One of the last TV newsmen speaks of the halcyon days of long lunches and fat ratings, living life high on the hog.
At a private members’ club in west London, some of the most televised faces in the country are gathering for a party. In walk Emily Maitlis and Kirsty Wark, television executives and editors of top news shows, all mingling and schmoozing at the Frontline Club. It’s a favourite dive among hacks. ‘A place for foreign correspondents to compare bullet holes and war stories,’ says one. ‘It’s absolutely heaving in here,’ says one producer. ‘It’s taken me ten minutes to get from one side to the other.’ The occasion: a leaving do for Kirsty Wark, a long-serving anchor of Newsnight, and the programme’s veteran diplomatic editor, Mark Urban. More than an adieu to a pair of colleagues, it has the feeling of a wake for the entire TV news industry.
It’s hard to imagine now, but television news once had the pull and influence that the internet enjoys today: moving pictures from around the world, beamed directly into our homes! It was the thing to be in, if you were lucky enough, a job that had a certain old-world cachet, like being an airline pilot or a diplomat or the Prime Minister.
Launched more than 40 years ago, Newsnight quickly pulled in UK viewers for news and current affairs programming. There were only three terrestrial television channels back then, and Newsnight ran investigations, long films about foreign affairs and the arts, and live political interviews. After round upon round of budget cuts at BBC News, Newsnight earlier this year became a zombified and unfrequented chatshow. I should declare an interest: I was a correspondent on the programme for 17 years before I was made redundant. It was a chastening reminder of how fickle this business is.
The news presenter used to be a God-like figure of authority and gravitas. Every generation had its own newscaster. Younger audiences have grown up with Jon Snow at Channel 4, the BBC’s Fiona Bruce or Sky’s Kay Burley. The fall of primetime personalities including Martin Bashir, who bagged his interview with Diana using ‘deceitful methods’, and more recently, Huw Edwards, is greeted with a numb shock, a collective question over how trusted figures could let us down so badly.
At first, I had no intention of joining this club, of becoming a TV correspondent. I wanted to write, and the medium seemed hostile to words. At least newspapers – another creaking legacy medium – dealt in sentences and paragraphs. To be honest, I was put off by the flashy lights and the panstick of TV news. It all seemed a bit garish. But I became a producer at a TV station after losing out on a Fleet Street reporting job to someone who had previously worked for the same station: perhaps here was the route I needed to follow.
Those pre-internet, pre-smartphone days were the carriage age of my profession. It was all so civilised that we practically wore buttonholes and twirled parasols. On my first TV news shoot, I was taken aside by a senior producer who told me that my priority – over and above powerful pictures and yes, yes, telling the story – was organising a nice spot of lunch for the crew. He handed me the Michelin guide. In those days the crew was like a repertory company, a travelling court: cameraman, soundman, sparks, PA, plus a couple of producers and a presenter. They were all counting on me for a decent nosebag.
Later, I was sent to cover a pollution spill in the south-west. We were billeted at a country hotel, some distance from the scene. At breakfast, I started to tell the crew urgent instructions about the story. The cameraman held up his hand, not unkindly. Swallowing his kedgeree, he explained that the hotel had been booked because it boasted a bracingly demanding golf course, designed by an Open champion. Dabbing his lips on a napkin, he went on that he hadn’t put his clubs in the back of the Volvo for nothing. He and his soundman, with whom he was paired for life, would play nine holes while I cooled my heels in the lounge. Only then would they devote themselves untiringly to the story.
In the studio everyone deferred to the presenters, but in the field the crews were kings. Semi-skilled lads who had trained as electricians, they couldn’t believe their luck to be working in the well-paid, tightly unionised concern that TV news was in its heyday. At the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, some TV crews were spending so much time in Belfast that one or two of them had steady girlfriends there, even raising second families. One cameraman bought a rolling farm in the Home Counties on expenses. But they also slept in hotel rooms where glass had been blown out by IRA bombs and replaced with chipboard that flapped like sailcloth. They walked towards parades, burning cars, riots – standing up, eye clamped to the viewfinder, unmissable and defenceless.
Back then, people paid attention to TV news. It got ratings, which meant it pulled in advertising revenue. At that time there was money in it. I was flown to New York to interview Martin Scorsese. I shared a piano stool with Bono. I’ve been to Papua New Guinea and met headhunters who wore penis gourds, and to the far Pacific island of Nauru, where islanders once got rich and fat by selling seagull guano to make explosives.
The business was highly adrenalised and attracted young, good-looking people, so inevitably things got messy. Many staffers had migrated from the boozy environs of Fleet Street, and the drinking culture followed them to TV. It was rare to have a newsroom which wasn’t a short walk to an in-house bar. One newsreader kept his coat in the office of his then editor, who enjoyed a glass or two. The newsreader would finish the evening bulletin, retire to the office where the editor had been watching the programme, collect his jacket and go home. One day he had a furious row with a colleague in the middle of the afternoon and stormed off. He barrelled into the editor’s room and snatched his rainwear from the hatstand. The editor lifted his face from the desk and said, ‘Great show, mate!’
The proprietor of a pub near the studios took a forgiving view of hard-living, free-spending TV news people and lock-ins weren’t unheard of – until a cameraman crashed out in the gents. The next morning, when the governor was rattling up the shutters and taking the milk in, our colleague was still there (and soon on the front page of a best-selling tabloid). I thought it was only characters in P.G. Wodehouse novels who fell asleep in their food until I saw a cameraman do it right in front of me one boozy night. We became friends and he shyly took me aside one day to show me his etchings, a sketchpad of fine drawings. He survived being hit by machine gun fire in Lebanon but died young from a lung disease brought on, it was believed, by inhaling the dust of a bombed-out city. Either that, or the ash of an erupting volcano.
Some newsreaders I’ve known had the attention span of funfair goldfish. With some – the men especially – the self-regard came off them like cheap cologne. Many were surprisingly thin-skinned and insecure, perhaps because they suspected that reading out words others have written scarcely justified their huge salaries. The long days and liquid evenings at party conferences led to some bed-hopping and corridor-crawling. But those same characters, no longer in the business or even alive, in some cases, faced gunfire more than once. They covered coups, revolutions and wars.
The days of liquid lunches, forthright editors and dazzling presenters couldn’t last. For most of my time, we were doing our best to stay ahead of managers who were anxious to make savings. They still fret that TV news is expensive to make. To deploy a film crew on a foreign assignment costs at least five figures: there’s the travel and accommodation of a typical team of reporter, producer and multi-skilled technician, plus very likely a translator/fixer, a driver and a security adviser. Digital news is simply much cheaper, and its reach is growing. Research by the broadcast regulator Ofcom has revealed that 71 per cent of the population said they used online services for news versus 70 per cent who watch television bulletins. The margin’s small but indicates a direction of travel: the figure for TV news is down from 75 per cent in 2023.
Newsrooms are now competing with social media influencers. A friend of mine recently went on a press junket to Modena for the launch of Michael Mann’s biopic of Enzo Ferrari, starring Adam Driver. He was the only hack on the trip. ‘Everybody else was an influencer,’ he said. ‘They spent the whole time changing into different outfits and filming themselves in front of the cars.’ Social media favourites deliver eyeballs, and uncritical coverage, making for happy promoters. But they’re helping drive TV news out of business. Influencers are eating our lunch – and filming it while they eat.
The news is so readily available now, and from so many different sources. At the same time, confidence in once-trusted outlets like the BBC has taken a knock. Does it matter? Well, when you think of some of the biggest events in our lifetime, the chances are you remember them from TV news: 9/11, Brexit, the pandemic, the rise, fall and rise again of Donald Trump. You might recall Prince Andrew’s interview with Maitlis, the last hurrah of my former programme. Television news may be the best means ever devised for telling ourselves what has happened in the world. Many of my former colleagues are doing brave and brilliant work in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere. Good people are taking risks and taking pains to tell us what is going on.
The glamour goes when people stop paying attention. I’ll miss the spangle of TV news and its antic grandiosity, its strange jargon. The fairground barker’s cry of ‘Coming up…!’ or those interrogative handovers. The medium is now facing an ending, just like the ones it has vamped so many times to a once-loyal audience: perhaps it is time for that climactic ‘And finally…’
