Читать книгу Lorraine - Neil Simpson - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI always knew that however awful I felt I was only reporting on it. I wasn’t living it like all those poor souls had to. I could walk away and I always remembered that they couldn’t.’
The first indications of the awful tragedy came in the evening of 21 December 1988. Christmas was in the air. But it was soon to be forgotten.
Pan Am Flight 103 had taken off as normal from London Heathrow, bound for New York with 259 passengers and crew on board – including three children. Just after 7pm, the plane disappeared off the radar screens. It had been travelling at 31,000 feet when a bomb went off, after being smuggled on board by two Libyan terrorists. Everyone on board died instantly, along with 11 residents of the small town of Lockerbie that lay under the flight path. Debris from the explosion was to spread over nearly 900 square miles.
It was an event Lorraine says she will never forget. ‘We were there three-quarters of an hour after it happened. The A74 had burnt-out cars all over it. The only thing that kept me going at first was that it was so dark that you couldn’t really see what was happening. The smell of burning aircraft fuel, the smoke in the air, it was hellish. There were loads of ambulances, but they didn’t have anything to do because everyone was dead. So many people were dead.’ Her voice tails off as she remembers the sights she and the crew saw, and the people they spoke to in those first harrowing hours after the explosion.
What made the event even more important for Lorraine and the TV-am crew was that the likes of Sky News and BBC News 24 were still to be launched. So the breakfast crews were the only rolling news providers on the scene. When Lorraine and colleagues such as Martin Frizzell went live on ITV on the morning of 22 December, millions of shocked viewers were watching them, and their first three-and-a-half-hour broadcast was one of the most important that the channel had ever made.
Lorraine remembers being in local residents’ homes and businesses. She recalls walking through the chaos and the darkness of the first awful night, trying to bring a sense of perspective to it the following morning. In common with most of the other reporters there, she says the whole scene frequently seemed unreal. But the stories of those who had lost relatives and friends were not. Neither were the hugs Lorraine gave people after the cameras had stopped rolling. What made the story harder for everyone in the borders was, of course, that Christmas was approaching, though it hardly felt like it.
‘Everybody was taking down their Christmas decorations. What was there to celebrate? I was there on Christmas Day, filing reports like all the other days as the tragedy all carried on unfolding,’ Lorraine remembers. And away from the cameras she needed somewhere private to break down. She found it with her parents. ‘My dad picked me up one day to take me home and I just poured it all out to him in the car and then at home. My way of coping was to pour it all out to my family.’
To her credit, she tried to ensure that her own feelings never overshadowed those of all the distraught relatives she met, either at Lockerbie, Piper Alpha or any of the other tragedies she has reported on over the years. ‘I always knew that however awful I felt, I was only reporting on it,’ she says of Lockerbie in particular. ‘I wasn’t living it, like all those poor souls had to do. I could walk away, and I always remembered that they couldn’t. It wasn’t just a story to them, and that’s something all journalists should bear in mind, but sometimes forget to do.’
* * * * *
As 1989 got underway, Lorraine was no longer just splitting her time between her flat in Glasgow and Steve’s home in Dundee. London was calling and she was spending increasing amounts of time south of the border as well. At this point TV-am’s iconic studios in Camden, north London were almost as famous as the breakfast programmes themselves. Converted from an old garage and designed by architect Terry Farrell, the most famous design element was the huge plastic egg-cups on the roof, which are still there today above the faint outlines of the old TV-am logo.
For Lorraine, though, the building tended to be shrouded in darkness when she arrived for her first few weeks of studio-based trial runs. She was on early, first filling in on The Morning Programme and then guest-presenting Summer Sunday and Frost On Sunday when the usual hosts were on holiday. The host of the final show, none other than David Frost himself, left particularly big shoes to fill. But the TV-am bosses felt Lorraine was more than up to the task, and they were prepared to give her plenty of room to grow.
‘I think I had come to the bosses’ notice because I had been reporting for them almost every day for the past year. Doing the 6am to 7am slots was great because I was able to make all my mistakes there,’ Lorraine remembers of her early London-based shows. ‘Nobody shouted from the rooftops that I was going to become the next big thing in breakfast television so I was just allowed to get on with my job and learn my craft.’
With typical honesty, Lorraine is the first to admit that she had plenty to learn. Presenting and controlling a show from a studio was a completely different job to reporting on news or other events out in the field. Television insiders say it requires a totally different style, pace and set of skills. At first, she says, she simply didn’t have them. ‘When I look back on my performance then I cringe,’ she says, years later. ‘I was young, raw, inexperienced and I spoke too quickly and used too many colloquialisms which simply weren’t right for that environment.’
What the bosses liked about Lorraine was that she was prepared to take criticism on board and was always ready to try and improve her performance. They say it was also clear that she was on top of the news and current affairs agenda and was able to convey some of the most complex political issues in a way that every viewer could understand. After a while, it became apparent that the gamble of bringing this Scottish livewire down to England appeared to have paid off. From then on, Lorraine’s one-and two-week stints in the London studio would become a lot more regular and start to last much longer. She became a regular resident of the TV-am flat in west London. And while she didn’t know it, she was being groomed for one of the biggest roles in British television.
