, darling, and you’re rubbing their noses in it.  Much better to let them arrive at the idea that it was a decision of extraordinary wisdom and sophistication on their part to have done this.  Let them sell it to their political masters as an act of vision.”  She saw the troubled look on my face.  “Trust me, darling.  It’s always a sound idea to have a good card up your sleeve.  That’s what you’ve given me.  So don’t spoil it, please.”

She was right, of course, and I was being naïve.  It was a very useful lesson.  Don’t fight the system.  Fight within it.  The chances of defeating the system are remote and if by chance you do, the consequences are almost always disastrous.  I liked Helen a lot.  She was an extraordinary woman.  She was about 4’11” in height and always wore four to five inch heels to give herself added stature.  She had a voice like a sergeant-major and if you planned on crossing her, you needed to be very sure of your facts before you did.  She’d been a producer on the London Weekend Television arts programme called Aquarius and she’d taken the COI job because she had an enormous tax bill that she couldn’t pay.  .  

It’s perhaps worth recalling at this point some of the surprising things that happen when you’re doing the kind of job I was doing, both as a reporter and a director/reporter.  When you’re freelance, you never ever know quite what’s going to come along.  For instance, weirdly, something that I’d said to Adam Leys actually happened.  I interviewed the Prime Minister on one day and Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd on the next.  Whatever else that was, it required quite a shift of perspective.  

It was never dull.  Occasionally, it was dangerous.  
When I was asked to a do a piece on the RAF’s rescue procedures and training, it seemed like a fairly straightforward story and I suggested that we built the item around the simulation of somebody dropping by parachute into the sea, being found and rescued.  As the reporter, that meant me.  As I discovered when researching the story, one of the dangers is that if there’s a wind blowing, which in most seas there almost always is, the parachute can get taken by the wind and drag the unfortunate airman along with it.  That way you can drown.  You are trained how to hold yourself so that that doesn’t happen and you are shown the quick release mechanism that you have to hit on your chest so that you can separate yourself from the parachute.  You then have to inflate your life raft and get into it.  That was the first part and we were scheduled to shoot it off the Plymouth coast.

At first all went well.  We were simply part of a course that was going through the same thing I was about to do.  We were on a boat that was going to be travelling at twelve knots and would tow all the people being trained.  Everyone was going to be dropped off the back, show that they could avoid the potential drowning bit by adopting the proper position in the water and then by releasing themselves.  We were told that if anyone got into trouble, we should raise an arm and there’d be a couple of specialists available to help.  We then went off to a spot off Plymouth and the process started.  We filmed a number of people going through the procedure, all of them successfully, before it was my turn.  I went off the back of the boat, adopted the correct position in the water and waited the right time to ensure the cameraman got his shots and that, as the RAF required, I’d done all the right things.

I then hit the quick release mechanism.  Nothing happened.  I hit it again, harder.  Again, nothing happened.  I hit it as hard as I could.  Still nothing.  I’m being dragged through the water at twelve knots and it isn’t a comfortable experience.  I must have hit that mechanism another half a dozen times without effect.  In the end, and reluctantly, I put my hand in the air to indicate that I was in trouble.  Eventually, the boat stopped and the two specialists dived in and came to find out what was wrong.
“I can’t get the mechanism to release,” I said to the first one.
You didn’t have to be a genius to read the expression on his face.  ‘Another bleeding, gutless amateur who’s too feeble to do something this simple,’ was what it was saying loud and clear.
“I’ll do it,” he said, in a voice dripping with resigned irritation.
He couldn’t.  He tried three times without success.“’Ere, let me have a go,” said the other man.
He couldn’t do it either.  The two of them looked at each other.  As one of them told me afterwards, once they realised it was a genuine emergency, they were grateful that I hadn’t panicked, partly because they knew most people would have done, and partly because they felt I was entitled to.
“Come on,” said the first man. “Between us, we’ve got to be able to get this bugger off.”
One of them held the back of the mechanism in the palm of his hand to give it more rigidity, while the other hit the front hard.  On the third go, it finally released.

As we arrived back at the dock, I was feeling very angry.  It didn’t help that the Wing Commander who was in charge of this little exercise was a little short on sympathy.“What happened?” he asked, wearily.“The mechanism wouldn’t release,” I replied.“You must have hit it in the wrong way,” he said indulgently, as to a small child.That did it.  I didn’t exactly lose it, but I came pretty close.
“No, I didn’t,” I said through gritted teeth.  “You’re wrong.  What’s more you have absolutely no evidence for blaming it on me. In an officer of your rank, I find that discouraging.  Why don’t you go and ask the two guys who got me out what the problem was?”“I will,” said the Wing Commander sharply, clearly taken aback by my tone and obviously very annoyed that I hadn’t shown him the deference to which he felt he was entitled.He turned on his heel, bristling with anger, and went off.  When he returned, his attitude had changed.“I’m told you’re right.  The mechanism was jammed.  I’m sorry.”

It was not what you would call the most handsome apology, but I was more concerned with the arrangements for the final part of the shoot, which involved the location of the downed airman, or rather me, in my little inflatable life raft.  Since I was going to have to rely on this same Wing Commander for the RAF’s co-operation, I needed to keep him onside to make sure nothing went wrong, so I said nothing else.
  
One of the problems that the rescue teams had always faced was that locating somebody in the water at night was virtually impossible.  They’d tried a number of things, but the solution everyone thought best was the use of infra-red technology.  This meant that filming the rescue had to be synchronised with a plane flying overhead at dusk, the only time when it was dark enough to suggest night time, but still with enough light for our film camera to pick out the aircraft.  Attached to the plane was a very early version of an infra-red camera, whose task was to find me and transmit my exact location back to the rescue people.  They would then send a boat out to pick me up.  Up in the aircraft would be another presenter, Howard Williams, whose job it was to deliver the lines I’d written for him and to add anything he thought might be useful.

The location was Southampton Water and it was dusk when I was filmed getting out of the water and into my inflatable life raft.  I then zipped myself into it until only my face was visible and delivered the appropriate piece to camera.  I had liaised with Howard, as arranged, before I went into the water and had told him to pass on that I was on board.  It was only mildly irritating, but I then discovered that, contrary to what had been arranged, the Wing Commander had already done this without telling me.  

Slowly, the tide started to take me out from the shore and the first thing I had to concentrate on was bailing out any water that was slurping around the bottom of the inflatable.  That took a while, but I’d been told it was essential to do this so that the heat of my body could start to dry me out.  I had doubted that that would happen, but trusted that they knew what they were talking about.  Which they did, and rather to my surprise, the top half of me dried off quite quickly.  I’d been out on the water for about forty five minutes and had drifted a long way from the shore when the plane with Howard in it flew over me for the first time.  It did another three circuits before it flew off.  I guessed I would have to wait at least twenty minutes before the boat came out to pick me up, so settled myself down for the wait.  The twenty minutes passed and there was no sign of any boat.  I’d been concentrating on getting the interior of the inflatable as dry as I possibly could and so I hadn’t noticed something rather crucial.  

The tide was moving more quickly than it had when I was closer to the shore.  It was taking me out into the shipping lanes. At first I wasn’t too worried.  The inflatable had a stock of gear in it designed for this kind of eventuality and I’d been briefed about it.  There was a two-way radio already tuned to the personnel on shore; there were a couple of rockets and a dozen flares; there was a torch and a whistle; and there was a fishing line and some emergency rations.  I wasn’t sure that the fishing line was ever going to be of any use to anyone without bait, but I was more concerned about the rest of the items and felt that, between them, they would do the trick. 
 
I started with the radio and turned it on.  I could hear the Wing Commander’s voice as he talked to various people.  A couple of things were immediately obvious.  First, he had lost me and had no idea where I was.  And second, he was starting to panic.  I could hear it in his voice.  I switched the radio to transmit and gave the call sign I’d been instructed to give.  Nothing happened and after doing this a further dozen times, I concluded that the transmit function wasn’t working.  Never mind, I still had the rockets and the flares.

Except that I didn’t.  When I opened the boxes in which they were supposed to be, there was nothing there.  They were empty.  I was so far off shore by now that the whistle would be no help at all.  I reached for the torch, hoping that it at least was working.  Mercifully, it was.  I held it high, pointed it at the shore and signalled SOS in Morse.  I then changed the direction and did it again.  And again and again.  I wanted to make sure that I had sent that message everywhere within sight to give myself the best chance I could get of being spotted.  At that point I’d been in the water for well over two hours and was beginning to realise that my situation wasn’t looking too healthy.

I also had a bit of a problem.  I was now on the edge of the shipping lane and drifting into it remorselessly.  Much worse, as I looked down Southampton Water, the next ship approaching was a supertanker and I was going to be in its path.  If you’ve never seen a supertanker from the water when it’s close to you, then you can have no idea of just how huge it is.  It’s a bit like a mountain rolling inexorably towards you.  I flashed my torch at the bridge and at the last minute they saw me and hooted furiously.  Not that it made any difference at that point.  It takes a supertanker miles to change course or even to slow down and we were way out of time for that to happen.  As this huge steel wall towered above me, I thought I was a dead man.  There was no way I was going to survive a collision with something like that. 
 
I got lucky.  I was picked up by the bow wave and swept clear of the hull.  It was probably because in terms of that bow wave, I was relatively small and light.  Anything bigger would have gone through it and collided with the hull.  It wasn’t the most comfortable ride of my life, but at least I still had a life when the steel wall had finally gone past.  Several times I thought the turbulence was going to turn me upside down in the water, particularly when I hit the wake of this monster.  That would almost certainly have been terminal, but somehow I managed to stay upright.  It was a terrifying experience and not one I would ever recommend to anyone of a remotely nervous disposition.

As I recovered what was left of my composure, I started flashing the SOS sign again and within twenty minutes could hear the boat coming to get me.  I could even see its lights.  As I learned later, it was the local coastguards who’d spotted the flashing and realised that they’d found me.  The Wing Commander had alerted everyone up the coast he could think of to report any sign of me they spotted.  The end was finally in sight.

Getting out of that inflatable was a very happy moment.  The crew wrapped me in blankets and gave me a tot of whisky as we sped back to the shore.  Nobody said anything, which rather surprised me, because I was pretty furious at what had happened.  I only realised why nobody had spoken to me about what had happened when we docked at the jetty.  Waiting for me was the Wing Commander, who was looking very angry.  “Why didn’t you radio where you were?” he demanded to know.
“How could I? The bloody radio could receive, but it couldn’t transmit,” I replied.“Then why the hell didn’t you use the rockets or the flares?  That’s what they were there for.  Do you have any idea of the trouble you’ve caused and the number of people you’ve inconvenienced?  I can’t believe you didn’t use the equipment.  It was totally irresponsible of you.  I can’t remember coming across anything like this before.”

I looked at him for a moment, said nothing and then went and got back on the boat.  I picked up the inflatable and carried it back to him on the jetty.  “Is that your radio and is it still switched on?” I asked, pointing to a radio sitting on top of a large piece of timber.“Yes, that’s mine.”
“Right,” I said, “let’s look at this.  Here’s the radio I had.  When I hit transmit,” which I then did, “nothing gets received by your radio.”
I showed him what I had done, hit the transmit button, said the call sign and looked at him.  His radio had remained completely silent. “In other words, it was a duff piece of equipment that hadn’t been checked to see if it was working.”  I reached inside the inflatable, found the cases for the rockets and the flares and handed them to him.“Look inside,” I said.  “Go on.  Open them up.”
He opened them and looked dumbfounded.“Yes,” I continued, “they’re empty.  There were no rockets and there were no flares.  Why?  Because the crass incompetent who’s in charge of this operation never checked and never got anyone else to either.  You have the nerve to talk to me about the trouble I’ve caused, but you nearly got me killed.  And don’t worry.  All of this will be in my report.  It clearly didn’t occur to you that I was drifting towards the shipping lanes and straight into the path of a supertanker.  You clearly thought it was perfectly okay to send me out there without the equipment you said I could rely on.  Not only did you dump me into the sea at twelve knots with a jammed safety mechanism on my parachute harness, you’ve done your damnedest tonight to kill me.  It’s an open and shut case of gross negligence and the lawyers will have a field day with it.  To say nothing of the tabloids.  You’re a disgrace to your uniform and you have no right to be an officer in any man’s army.”

During the last part of what I’d said, I’d advanced towards him.  He knew I was extremely angry.  I think he thought I was going to hit him.  Tempting though it was, I’m not that stupid.  Still, it had finally dawned on him what a mess this was and what trouble he was probably going to be in.  The expression on his face had changed dramatically.“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.” 
 
He must have said it half a dozen times.  I said nothing.  I just turned and walked away, acutely conscious that there had been a number of people close enough to listen in on the conversation and be fascinated by it.  I told my film crew what had happened asked the cameraman if he had his stills camera with him and asked him to take some pics of things like the empty flare box and to do it as discreetly as he could manage.  Then, we’d call it a day.  I didn’t have everything I planned, but I knew I’d be able to write and cut my way round the problems.

Two days later, Howard walked into the office before we went to a screening of the rushes.  
“Bloody hell, Ian,” he said, “I thought I was going to get killed on that one.”“Why?”
“It was the plane,” he replied.  “It was a very old DC3.  The airworthiness certificate was so ancient it was yellow and the edges of the paper had gone all dry and brittle.  I’ve never been in a plane that rattled, vibrated and shook quite as much as that one did.  And one of the engines kept cutting out.  Okay, it started again almost immediately, but it was all buttock-clenching stuff.  The sound guy started to worry about whether he’d paid up his life insurance and I have to admit that the bits I did to camera were the most difficult presenting job I’ve ever had.  And some of the manoeuvres that pilot did felt like the end of the world was nigh.  Absolutely terrifying.”

As I recall, the next documentary of major interest was one on Concorde, the Anglo-French supersonic airliner project.  It was originally a project I was doing for Helen Standage, but it was then shifted to Adam Leys, for whom it was to be a half hour documentary.  I put together the people I wanted to be involved, wrote a script for the revised project and continued to do more work on it, including filming the first take-off of the prototype airliner 002 from an airfield at Filton, just outside Bristol.  I also got the first helicopter footage of it.
  
I then had the interesting experience of doing a recce trip on the plane itself as it went on a trip round the UK.  Three things stick in the memory.  First, although we were flying at twice the speed of sound, there was no great sensation of that speed.  Second, when you’re at 75,000 feet, you discover the earth really is round.  And third, at that height, the sky is not blue, it’s black.

  I carried on working on the project for a while and as the time was approaching for the first flight, which was initially planned to go to the US and Australia, there was a growing realisation among a number of people of just what a prestige project this was likely to be.
​
One of those was Adam Leys, who was beginning to have a perspective on the Concorde project that in his view took it into a different stratum of television documentary.  So when he phoned me one evening and asked me if I was free for lunch the following day, I stopped and thought about it for quite a long time before I worked it out.
 
In the middle of the lunch I said, “OK Adam when are you going to get round to telling me that you’re going to fire me from the Concorde project?”
His mouth dropped open and he looked at me in astonishment.
“How the hell did you know that?” he asked.  Well I said you’ve been getting megalomania over this Concorde project for several weeks now and you’ve convinced yourself you need a big name director to do the job for you.  I don’t come into that category.”

Adam looked uncomfortable.This is very difficult for me,” he said.Let  me tell you a couple of things,” I said, ignoring his discomfort.  “You haven’t grasped that hiring a big name director isn’t going to work for you.  For a start, he’s going to make the film he wants to make, not the film you need to deliver.  He’s going to be difficult to work with, because he won’t be interested in listening to what you’re telling him you want.  He’ll just want to do his own thing.  I would have got you the film you needed, because I know exactly what the COI wants.  He doesn’t.  The other thing? Dead simple.  You’ll have my letter of resignation on your desk within half an hour of our getting back from here.  I’ve only got about three weeks left on my current contract, so I can’t see it’s going to be a problem.”
“You don’t have to resign,” said Adam.  “Of course your contract will be renewed.”
I don’t think it ranked as the most pleasant lunch that either of us had ever had.
The handful of people working on the Concorde project were not happy that I’d been fired and over the next few months I got a series of phone calls from them keeping me up to speed with everything that then happened.  As I’d predicted, it didn’t go well.  Adam went through three big name directors before shooting was completed and BIS New York got pretty stroppy about the way things were going.  They insisted on exercising control over the cutting of the film and this meant that the editor, Peter Greenaway, found himself dealing with a bunch of people with the power to tell him exactly what to do.
  
I had asked that Peter cut the film, because he was a class act.  As a person, he initially came across not just as austere and distant, but almost as arrogant.  He could be awkward and distinctly unfriendly until you got to know him better.  Indeed, you never got to know him at all unless he felt you had sufficient intellect to be worth his time.  Once you’d got past that barrier, he wasn’t just good company, he could be extremely interesting.  He was very well-read and had strong views on most things, though his judgments were never superficial and had always been well thought through.  As an editor he was very good, particularly if he thought the project was stimulating enough to engage him. 
​ 
Outside his normal day’s work for the COI, he also made his own films on very low budgets.  If any of us were out on a shoot and had any short ends of film stock left over at the end, we’d always give them to Peter if we possibly could.  He once asked me out of the blue if I spoke any German.  Very little and very badly, I replied.  Perfect, he said.  Just what I need.Would you be up for a scene I want to shoot?” he asked.  “There’s a naked girl in a bath and you’re sitting on the edge of it talking to her in bad ungrammatical German.  Doesn’t matter if it makes no sense.  In fact that’s the point.  Would you do that?”

I don’t think any of us could have foreseen then that Peter would go on to direct major art house movies like The Draughtsman’s Contract, The Architect’s Belly and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and eventually get a BAFTA award for his contribution to the film industry.  The first inkling I got that Peter was a rising star was when he was editing a documentary I’d directed for the MOD about Sandhurst in a cutting room in Shepherd’s Bush.  He asked me if I would mind if he went early the next day, Friday, and came in at lunchtime on Monday. No problem,” I said.  “I wasn’t going to come in until three myself on Monday.  I’ve got a heavy meeting all morning, with a lunch afterwards.  Going away somewhere?” “Yes, New York,” he replied, his voice flat.  “The Museum of Modern Art is doing a retrospective of my films.”“Wow, that’s great, Peter,” I said, feeling all excited for him, but knowing full well that he wouldn’t show any excitement himself.When I got in on Monday, Peter was sitting at his Steenbeck, working away.  I made some coffee.“How was New York?” I asked.“Fine,” he replied.  “Could you come and look at this sequence?  You know, the one you thought didn’t quite work.  I’ve re-cut it. I went and looked at the sequence a couple of times and we spoke about one minor change which he made on the spot.  We then both picked up our coffees and Peter looked at me.  I suddenly realised he was bursting to tell me something.  I waited.
“It was absolutely amazing,” he said suddenly, and his face broke into the half smile of a little boy who thinks he could turn the corner and find an ice cream shop.  “I went to MOMA and I couldn’t get over it.  It wasn’t just the posters.  There were Tulse Lupa t-shirts for sale.  Not just one or two, but dozens and dozens of them.” Tulse Lupa was Peter’s alter ego, the name of a character who featured in almost all of his films.  I waited as he took another sip of his coffee.

“Then I went down to the basement to the loos and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he continued.  “Someone had sprayed the words in black on the white tiles, not just once, but half a dozen times.  Tulse Lupa Lives.  It was amazing.  Something I’d dreamed up in my little flat in Hammersmith was being celebrated in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  I couldn’t get over it.  What I’d created actually meant something to people thousands of miles away.”
“That’s a great achievement, Peter,” I said.I looked at him and at his pleasure and knew I’d probably never see him like that again.  Just for that couple of minutes, he’d let his guard down and shown a degree of feeling that was never normally on view.  Then his face closed up again.“Right, I must get on,” he said, and turned back to his Steenbeck.

Anyway, there was Peter, parked in a cutting room with a load of rushes, but without a director and without a script.  Being told by a bunch of BIS mandarins who knew virtually nothing about making films – they just thought they did - what to do and how to do it hardly counted as guidance.  He called me, explained what had been going on and asked for some help.“There are two things I’m after,” he said.  “First, what was the music you wanted to use? You played it to me once and I thought it was just right.  And second, do you have a copy of your original script?  A lot has changed since you wrote that and the whole thing will certainly finish up very differently, but at least it had a proper shape to it and it’ll give me a starting point.”“The music was the slow movement from Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto,” I said.  “Bo Widerberg used it in Elvira Madigan and I was very irritated because I’d been holding on to it in my mind to use myself.  Then he did it.  I thought it would suit Concorde.  I promise you it’ll be perfect.  And of course I’ll get you a copy of my original script.”

Peter called me a couple of times either to discuss ways of doing things or when he wasn’t quite sure of the significance of some of the technology that was being showcased, most of which I’d shot.  Eventually, I saw the finished film and could see immediately that it didn’t have a director’s signature on it, only the editor’s.  The trouble was that Peter had had nothing to do with shooting the material and so it meant the film wasn’t really anybody’s.  It irritated me, because I knew that if it had been left to the two of us, as had originally been planned, it could have been much better.
It was some years before I saw Adam again.  Then I turned up for some festival in Brighton where I thought I stood a good chance of winning an award and as I walked into the Metropole, there was Adam checking in. “Hello Ian,” he said.  “Fancy a little walk along the beach?”“Actually,” he said, “there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you for some time.  It’s about Concorde.”

“What about it?” I asked.  “I heard you had a difficult time with it.”“Yes, but d’you remember what you said to me at the time?” “You said taking you off it was a decision I’d come to regret,” he said.  “Well, you were quite right about that.  I got it badly wrong and I did come to regret it.  I just wanted to let you know.”

I wondered whether I should tell him about my conversations with Peter when he was cutting it, but decided there was no point.  It would achieve nothing, so I let it be.

The next story worth telling may be a touch incomplete because I’ve had to rely partly on memory and not just on my notes from the time.  I’d met up with John Hall in Soho for a coffee and he was then going on to a company called World Wide.  We’d met about something else – I can’t remember what – but as we were walking up Wardour Street, he suddenly asked me if I’d be interested in putting together a script on traffic management.“Two production companies have had a go at this,” he said, “and neither of them came up with anything that the DoE would accept.  It’s taken two years to get this far, which is absurd, and I thought you might like to come up with something a bit different.”

I did and it was called At Last It’s the Traffic Management Show.  Hosted by James Burke it used a fair bit of comedy to make its points, using actors like Bill Pertwee, Graham Stark, John Wells and John Clive.  It was an unusual approach and everybody liked it.
 
I’ve spoken about some of the people I worked with at the COI – people like John Hall, Adam Leys and Helen Standage - but I’ve left out a lot and as I look back, all sorts of details come to mind.  

Here they are, in no particular order.

The Programme Editor on the African version of London Line was Anna Kaliski.  Anna was a force of nature.  Her personality ran the gamut from utterly charming to totally terrifying.  Her driving exemplified the latter rather than the former.  I was twice driven by her to a meeting we both had to attend and each time I worried whether my daughter was about to lose her father.  I was once in her production office when she came in looking ferociously angry.

“Are you okay, Anna?” I asked.
“No, I’m not,” she replied, flinging her bag and a bundle of papers on to her desk.  “I got stopped by the police just this side of Westminster Bridge.  Unmarked police car.  They said I was speeding.”
“And were you?”
“Probably, but that’s not the point.”
“You mean they gave you a ticket?”
“Of course they didn’t.”
“Why not?
“I got out of my car and I shouted at them.  I told them that they should be charged with dangerous driving.  They were driving far too close to me, trying to intimidate me.  There was I, a single woman, being harassed by another car.  I didn’t know who they were.  I didn’t know they were the police.  It was outrageous and needed to be taken up with their senior officer.  I was furious.”
“What did they say?”
“They didn’t say anything.  They just backed away, got into their car and drove off.”

I worked a great deal on London Line with Margaret O’Donald, Eric Halliday and Jenny Lucas, who were writer/researchers on the programme.  Maggie was astute, conscientious and very effective.  She had dyed her hair blonde on the entirely reasonable grounds that blondes had more fun.  It also meant the she had powers of persuasion not open to mere men and could get people to appear on the programme when they really didn’t want to.  She could be very sharp sometimes, but her professionalism was unquestionable.  I think in many ways she was a rather private person, because I never really felt I knew her at all.

Eric wrote competently and had a reasonable eye for a story.  He was also Jack-The-Lad incarnate.  Everything he said was designed as a form of self-aggrandisement.  He had worked at ITN for some time and still freelanced for them occasionally. 
“They lay on a car to get me home after I’ve done News At Ten,” he would say, as though he was personally responsible for ITV’s flagship news bulletin and needed a chauffeur-driven limo to calm his fevered brow after the show.  The fact that they sent everyone home by taxi after any programme that came off air late was, he thought, a secret known only to him and a few mates.
That makes him sound as though he was awful.  He wasn’t.  He could be very good company and had a brand of humour that wasn’t to everybody’s taste, but could be very funny.

I can’t remember why we first came to call Jenny ‘Mother Lucas’, but it certainly sticks in my mind.  It was probably because of the very maternal way that she took care of things.  There was something of the mother hen about the way she kept her chicks under control, whether it was a crew or the show’s guests.  She was a very nice person and possessed one of the most valuable attributes anyone can have who works in the madhouse that television frequently is.  She was unflappable.

In that respect, Jenny was not unlike Chris Tarrant, who worked as a researcher/producer on Television News Features before he became famous from presenting programmes like Tiswas and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?  Chris was one of the easiest producers I ever worked with.  So laid back, he was horizontal.
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What’s written above doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a selection of tiny snapshots of some of the people I worked with in the late sixties and early seventies.  I’ve always believed that you can talk about concepts, policies and ideas until the cows come home, but in the end it’s the people who make something work.  Or not.  And they come in all shapes and sizes and can have an extraordinary mix of qualities.  They can be brilliant, creative, stubborn, stupid, clever, arrogant, dull, exciting – it doesn’t matter.  They’re just people and if that’s what it takes to make programmes that other people want to watch, then we should just accept that an unusual fusion of characteristics may be needed to make it all happen.