Читать книгу Greg Dyke: Inside Story - Greg Dyke - Страница 6

Every so often I try to explain to my own kids what life was like growing up in a small West London suburban street in the 1950s, but I only get mocked for my efforts. I think they laugh because I make it sound too much like the Hovis advertisement where everyone was poor but happy, and the luxuries we aspired to were very simple.

We lived, for the first nine years of my life, in a very ordinary cul-de-sac on the borders between Hayes and Southall in Middlesex. My parents Joseph and Denise bought the house, a new, small suburban semi in a street called Cerne Close, in 1946 for £650. Today it would sell for close to £250,000. They moved there with my brothers Ian, then aged five, and Howard, who was only a few months old. I was born the following year in 1947, a year when there were more births in Britain than in any other year in history. It was the peak of the post-war baby boom with a million children born compared with an average of 600,000 a year today.

The reality was that most people did live very simple lives, compared with today. It’s when I tell my kids that the milk was still delivered by horse and cart that they laugh. We walked to school in a big crowd – just kids, without any parents to escort us – and we all played football in the street with a tennis ball. No one in the street was divorced, and virtually all the children lived with two parents in a classic nuclear family, often with a grandparent in tow. Dad went out to work and Mum stayed behind to look after the children and the home. It was as simple as that.

My dad’s job was selling insurance; as a result we were one of only two families in the street with a car, owned by his company, so we were seen as quite affluent. We also had a telephone for the same reason and neighbours used regularly to knock on the door to ask if they could come in and use the phone.

We were luckier than most of the people in our street as we had at least three holidays each year. Every summer we stayed in a bungalow on the beach at Pevensey Bay in East Sussex, where the big treat of the week was a trip on a boat called the William Olchorn, which took holidaymakers out on trips around Beachy Head lighthouse. On the way back to the bungalow we would all have fish and chips, which we saw as something special. Every Easter we stayed for a week with my parents’ best friends, Uncle Frank and Auntie Vi, in Bridgend in South Wales, and at Whitsun we stayed with ‘Auntie’ Edna and ‘Uncle’ Bill in Emneth near Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where my Auntie Doreen was evacuated during the war; she was joined by my mum and my brother Ian towards the end of the war after their house in Bromley, Kent, had been bombed.

The years we lived in that little street in Hayes were happy times. No one was well off, but neither were they poor. We all had food and clothes, and life was uncomplicated by the choices that greater affluence has brought. I suspect it was also pretty dull, but as a child you didn’t know that.

The Middlesex suburbs have never had a very good press and were widely looked down upon, particularly by the English upper-middle classes, but the criticism was, and is, unfair. These areas were largely populated by the aspiring English working class; most of the people who lived in this area of West London had moved there from pretty awful conditions in inner London. They wanted something better for themselves and, in particular, they wanted something better for their children. In most cases they achieved it.

My parents were typical. They had both been brought up in Hackney in East London. On my mother’s side her father had been a soldier who had fought in the Boer War. He fell in love with South Africa and wanted to stay but his fiancee, my grandmother, refused to leave London and join him. Instead he came back to England, got married, and went to live on the Isle of Dogs, where he became a docker like the rest of his family. He was later injured in an accident at the docks and, after a long battle, won some compensation from the dock owners. With it he bought a small newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop in Morning Lane, Hackney. My grandmother ran the shop while my grandfather spent the takings at the local dog track. Whenever he had a big win he would come home in a taxi with his bike on the top.

My mum’s mother, my gran, was one of six children who had been brought up by their grandparents in Farnham, Surrey, after both their parents had died when they were young. She always told how the local villagers were supposed to doff their caps to the gentry as they went by, but her grandfather wouldn’t let them. He used to tell them ‘You’re as good as they are.’ My grandmother went into ‘service’ at a young age and worked her way up from the scullery to become a ladies’ maid at a big house in Sloane Square in London. Her life was tinged with tragedy. She never really got over the loss of all three of her brothers in the First World War. All were much younger than her, and she had helped to bring them up. During the war they lived with her in the shop in Hackney when they were home on leave. One by one they all died. Their loss was enormous. Right up until she died, in 1973, you could call in to see her and find her in tears thinking of her brothers and the waste of their lives.

My paternal grandfather came from a family of publicans in North London. They owned a series of pubs in Islington and Dalston and my father was born in one of these, the Trafalgar. They were a fairly affluent North London family and there is a Dyke family vault in the Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, near where Christine, my eldest daughter, now lives with her partner Martin. My grandfather died in his early thirties in the 1919 flu epidemic, which worldwide claimed more victims than the First World War. My dad was seven at the time.

His mother, my paternal grandmother, left home at the age of fourteen when her widowed mother took up with another man – known only in the family as Mr Sadgrove – and had an illegitimate child, Horace James. Years later, at her ninetieth birthday party, everyone kept pointing out Horace and saying, in very loud whispers, ‘He’s the illegitimate one, but don’t mention it.’ When she left home my grandmother got a job as a barmaid at one of the Dyke pubs and married out of her class when she became the wife of the publican’s son, Leonard Dyke. He left my grandmother penniless when he died; any money he had he left in trust for my dad and his brother Leonard. My grandmother wasn’t even allowed to continue running their pub because, as a woman, she couldn’t hold a licence. Instead, the brewery offered her an off-licence and general grocer’s shop in Tresham Avenue, Hackney, where my father and his brother Len were brought up.

My grandmother Lil came from a big Walthamstow family that was dominated for more than half a century by four powerful sisters: Lil, Beat, Flo, and Ruby. They were known in the family as the big four, and all dominated their husbands. They all lived long lives; two of them received telegrams from the Queen on their hundredth birthdays. My grandmother died at the age of 101. She and I never really got on: according to the rest of the family we were too alike. We were both very competitive and hated losing (as a young boy I regularly beat her at cards). One of her brothers, Albert Silverton, worked as a commissionaire at Broadcasting House in Portland Place in the 1930s. When I joined the BBC it became a family joke – commissionaire to Director-General in only two generations.

My parents met at St John’s Church in Hackney and got married in 1939, living first in Birmingham and later in Bromley. They moved to Hayes soon after the end of the war. As a family we weren’t poor but we never had any money. Like most of those around us, we never went abroad for a family holiday – my first visit overseas came when I was sixteen on a school trip to Paris. And we certainly never ate in restaurants. The first time we ever ate out together as a family was at the Swan and Bottle, a Berni Inn steak bar in Uxbridge: I was 14 or 15 at the time.

Some things are memorable from that time. I vividly remember being told by my mother that King George VI had died: it was the same day in February 1952 that my brother Ian took the 11-plus exam. For my parents, the King represented something special because of the symbolic role he had played in the East End of London during the Second World War. People in the East End respected the King and Queen because they had stayed in London during the Blitz and had regularly visited the parts of East London that were badly bombed.

On the day of the King’s funeral they both went to stand by the railway bridge in nearby Southall as the train carrying the King’s body passed by on its way to Windsor. They thought it important that they pay their respects and I can remember to this day my dad leaving in his best suit and trilby hat and my mother in her best dress. They were dressed to the nines just to stand by a railway bridge. This was still the age of respect.

None of my memories of living in Cerne Close is as exciting as those of the street party my mother helped organize to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the following year. My brother Ian took part in a sketch put on by the older kids and I sang a song, pretending that the tennis racket I was holding was a guitar. We all had jellies and sandwiches in the street – it was a magical day for a six-year-old. Nearly fifty years later I sat in the royal box in the grounds of Buckingham Palace as the BBC put on two spectacular concerts to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession, and afterwards I wandered around the Palace meeting members of the Royal Family. It was a lifetime away from Cerne Close.

I remember the coming of television vividly. My early childhood was spent with Listen with Mother on the Home Service. Then television arrived. Initially, only two people in our street had television sets, the Riches at Number 21 and Mrs Unstead, who lived in the corner house, and all the kids in the street used to pile into one or other house to watch children’s television. And then, in 1953, came the great day when Howard and I, walking home from school, were, by complete coincidence, counting the number of houses that had television aerials. Life in Hayes wasn’t exactly exciting in those days and this was the sort of thing you did as a kid. We turned the corner and, lo and behold, there was an aerial on the roof of our house. We rushed in to find a television set, which my dad had bought so my mother could watch the Coronation and he could watch the Cup Final. We were really excited until about a week later when it stopped working. My dad called out the TV repair man, who came and plugged it back in. Dad was never a practical man, and I’ve followed in his footsteps.

Our set only received BBC and when ITV started in 1955 my dad refused to change the set, which meant that my brothers and I missed all those early ITV programmes like The Invisible Man, Robin Hood, Take Your Pick, and Double Your Money. I remember we felt very deprived that we couldn’t join in the conversations at school about these programmes. My dad was always of the view that the BBC was ‘proper’ television and that advertiser-funded television was inevitably inferior. He believed this until the day he died in 1990.

In our last years in Hayes, in the late Fifties, the area began to change rapidly. Southall became a massive centre for Indian immigrants and changed beyond recognition in just a few years. For those original residents who remained in the area the speed of change must have been traumatic. One moment you knew all your neighbours; the next, most of them were strangers from an entirely different culture who didn’t speak your language.

After we had moved from our street some residents clubbed together to try to prevent Asian families from buying houses in the road. Of course they were branded as racist by some, but that was unfair. They weren’t being unkind or reactionary – quite the opposite. They were simply scared by the pace and scale of change all around them and didn’t understand its causes. They had seen the centre of Southall change beyond recognition and they didn’t want to see the same happen to their street.

A couple of years ago I went back to the area when, as Director-General, I was invited to open the new hall at Yeading Junior school, where I was a pupil between 1954 and 1958. In 1958 the school was entirely populated by white working-class and lower-middle-class kids. Forty years later it was 80 per cent non-white, with children from dozens of different ethnic backgrounds. If a sociologist had moved into our house when we moved out in 1956, and had stayed to study Cerne Close and the surrounding area over the next forty years, he or she would have had a brilliant case study of the impact of immigration on a small community.

These were the days when the 11-plus dominated life for parents in streets like ours. If you were one of the 20 per cent who passed the exam you went to the local grammar school; if you didn’t, you went to the secondary modern and, educationally, were effectively written off. No one we knew went to private school. I don’t think anyone considered it an option: it wasn’t on their radar screen even if they could have afforded it, which they couldn’t.

One of the most traumatic memories I have of my childhood was when my eldest brother Ian failed the 11-plus. It was a family tragedy, and my parents were distraught. I took the exam six years later when there were four or five boys from our street taking it. Only one failed but his parents were broken hearted. My hatred of the 11-plus, and the whole concept of selection at the age of eleven, is rooted in those experiences. This was one of the main reasons why, later in life, I joined the Labour Party and Sue and I sent all our kids to comprehensive schools.

We left Hayes in 1957 to move to a bigger house three miles away in Hillingdon. My parents paid £4,500 for it: today it would be worth somewhere between £350,000 and £400,000. We moved there when I was nine and it was certainly a move up market. We had a detached three-bedroomed house with a large garden where my father spent most Saturdays and Sundays tending his vegetables, when he wasn’t fishing at a gravel pit in nearby Harefield.

Unlike Ian, both Howard and I passed the 11-plus and consequently went to Hayes Grammar School; neither of us was notably academic and one year I came bottom of the whole year – 132nd out of 132 pupils. Another year I remember Howard getting 7 per cent in his maths exam and his teacher saying in his school report that ‘He thoroughly deserves this mark.’ I also remember walking into a chemistry exam and the teacher saying to me ‘Not a lot of point you coming in, Dyke.’

Our school was dominated by the headmaster, Ralph Scurfield. When I look back I think he was a really good headmaster, a great character, and a real leader, but we all lived in fear of him. After I left school I had no contact with him for nearly twenty years until I first hit the headlines at TV-am. One day Jane Tatnall, my secretary at the time, told me there was a Mr Scurfield on the phone. I picked it up and he said ‘Is that you, Dyke?’ My answer was entirely predictable. I said ‘Yes, sir’, as if nothing had changed over the intervening years. I was even tempted to stand up when I said it. Mr Scurfield had retired by then but was phoning on behalf of the new head teacher to ask me to give the prizes at speech day.

I went, and so did Mr Scurfield, who confided in me that day that he wished he had never used the cane while a headmaster. As I had been beaten by him on a couple of occasions, his conversion to non-violence didn’t impress me. I wasn’t ready for truth and reconciliation yet. Mr Scurfield is still alive and living in Sheffield and we write to each other once or twice a year.

Soon after I became Director-General I invited a few of my old teachers to dinner at the BBC, along with my brother Howard. I suppose I invited them so I could say to them ‘OK, I didn’t do so badly after all, did I?’ All the teachers were retired and seemed to enjoy their evening, especially the red wine. After a few bottles one of them said to me that on the way there they had discussed my progress in life. ‘We would like to say we spotted your potential,’ he said, ‘but in truth we all agreed you were one of the least likely pupils to succeed.’ It’s amazing how teachers can still wound, even after nearly forty years.

In Hillingdon we lived in a road called Cedars Drive, where I really enjoyed my teenage years. The street was full of boys (there were very few girls, except for my friend Val Clifton), and we did all the things boys did. Some of us became paper boys at the local newsagent’s, which was run by a retired army officer, John Kane, known to us as Major John. We all liked working there, but he drove us all mad. He smoked like a chimney and would regularly leave his cigarette on the pile of newspapers he was marking up, which would then catch fire. But what really annoyed us about Major John was his habit of sleeping in so that when we turned up to collect our papers for delivery they were never ready for us. My first experience of being an ‘activist’ came at the age of fourteen or fifteen when I organized industrial action amongst the paper boys. We weren’t bold enough to strike, but we decided that it was time we frightened Major John, so none of us turned up for our rounds until an hour after the normal time. I think he was a bit shocked but he quickly found out I was the ringleader and took me to task. He told me that if I didn’t want to work on his terms and conditions I should leave. Forty years later I can understand what he was getting at, but at the time I thought he was being extremely unreasonable. My greatest success as a paper boy came when my friend Mick Higgins and I decided to go round to all our customers at Christmas, knock on their door, and wish them the compliments of the season. I think we got twice as many Christmas tips as anyone else.

Until girls came along, sport dominated the lives of all the boys on our estate and over the years we set up two football teams. The first, called Cedarwood Rangers, played in Newcastle United’s black and white shirts; then, when we were older, we started Vine Athletic, who played in blue. The team was named after the local pub, the Vine, where we did most of our training. It was one of those pubs where you could be a regular at sixteen.

I’ve often wanted to make a documentary about kids from a typical street and tell the story of what happened to them in later life. In our street, the boys went on to do a whole range of things. Roger Weller became a teacher while his brother Keith was a senior civil servant in the Department of Education and ended up with an OBE. Mick Higgins went to work as a sales rep in the food industry, and Peter Hinley became a hairdresser but sadly died young. John Hayes did well in finance, while Martin Webb worked for British Airways before joining his dad’s business. Peter Bowden became an estate agent and Robin Cameron went into interior design. My brother Howard is currently a professor at the top university in South Korea while my brother Ian, after a life in the insurance industry, was the first to retire and was very proud of it.

I suppose I became the most famous by becoming Director-General of the BBC, but Christopher Barrett-Jolly came a close second. He came from the poshest family on our estate – at least we all thought they were posh because they had a double-barrelled name – and went off to be an airline pilot. At one time he ran a company flying live animals in and out of Birmingham Airport, which brought him a lot of flak from the animal rights lobby. Later, Chris hit bad times and received a good deal of publicity when he was sentenced to twenty years in jail for trying to smuggle £22 million worth of cocaine into the country. He had been caught flying a plane full of the drugs into Southend Airport. When he realized the police were waiting for him at the airport, he and his colleagues decided to try throwing the drugs out of the back of the plane, littering the runway with cocaine.

My best friend, then and now, is Richard Webb, who also lived on our estate. He had TB as a kid and as a result has a shortened left leg, which means he has had to wear a raised boot for most of his life – although you’d never have known it as you watched him playing football, cricket, or, in later life, in business. When people accuse me of being a competitive human being I always tell them they ought to meet my friend Richard. This was a man who impounded an easyJet plane, when it was full of passengers and just about to leave Stansted Airport for Nice, because he was owed £520 by the company. They refused to pay, so he went to the local County Court, representing himself, and got a court order. EasyJet still refused to pay so he got the bailiffs out and seized the plane. When an anxious easyJet executive rang and agreed to pay up, Richard made him send the money in cash by bike before he would release the plane.

Richard left school at sixteen and trained to become a chartered accountant. He’s been my financial adviser for most of my life and in recent years has been involved in virtually all the business ventures I’ve undertaken. The only reason I’ve got lots of money today is because Richard has looked after it for me. I’ve only ever paid him for his advice once. When we all made a lot of money out of London Weekend Television in the early Nineties I gave him a pile of my shares, explaining that it was his payment for life: twenty years in arrears and twenty years in advance. I’m a bit worried that the second twenty years ends in 2012.

I trust Richard more than anyone else I’ve ever met in my life. We’ve always argued and disagreed about all sorts of things, but we go back so far that it would never occur to either of us not to act in the other’s best interests. Richard has access to every bank account I possess and he could completely clean me out if he wanted to, but of course it would never happen. That’s what friendship is. When I was running the BBC and was criticized for retaining certain private business interests – on the grounds that I couldn’t do more than one job at once – I tried to explain that they took up very little of my time because my friend Richard looked after my business interests for me. Of course for the journalists that spoiled a good story, so they ignored it.

I had a very happy childhood; as the third son in the family I had few of the battles with my parents that my elder brothers had had. In those days the vast majority of school leavers didn’t go on to higher education; sadly, many of the brightest kids at my school left at sixteen because their families either couldn’t afford, or didn’t have the aspiration, for them to stay on. Although I had not done well at school my results picked up a bit in the last year or two and I passed six GCE O-levels. It was just about enough for me to stay on for the sixth form, but going on to university or college was never a realistic prospect.

I had a great time in my last two years at school. I played rugby for the First XV, was the school 440 yards running champion, was in all the school plays, and even sang in the choir. That’s a slight exaggeration. I used to stand next to my good friend Dave Hornby, who had a great bass voice. He sang and I mimed. In fact we were together in the choir at the Royal Albert Hall on the night President Kennedy was assassinated. When people ask me where I was when JFK died, I always tell them I was miming at the Albert Hall.

I was enthusiastic about everything in those last two years, except academic work. I took A-levels in economics, and pure and applied maths, but didn’t understand any of it. When I achieved a grade E in my combined maths A-level, which meant I had just passed, I was amazed – as was my maths teacher. When I met him in a pub about ten years after I left school he told me he still used me as an example of why pupils shouldn’t give up at the mocks ‘because miracles could happen’.

On Saturdays I used to work in a shoe shop, first in Ealing and later in Acton. My greatest claim to fame at that time was that I sold Roger Daltrey a pair of plimsolls. We sold cheap shoes but it didn’t stop people complaining. I’ll always remember someone coming back unhappy, not unreasonably, because on getting home and opening the bag they’d found I’d sold them odd shoes – one was a size six, the other a size ten. What was strange was that we never found the matching pair.

While selling shoes, I learnt a lot about how salesmen con the public. If the shoes we were trying to sell were too big we’d explain that it was cool in our basement and that the customer’s feet would expand when they got outside. If they were too small we’d say that they had been walking a lot and that their feet had expanded but that the shoes would be fine once they got home. The biggest scam was selling the shoes for which we got extra commission – the shoes people didn’t want to buy. The trick was to bring the customer the wrong-sized shoes, and then miraculously pull out a pair that fitted perfectly, which just happened to be the pair on which we earned the largest commission.

When it came to leaving school and getting a proper job my mother had always warned me that I would have to ‘buckle down’ and that life wouldn’t be as much fun any more. She was so right; in my first venture into the world of full-time work I became a trainee manager at Marks & Spencer, at the Watford branch in Hertfordshire. I got the job largely because my dad’s brother, my Uncle Len, was a manager at M&S for more than thirty years and he put a word in for me. I started in September 1965, and hated every minute of it; it was purgatory.

In those days, M&S stores were largely managed by cautious public-school boys. Most of the bright people worked in head office, where they controlled almost everything. It was obvious to me that people in the stores were not encouraged to use their own initiative. When, many years later, M&S was in financial difficulties and the company decided to change the way they ran things, they announced that they wanted their managers to act as if they were franchisees. When I read this I nearly wrote to them to tell them that they had no chance of making this work. The people they now wanted to run their stores had either been sacked or had left in desperation over the years. The people they’d retained were those who did what they were told and kept their noses clean. They didn’t seem to understand that you can’t change the fundamental culture of a company merely by announcing that you’ve done so. It’s rather more complicated than that.

I remember being constantly in trouble, almost from the day I arrived at M&S. I set up the all-time broken biscuit record when I worked in the stockroom, got told off for not having my hair cut short enough, was told to stop chatting up the attractive shop girls, and was asked by the manager if I’d had any elocution lessons when I was at school. As a joke, I told him I’d gone to school in Hayes, where no one could even spell elocution, let alone take lessons in it. He didn’t think it was at all funny.

After four months I got the sack. Because I was a management trainee they sent down some bigwig from head office to give me the news. With him came the latest of the Sieff family, who ran M&S. He was learning about human resources as he was fast tracked through the organization. I was shocked to be fired, but also absolutely delighted. They even gave me three months’ money to leave. Years later, when I got a lot of publicity at TV-am, I was interviewed by one journalist and asked if I regretted not going into television earlier in life. My answer was that everyone should start their working life at Marks & Spencer, because it could only get better after that. Soon after the interview, David Frost bumped into Marcus Sieff, the then boss of M&S. Sieff said to him, ‘I see you are employing one of our boys now,’ so clearly someone had noticed.

The four months I spent at M&S had a profound influence on my future direction in life. It certainly prejudiced my views against public-school boys for many years, which, in turn, pushed my political views further in the direction of Labour. It also convinced me that my mother had been wrong. I decided there and then that I would never do a job and be miserable again; if I didn’t like a job in the future I would leave. My dad, horrified that I was out of work, then tried to persuade me to follow him and my eldest brother into the insurance industry, or else try for a job in the local solicitor’s office. I was having none of it. I’d tried work their way. Now it was my turn.

I was determined to find something exciting through which I could express myself. One day, when I was still unemployed, I wandered into the office of a fairly new local newspaper based in Uxbridge called the Hillingdon Mirror and met the editor, Brian Cummins. The paper was a tabloid with a colour picture on the front page; the office was a complete tip. I had a long chat with Brian and told him why I wanted to be a journalist; as I left I remember thinking that I could enjoy life there. A few months later, while I was working in a temporary job, he rang me and offered me a job as a reporter.

Brian was 27 at the time but he seemed old to us youngsters in the office. Not only was he the boss, he had also spent two years in the RAF doing national service. We always used to joke that he’d spent his time learning to fly Sopwith Camels. He was a great man to work for and let us all get on with it. The paper was manned by indentured junior reporters, young kids who had signed up for three years at very little money to learn the business. It was Brian’s job, along with his deputy, Peter Hurst, to teach us.

The newspaper group we all worked for, King & Hutchings of Uxbridge, was so mean they didn’t even supply typewriters; you had to buy your own. I’ve still got mine. Expenses were virtually unheard of, although at a stretch they would pay bus fares, and the entertaining policy was straightforward: don’t, and if you do you won’t be reimbursed. I was always someone who challenged everything and after a couple of years I decided this was exploitation, particularly when we found out that the tele-ad girls earned more money than the indentured journalists. I organized a demonstration of junior reporters. Ray Snoddy, later to be an eminent media journalist on the Financial Times and The Times, was one of those who joined the protest. We demanded to see the top man.

We clearly got the company worried because in the end Mr Larriman agreed to meet us. Now everyone at King & Hutchings believed Mr Larriman was a mythical figure. No one knew him but when middle management talked about him it was in hushed tones. He was only ever known as Mr Larriman: no one knew his first name, let alone used it. He ran the whole newspaper group, ten or twelve prosperous papers stretching right across West London. When we met him we tried to explain that all the indentured juniors, and there must have been forty of us in all, were short of money and needed more. I can remember his reply to this day. He told us there was no point in increasing our wages because we were young and would only spend the money on things like records and portable radios. I think the Sixties youth revolution must have passed Mr Larriman by.

We all pretended we were proper big shot journalists and joined the National Union of Journalists so that we could flash the big NUJ membership card around. Having failed to impress Mr Larriman by organizing the junior journalists, I decided on a different approach and got myself elected as Father of the Chapel – the shop steward for all the journalists working in Uxbridge. I spent the next year or so trying to be a pain to the management.

On the Hillingdon Mirror we were trying to break the mould of local journalism. We didn’t report the local court proceedings much, and we certainly didn’t cover weddings and funerals. As a result we struggled to find enough to fill the paper, and consequently didn’t sell that many copies. We’d spend our days on the road making ‘contact calls’, as Brian Cummins used to call them – trying to find stories. My best friend as a reporter was a tall, good-looking boy called Roy Eldridge, who ended up in the pop music industry. His version of contact calls was different from the rest of us – he ended up having a torrid affair with the woman who ran one of the local residents’ associations. My girlfriend at the time was another reporter on the paper, Christine Webb. One day I was called in by Brian Cummins and told that his boss, the editor-in-chief, had seen us ‘making contact’ in the office one evening and that this wasn’t appreciated.

I’ve always enjoyed working hard, so in my days on the Hillingdon Mirror I had a second job at the weekends to earn a bit more money. I worked for a news agency in Guildford called Cassidy and Leigh. If you talk to anyone who has run the newsdesk of a popular national paper they’ll know about Cassidy and Leigh. Our job was to sell stories to them. Cassidy and Leigh were good, hard newsmen, but they also provided frothy stories for the tabloids. Not all these stories had to be 100 per cent true, just as long as the people you were writing about agreed they were. I remember, in particular, that we sold a whole string of stories about a Roman Catholic convent in Godalming whose nuns were terribly publicity conscious and getting headlines like ‘Officiating at the Morning Service’ – with a picture of a nun lying under a car wielding an enormous spanner.

My interest in politics really dates back to that time working on the Hillingdon Mirror. I became the paper’s part-time political reporter and spent a lot of time with local councillors, MPs, and the like. I left the paper in 1969, initially to run the Staines regional office of the Evening Mail, a brand-new evening paper that was being started in Slough, but within a few months I had become its full-time political reporter. I was now a specialist. At that time I shared a flat in Windsor with a photographer called Jeff Wright, whom I had first met at King & Hutchings and who had made the move to the Evening Mail a few months before me. Jeff and I are still close friends.

In my second year at the Evening Mail I began to think about going to university. Although I was told I didn’t need a degree to have a good future as a journalist, I began to become conscious that I hadn’t had much of an education. Someone I knew had got a place at university without the normal qualifications and I began to think about applying myself. I suppose I felt intellectually inferior to those who had been to university and needed to prove to myself, and to others, that I wasn’t. I was also getting more and more interested in politics and wanted to study the subject.

I persuaded the editor of the Slough Evening Mail, John Rees, to give me a reference and set about filling in the appropriate university entrance forms. Much to my surprise I was offered interviews at Lancaster, East Anglia, and York, and then was offered places at all three. Although I only had my one maths A-level, all three were willing to take a chance on me. I chose to go to York because it was a beautiful campus and the people I met at the interview were both challenging and friendly. Twenty years later, after I had made a great deal of money, I decided that the risk the university had taken by offering me a place deserved to be rewarded. As a way of saying thank you, I gave them a quarter of a million pounds, which they used to build an all-weather sports pitch.

Changing from being a reporter on popular newspapers to studying politics required an enormous adjustment that took me at least a year to achieve. For the first time in my life I had to understand what academic study was all about. I remember vividly the first essay I wrote at York. I was asked to ‘Discuss the causes of the English industrial revolution’. I remember reading one chapter of one book, thinking ‘That’s it, cracked that’, and then just repeating what I’d read. It was pointed out to me by my tutor that academia was about collecting a range of opinion and assessing the strengths of different ideas, not just taking the first available option. I was no longer a pop journalist.

Gradually I grew to understand what it was all about and, as an older student who had made a positive decision to go to university, I worked pretty hard compared to most of those around me. In my politics course I tended to specialize in three areas. I wrote my dissertation on the origins of the Cuban revolution, and grew fascinated by the history of the Soviet Union; but the most exciting period came in my final year, 1974, when I was studying American politics. It coincided with the unfolding of the Watergate scandal – Richard Nixon resigned as President just after I had finished the course. The American Politics lecturers decided to abandon their usual course and rearrange the whole year around Watergate, which was a brilliant move as it meant you could study the theoretical base of US politics through what was actually happening during that year. The separation of powers between President, the Senate, and the Congress really meant something when the President was in the process of being impeached. I have been a Watergate groupie ever since, although even now I still don’t fully understand why Nixon’s people decided to burgle the Watergate building in the first place, and I’m not sure anyone else does.

I had long been interested in US politics and at the end of my first year at York spent the entire summer wandering around the United States. I went to the Democratic Party convention in Miami, where I worked briefly on the campaign for George McGovern, the US senator who was to stand for the Democrats in the 1972 presidential election. I then wandered off to find out about the USA. I hitched my way around the country, covering some eight thousand miles. I was on my own, which enabled me to discover America in a way I couldn’t have done by any other means. From Europe we tend to see the USA as California and the Eastern seaboard. By hitching through the Midwest you discover another America.

The Vietnam War was still raging and in town after town in the Midwest there were very few young men in evidence – they were all away at the war. I also travelled down to El Paso in Texas to meet members of our extended family. Both my US cousins had fought in Vietnam, and both had been screwed up by the experience.

Being at York University in the early Seventies was an interesting experience. These were the days of sit-ins and radical action. Having gone to university from a job in which I’d been seen as a bit of a leftie, at York I was seen as a revisionist because I was a Labour Party supporter. The Socialist Workers Party and their like saw me as dangerous because, although I was of the Left, I didn’t agree with them that the true path to change was through revolution. I distinctly remember the leader of the hard Left at York walking into a meeting and apologizing for being late by explaining that he had ‘been out working for the revolution’. All his fans applauded. His name was Peter Hitchens, now a right-wing columnist on the Mail on Sunday. I’m amazed when I discover that there are still Trotskyist organizations active in British universities, egged on by the last of the Trotskyist academics.

Unlike most students I did pretty well financially while at university. As I was 24 I got a full local authority grant and when I arrived at York decided I didn’t want to live on campus but would rent my own house instead. I then rapidly came to the conclusion that it would be cheaper to buy than rent. My dad had just retired and one of his insurance policies had paid out, so I borrowed the lot, paying him a decent rate of interest, and bought a small terraced house in Briggs Street, near the Rowntree factory. I paid the princely sum of £1,200 for the house, got a local authority grant to add on a bathroom, and sold it for £5,000 when I left. When I was in York recently I was fascinated to see similar houses are now selling for £120,000. I wonder where the poor of York can now afford to live.

But my most memorable financial experience at university was my libel action against the local evening paper, the York Evening Press. They had run an article saying that a local printer wouldn’t print a student newspaper because of an article written by me that was claimed to be obscene. While it was true that the printer wouldn’t print the paper it had nothing to do with my article, which was about the California marijuana initiative (an attempt to make the drug legal on the West Coast of the United States). I asked for an apology but the editor of the Evening Press, unaware that he was dealing with a student who had trained as a journalist, refused. So I decided to sue. In the end I got a full apology, all my legal costs, and £250 as an out of court settlement. Given that a full grant in 1974 was just £420, this was a good day: my girlfriend at the time, later my wife, Christine Taylor and I had a good summer in France on the York Evening Press.

There is a postscript to the story. In 2003 I was invited as Director-General of the BBC to be the guest speaker and present the awards at the York Evening Press Annual Business Awards. As DG you get hundreds of similar invites, but this was one I couldn’t resist. Clearly no one at the paper was aware of the history; in my speech I told the whole story. I ended by thanking the Evening Press for making my life at York more comfortable.

Going to York as a mature student completely changed my life; it’s why I’ve always been keen to encourage as many people as possible to go to university, particularly those who are older and who may have missed out on formal education the first time round. After I had left York I convinced Jeff Wright, my flatmate in Windsor, that although he didn’t have a single O-level he was certainly clever enough to go to university. He ended up with a very good degree from Swansea University and went on to get a Masters. He was just another kid whose education was screwed up by the 11-plus.

In late 2003 I was appointed Chancellor elect of York University, which the Sunday Times recently named as University of the Year. For someone who went as a student with one A-level and caused a fair amount of trouble when I was there, I was both amazed and flattered to be asked to take on the role.

Unlike most students I haven’t remained in close contact with many of my friends at York, with the exception of Marianne Geary, a girl from Northern Ireland. We’ve always enjoyed each other’s company and she’s very perceptive about me and what drives me. Just a few days after I left the BBC, I received an e-mail from Marianne telling me that Keith, her husband, had cancer and was about to have a kidney removed. At a time when I was feeling pretty sorry for myself it was a real awakening. By comparison, what was I making such a fuss about? Thankfully, it looks like Keith will make a full recovery.

When I left York after three incredibly stimulating years I wasn’t sure what to do, so I went back to work in regional newspapers. My girlfriend Christine, who became my wife in 1975, was going to Newcastle University to do a one-year course to train as a probation officer, and it so happened that John Rees, my former editor on the Slough Evening Mail, was now the editor of the Journal in Newcastle. I wrote to him and he immediately offered me a job.

Going back to local journalism was a terrible mistake. Just as I had had to unlearn being a pop journalist when I went to university, so I was expected to forget all I had learnt while there and be a pop journalist once again. I hated the experience. I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in what some jumped-up councillor thought, nor was I prepared to create stones simply because someone said they were true when it was quite clear they were bullshit. The only good thing about the six months I spent on the Journal was that I met some people there who were to play a significant part in my future life. One was Peter McHugh, the industrial correspondent on the paper at the time, who later worked with me at TV-am and is now in charge of GMTV. The second was Nick Evans, who was doing a similar job to me on the regional evening paper, the Evening Chronicle.

Nick is a very close friend who always claims that he was the better reporter of the two of us, and it is certainly true that his shorthand was better than mine. Much later in life, Nick became famous when he wrote his first book, The Horse Whisperer, which became an international bestseller and was turned into a film starring Robert Redford. Nick played a big part in getting me my first job in television and later we worked together running a programme at London Weekend Television.

While in Newcastle I decided I didn’t want to be a journalist any more – I wanted to do something more useful in society; so I got a job as a campaign organizer for Wandsworth Council for Community Relations. This meant Christine and me leaving Newcastle, which we both liked (even though I disliked my job), and moving to London, where she became a probation officer, also in Wandsworth. One day I was at home decorating our flat when she brought home a fellow probation officer, a very attractive girl called Sue Howes. Seven years later, after both our marriages had failed, Sue and I became an item, and still are.

My job involved organizing campaigns in the field of race relations. The Borough of Wandsworth had been a centre for both Asian and West Indian immigration in the 1960s and 1970s and the Community Relations Council was an organization that sought to bring representatives of the different ethnic minority communities together. I’m not sure anyone was really quite sure what a Community Relations Council was supposed to do, but my boss there, a man called Charles Boxer, believed that we should be a campaigning organization influencing local and national policy in the field of race. He employed me to set up campaigns and to get him, the organization, and the campaigns plenty of press publicity, which is exactly what I did.

I worked at WCCR for close on two years and discovered something profound: that no one, at any level, had solutions to some of the problems we identified. Worse still, neither did we – although of course we pretended we did by blaming the Government or the local council or claiming that more money would sort out all the problems. I had given up regional journalism because I thought it was superficial. Now I had found exactly the same thing in another area.

From this I began to recognize what I still believe today to be a fundamental difficulty in the relationship between pressure groups, media, and politics. Politicians are incapable of saying ‘We don’t know the solution to this’, or even ‘We don’t think there is a solution’. If they did, they would be portrayed as weak or incompetent by the media. Pressure groups and opposition politicians play the same game by demanding that ‘Something must be done’, while politicians in power resort to saying ‘Something is being done’. The whole process is damaging to media, politics, and the public understanding of the issues of the day.

Not that this growing understanding of the limitations of politics deterred me from following an ambition of mine that had developed in the years in Slough and afterwards: to be a politician. While I was at WCCR the opportunity arose for me to become the Labour Party’s candidate for the Greater London Council election in Putney, one of four constituencies in the Borough of Wandsworth. The GLC was elected through the same constituencies as local MPs, so being the GLC candidate for Putney was quite a big deal.

I was nominated by one of the Labour branches in Battersea, where I was a member of the Party and where my friend Mark Mildred was also a member. I knew Mark, a successful lawyer who had worked on personal injury cases like Thalidomide, because his wife Sarah Rackham worked with me at WCCR. He put my name forward. Quite why Putney Labour Party wanted me I was never sure, but I was selected as their candidate for the 1977 GLC election. At that time Putney was a Labour seat both in Parliament and the GLC, but it was always going to be difficult to hang on to it.

The problem was that the Labour Government at the time, led by Jim Callaghan, was incredibly unpopular, so my chances of holding the seat seemed slim. And so it proved. I turned a Labour majority of 4,000 into a Conservative majority of 7,000, a massive 17 per cent swing to the Conservatives. At the General Election two years later David Mellor, whom I had met and liked while I was active in Putney, also won the parliamentary seat for the Conservatives. During the GLC election I had met Ken Livingstone, who was organizing a left-wing grouping of potential GLC councillors. I joined his group, as he never ceases to remind me, but it was all in vain as very few of us won. Four years later he did the same thing again and became the Labour leader of the GLC, but by then my political ambitions had disappeared.

I often think how different my life might have been if I had won in April 1977. I would have become a full-time GLC councillor, and probably gone on to be a Labour MP, and would never have gone into the television industry. I have to say I am eternally grateful that I lost that election. I’ve seen too many people I really like go into politics only to find it frustrating and unrewarding.

A couple of months before the election I had resigned from WCCR, frustrated by all I had found in the race relations industry, which in those days was racked by the politics of race. On 20 May 1977 I celebrated my thirtieth birthday unemployed, having just turned a reasonably good Labour seat into a safe Conservative one. I was depressed and unsure of the future. I had always been ambitious and believed I would be a success in life, yet here I was with very little to show. I spent my birthday sitting on a log on Wandsworth Common asking myself ‘Whatever happened to me?’

And then, just four months later, my life changed for ever.