I love elections, particularly those that bring real political change. Next Tuesday night I’ll be glued to the box till the early hours with my American future-wife and future-mother-in-law, expecting Palin to be consigned to Alaskan obscurity and the accession of the first black president of the United States.
I think my fascination for the democratic process began in San Francisco when I was 20 and marching for George McGovern behind Jane Fonda. Quite a way behind in fact: there were about 20,000 of us. I guess the sight of so many hippies protesting against the Vietnam War was too much to bear for conservative Middle America; McGovern lost by a landslide.
Two years later I was a trainee journalist in the vast BBC election studio, sitting just behind Robert McKenzie and his Swingometer. I’ll never forget the excitement of the first result, with Robin Day growling at his guests and David Dimbleby calmly in control. I was in the producers’ room of that same studio in May 1979 when Thatcher came to power. And in 1983 I directed the whole of the BBC’s election coverage as Thatcher romped to her second term.
However I think my most memorable election was in the winter of 1979. Regular readers of this blog may recall how I left my job on Panorama and drove east in an old campervan in search of love and the Dalai Lama. I ended up marrying my first wife in a Tibetan ceremony in the Himalayas, but on our way to Nirvana, we completely ran out of money, largely because we had to ship our VW campervan on a tiny Chinese wooden dhow across the Arabian Sea.
We arrived in Delhi stony broke, and resigned ourselves to selling the van and hitching home. Luckily we were befriended by the BBC’s Bureau Chief Mark Tully. One day he announced over lunch that the Indian Prime Minister, Choudhary Charan Singh, had resigned. Indira Gandhi, ousted in disgrace just two years before, was hot favourite to return to power. When Mark told us the date of the election, I realised that in Britain the result would be announced at 8pm on a Monday evening, just as Panorama was going on air. I telexed my old boss in London, and an hour later the machine clattered back with the command: “Hire crew and start filming. Get interviews with Mrs Gandhi, the Prime Minister and the President.”
Our financial troubles were over. However Jilly and I had been on the road for three months; I had long hair and a scruffy beard; we wore ripped jeans and were living in the Tourist Camp, surrounded by vegetarians and clouds of marijuana. It wasn’t quite the image for the BBC’s flagship programme.
With gritted teeth, I went to Connaught Circle and ordered a baggy cream linen suit; a printer ran up some BBC business cards. But Jilly and I were determined not give up our lifestyle altogether, so we spurned the BBC’s offer of moving into the Imperial Hotel. Instead, every morning, a white stretch Mercedes slipped past the rainbow vans in the Tourist Camp to take us to the Presidential Palace. Eventually the urge for a hot shower got the better of us and we persuaded the manager of the Imperial to let us stay in the hotel car park and use the facilities.
For six weeks we followed the Gandhis: Indira, the most charismatic woman I have ever met, and her scary playboy son, Sanjay. On January 15th we sat in our van and heard Mrs Gandhi’s victory speech on the World Service. Her opponent, a man in his seventies, hadn’t stood a chance. Hopefully next Wednesday we’ll be celebrating the defeat of another septuagenarian, and the dawn of a new era in world politics.
Senior First Officer John Coward must have the least appropriate name for a hero. With nerves of steel he guided his 777 onto the Heathrow grass, rather than parking it somewhere in the middle of Hounslow. Quite what he must have felt when the engines lost power in his final approach can scarcely be imagined.
It was hardly life threatening, but I once piloted a television programme that lost power and crash landed in front of six million viewers.
The programme was Panorama, in the days when it was presented live in the studio by David Dimbleby. One week, when I was in the director’s chair, the show looked as though it would be an extremely easy ride. With no studio guests, David had to walk across the studio, sit down at a desk, and introduce two films. We even had some standby films lined up in case anything went wrong.
With the thirty or so television monitors making the studio control room glow like the deck of a jumbo jet, the show took off with its portentous opening music. David went into the first link. “Good Evening. Tonight on Panorama…”
Just as he reached the word “Tonight”, all the screens in the control room suddenly went blank. All except four. Every single piece of film had disappeared, but there were four separate camera shots of David.
In vain, I gazed at the empty screens, willing the films to reappear. The technical crew were screaming into telephones. Oblivious to the approaching catastrophe, Dimbleby kept going.
“Our first film tonight…”
We had just ten seconds before David reached the end of his script. I braced myself for the inevitable.
“Here’s his report”, he announced. Then silence.
It took a few seconds for David to realize we weren’t going to cut away from him. Then he apologised to the viewers, and paused. I rang the telephone on his desk. The scene has been replayed many times on Auntie’s Bloomers Indeed, if you turn up the volume you can just about make out my voice at the end of the line.
“Er, David, we have a problem”.
“I can see that. Shall we go to the next film?”
“Er….there is no next film. And no standby.”
“So, what would you like me to do?”
“Just… keep talking”.
Which he did, for eight gruesome minutes. He talked about the studio, the cameramen, what he was going to have for supper after the show. In front of six million transfixed viewers.
It was a performance worthy of the adlib king Mike Neville during some of the many glorious breakdowns on Look North. But that was local news, and this was the BBC’s current affairs flagship.
Then, suddenly, the screens bounced back into life and I rang the studio phone again to put David out of his misery.
We did eventually find the cause. During the afternoon a fluorescent light bulb had gone out at the back of the control room and someone had rung up the engineering department to have it changed. Just as we went on air, a man in a brown coat arrived clutching a spare, found a switch marked “Power”, turned it off, changed the bulb, and exactly eight minutes later turned it back on again.
I do hope for Boeing’s sake something as simple as that lies behind the 777 problem. Because right now I wouldn’t live in West London if you paid me a fortune. It was bad enough living in Putney for 14 years, right under the flight path, with conversations drowned out every sixty seconds. We all used to fear that one day a plane would come down on top of us.
And yet the Government is seriously thinking of allowing Heathrow to expand and blight the lives of Londoners even further. Instead they should shut the whole thing down and build a decent airport in the middle of the Thames Estuary. Provided Boeing makes sure their planes can float.
