Adventures in Correspondentland Read Online Free PDF Page A

to simplify but to exaggerate. Much like a reader would barely recognise a much-loved novel after it was put through the cinematic wringer, the characters in our news reports would often identify only with the shadowy outline of their story.
    The cadetship finished as it had started, with a written test, and then we were absorbed, like low-grade motor oil, into the BBC news machine. I ended up at our rolling news channel, Radio Five Live, which had so many hours of airtime to fill that even new arrivals were allowed to plug the gaps.
    Sure enough, by day two I had been handed my first assignment. That morning, the Daily Mirror had managed to expose the cracks in Downing Street security by squirrelling areporter into the prime minister’s office. As the latest recruit, I was tasked with revealing the fissures in Daily Mirror security by squirrelling myself into the editor’s office high above Canary Wharf.
    From getting lost on the Docklands Light Railway to finding myself temporarily imprisoned in the stairwell of a 230-metre skyscraper, my first forays could hardly be described as auspicious. But the fear of returning to the newsroom empty-handed pushed me on, and I eventually managed to sneak past the security guards at reception, locate the executive floor and get within metres of the editor’s office. All the way, I had been faithfully capturing every moment of haplessness, and now my tape recorder was in record mode as I took my final steps towards glory.
    With the spires of the City in the near distance and the arc of the Thames below, the view from Piers Morgan’s office was magnificent, and I took great delight in describing the panorama to our listeners. Soon, my commentary was interrupted, as obviously I hoped it would be, by a fretful secretary mortified that I was reclining in her boss’s executive leather chair. Then came Piers Morgan himself, who was happy to play along in this pantomime by delivering a gentle scolding and describing me as a journalistic low-life.
    By now, the main challenge was to make it back to Broadcasting House in central London, and to brandish my razor blade with sufficient speed to deliver the report for the late-afternoon show. With the deadline bearing down on me, I pulled it off with the help of an industrious sound engineer, who underlaid the piece with that most hackneyed of musical clichés, the pounding theme tune from Mission Impossible . Over consecutive hours, we ran the story in two parts: the first ending with your correspondentbanging helplessly on the door of some random office 43 floors up as I tried to escape from the fire escape; the second ending with the self-congratulatory words ‘Mission accomplished’, a phrase that would feature in very different circumstances much later in my career.
    For now, though, as the music died away and the presenter guffawed with delight, I basked in something that I have never managed to replicate: a ripple of applause that spread throughout the newsroom. I had delivered a piece of light entertainment rather than hard-hitting journalism, but it mattered not. After two days spent on the nursery slopes of my career, I had been earmarked as a black-run reporter. So much so that when the news came through from Jerusalem 48 hours later, the newsdesk rang to tell me that I had been booked on a plane at dawn the following morning. It was 4 November 1995, and the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had just been assassinated. My journeys as a foreign correspondent were about to begin.
    As for the loya jirga in Kabul, the children’s choir eventually made it through the security checks and barbed wire to perform on stage before the delegates. Their song was of a land tired of suffering and unfaithfulness, of a country lonely and unhealed, of stars and moons, of poetry and song, and of saddened and weary hearts. As no doubt intended, it provided the ideal coda for our report, but now we feared it might never