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On Wednesday I was in Tunbridge Wells in Kent. I wasn’t looking for the legendary “Disgusted” correspondent of the town but for the location of a BBC hostile environment training course.
In the past journalists covering conflicts and wars may have been rather cynical about such exercises; now they are increasingly becoming targets and there seem to be fewer clearly defined front lines, such courses are taken much more seriously. It is not just death and serious injury that face today’s reporters, producers, camera people and sound recordists but the possibility of kidnapping and rape.
Earlier, back in London I had talked to the BBC’s chief international correspondent, Lyse Doucet, about how she copes in war zones, and with the appalling scenes she has to witness so that we can be informed about what really is going on.
One of the instructors on the course told me how much he had suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. This was manifested not just in nightmares but in appalling images evoked by the smoke of an ordinary bonfire which brought back the smells of a conflict zone - rotting, burning flesh and smouldering car tyres.
I thought back to when I was a Programme Editor sending teams off into dangerous situations. I thought very little about their mental health until one famous reporter had what seemed to be a nervous breakdown following three trips to bloody war zones.
Reporters have died in the past of course
I meeting the charismatic Sunday Times journalist Nicholas Tomalin shortly before he was killed by a missile in Israel in 1973 at the age of just 41. He was hit by a Syrian wire missile while reporting on the Yom Kippur war.
Other teams, who worked for me in the 1980s, had narrow escapes. David Lomax and Mike Dutfield were particularly courageous, though the experience of spending a day in a roadside gutter on a hot Lebanon hillside being fired at by snipers somewhat diminished their enthusiasm not to mention that of their families. David even survived telling the ghastly Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, that he was a mass murderer, before eventually dying in his bed last year at 75. Still too early.
Mike Dutfield braved many battle fields but was killed on his motorbike on the M1, crushed by a lorry. He was just 48 years old. Those two were very special.
As was Alan Stewart, a producer who worked with me on Thames Television’s This Week programme. When I took over in 1986 he told me, with typical candour, that he thought he should have got the job and then proceeded to be totally loyal, enthusiastic, and hard working. We were both ionate about 5 a side football, which was an ideal way of working off the tensions of work. His tackling was ferocious.
In October that year I asked him to go to Sudan where a brutal civil war was even then in progress. His reporter was the African specialist Peter Gill and we were to call the film they made “Where Hunger Is a Weapon”, as we detailed how food aid was being diverted to the various armed groups and civilian areas were being systematically starved.
It was a far from easy assignment but Alan, Peter and the team went without a murmur, determined to tell the world about this humanitarian crisis.
They had finished filming and were leaving the country by what was said to be a safe dirt road when their two lorries went over a hidden land mine. The first, with Peter next to the driver, got through safely.
Alan was in the back of the second lorry with the cameramen and sound recordist.
The mine exploded beneath them injuring Alan’s two colleagues, who took months to recover. Alan was blown up and hit his head on a tree. He died a few hours later, cradled in the arms of his colleagues, far, far away from any hospital.
Peter then called me and I began the process of telling his loved ones what had happened before they heard it on the news. The metal canisters containing the film the This Week team had shot were buckled and twisted in the explosion, but survived. Peter Gill brought them back to Britain with Alan’s body, edited the material and the programme went out.
It seems trite to say that was what Alan would have wanted, but I am sure that it was.
Whenever I hear politicians castigate biased television journalists I think of David and Mike and Alan, the best of public service broadcasters.
Roger Bolton is the presenter of on Radio 4
