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 passionatecommitment 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: Memoirs
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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This happened at a party conference in the late 1980s. The difference is that it was a pre-recorded interview with a prominent Northern Ireland minister late one evening for use the following morning. Party conferences don’t have too much in common with Methodist temperance meetings. There are many parties and receptions and a great deal of drink is taken. The minister had taken too much. Far too much. He or his advisers should have refused to do the interview but they didn’t.
What he said was pretty incendiary and would almost certainly have had a seriously damaging effect on the peace process, which was going through a tricky time. Should we run it? I talked about it at some length with my editor and in the end we decided not to. Again it was not an easy decision. It might well have made headlines the next day, but what’s a headline in the context of a vicious conflict that killed and injured many thousands of people?
