Those were the days. No videotape, no satellites, no mobile phones. The main link with head office was an airline timetable. If you were lucky the last flight of the day to London was well before happy hour. Just time to write a script, record it on film, seal the film time and dispatch the wretched soundman in the direction of the airport whilst correspondent and cameraman retired to the bar secure in the knowledge that London could not get a telephone call through in under 48 hours so the evening was not going to be disturbed.
It did have its pitfalls, working on film. I had crawled along a ditch with my BBC cameraman, a wise and elderly fellow who treated me like his servant but who I knew could teach me a lot. We were on the border between the north and south of Ireland and in the middle of a cross border shootout between the British army and the IRA. We stayed there until the last possible moment to get ourselves out to the car, up the road to Belfast, put the film into the soup and edit in time for our action exclusive on the lunchtime news. Two rolls of film we had shot, with a third still in the camera. Every frame a winner. We crawled back through the muddy ditch, bullets still whistling above our heads and made it to the car where several other TV crews were filming the action from long range and clearly put out to see us appear from the undergrowth with footage that would obviously put theirs in the shade.
"Lets move" my cameraman ordered. "Where's the film tins?"
"I thought you had them" I told him.
"Listen laddie (when an experienced cameraman called his reporter "laddie" it was a clear sign the reporter was in deep trouble) you don't do very much to contribute to the output. Its your job to keep the film tins. Go and get them." (actually that is a sanitized version of what he said to me. The actual words cannot be repeated!)
Twenty terrifying minutes later I reappeared from the undergrowth with the two film tins. We missed the lunchtime bulletin but did make the evening news. I bought the cameraman a beer that night in the bar as the three of us (never forget your soundman) basked in the glow of a well-done message from London and the envy of our opponents. It was a hard but invaluable lesson.
Television is nothing without pictures. That sounds pretty obvious. It is, alas, a lesson some correspondents, more anxious about their hair, their make-up, their suntan, the cut of their (often totally unnecessary) flak jackets never learn.
Sky News recently won an award for its "on the day" coverage of the NATO invasion of Kosovo last year. What a far cry from those days of film and overnight flights to London and being in the bar in time for happy hour. 18 hours of almost non stop live coverage using five correspondents, three uplinks and half a dozen satellite phones. Looking back on it I have to say, even though I was in the forefront as the pool correspondent with the armored spearhead force, that it was quite brilliant coverage. A war live on television. In more than 30 years in television that includes too many conflicts to mention (my God, a colleague said to me recently, were you in the Vietnam war. I've read about it!) I have seldom had the adrenalin rush I felt as I drove Sky's armored truck behind a battle tank as the fourth vehicle of the NATO invasion force across the Macedonia border into Kosovo with a hoard of newsmen, including a Sky team broadcasting live, on either side of the road. I was working with an outstanding Sky cameraman called Martin Smith. We had been warned in our briefing that there was a possibility of snipers and roadside bombs once we were across the border. I will always remember that drive through the ravine into the heart of Kosovo. The pictures were outstanding. That was because I was alone in our armored vehicle. Martin Smith made the trip clinging with one hand to the turret of the battle tank ahead of me, hanging onto his camera for dear life with the other hand. He did though find the time, during a stop whilst a roadside bomb just ahead was being defused, to shoot a nice piece to camera which impressed by bosses back in London.
"Great stuff" they told me on the Satellite phone, "looked pretty hairy".
Well not really because my armored car was, according to the manufacturers, capable of stopping anything but a direct hit from a fair sized shell. I can't speak though for the cameraman. Or perhaps I can. Yes it was pretty hairy. But then it often is.
