For more than three decades, millions of Britons have woken to the sound of John Humphrys’ voice.As presenter of Radio 4’s Today, the nation’s most popular news programme, he is famed for his tough interviewing, his deep misgivings about authority in its many forms and his passionate commitment to a variety of causes.A Day Like Today charts John’s journey from the poverty of his post-war childhood in Cardiff, leaving school at fifteen, to the summits of broadcasting. Humphrys was the BBC’s youngest foreign correspondent; he was the first reporter at the catastrophe of Aberfan, an experience that marked him for ever; he was in the White House when Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign; in South Africa during the dying years of apartheid; and in war zones around the globe throughout his career. John was also the first journalist to present the Nine O’Clock News on television.Humphrys pulls no punches and now, freed from the restrictions of being a BBC journalist, he reflects on the politicians he has interrogated and the controversies he has reported on and been involved in, including the interview that forced the resignation of his own boss, the director general. In typically candid style, he also weighs in on the role the BBC itself has played in our national life – for good and ill – and the broader health of the political system today.A Day Like Today is both a sharp, shrewd memoir and a backstage account of the great newsworthy moments in recent history – from the voice behind the country’s most authoritative microphone.
Оглавление
John Humphrys. A Day Like Today
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Prologue
A childhood of smells
The teenAGE pAGE
Building a cathedral
A gold-plated, diamond-encrusted tip-off
A sub-machine gun on expenses
A job that requires no talent
A very strange time to be at work
Why do you interrupt so much?
‘Come on, unleash hell!’
A pretty straight sort of guy?
Management are deeply unimpressed
Hamstrung by a fundamental niceness
A meeting with ‘C’
The director general: my part in his downfall
Turn me into a religious Jew!
The political deal
Shrivelled clickbait droppings
Goodbye to all that
Picture Section
Also by John Humphrys
About the Author
About the Publisher
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JH: So you’d be happy for the BBC to have carried on as it was when you joined fifty years ago? I suspect the only black people you ever saw then were cleaners and all the bosses were straight white men. And institutional racism wasn’t challenged because it wasn’t even recognised.
JH: Of course I wouldn’t. God forbid! They were indeed bad days in so many ways. But the BBC was hardly unique in racially discriminating. It was reflecting the nation. As I describe later in this book, I was brought up in what would certainly be regarded now as a ‘racist’ household. My parents had not a single neighbour, let alone friend, who was black. Jews were regarded with profound suspicion. People of mixed race were ‘half castes’. I can’t recall there being a single black child in my school or even a black teacher. The idea of being served in the post office, let alone the bank, by a black man or woman was literally unimaginable. And as for a black woman or even a white woman reading the news on the wireless, let alone the telly … dream on!
