You’re lower than a camel’s crotch!
That’s just one of the insults John Humphrys and John Simpson sent to viewers who dared criticise their presenting on the Nine O’Clock News — as the veteran BBC star reveals in the latest incendiary extract from his blockbuster memoir
LAST week John Humphrys broadcast his last Today programme for Radio 4 after 32 years. Then, in a bombshell new memoir in Saturday’s Mail, he lambasted the BBC’s liberal bias. Today, continuing the exclusive serialisation, he recalls how his first newsreading role didn’t endear him to the viewers . . .
AfTEr working as a foreign correspondent for many years, in 1981 I suddenly found myself on the nation’s TV screens, presenting the newly revamped Nine O’Clock News.
The idea was that I’d do three days a week, while my old friend John simpson would do the rest.
I was very happy with that: John’s a brilliant journalist, and we share the same seriously warped sense of humour. And, boy, did we need it over the coming months.
I often think that if I hadn’t been sharing an office with John, I might very well have taken the lift to the top floor of TV Centre, climbed out onto the roof and jumped off.
The word mortifying is nowhere near strong enough to describe the viewers’ reaction to us. Embarrassing? Certainly. Crushing? Without a doubt. humiliating? Oh yes! The audience did not like us. In fact, they
hated us — partly because we’d ousted richard Baker.
Many felt, with some justification, that Dickie had been treated pretty shabbily by BBC News. The first person ever to read the news on television, way back in 1954, he’d been doing it ever since. he was a consummate professional — always in total control, never flustered — and an old friend in every living-room in the land.
Dickie was also a very nice man. On the day of my first outing on the Nine O’Clock, he’d been demoted to reading the six O’Clock News and I was doing my best to avoid bumping into him. I tried to imagine how I might have reacted if I’d been in his position — unseated after nearly 30 years of immaculate service by a callow youth who’d never read a news bulletin in his life.
I need not have worried. When I went into the newsreaders’ makeup room, half an hour before we went on air, there was a message scrawled across the mirror in lipstick. It read: ‘Break a leg, John! You can do it! Dickie.’ What a gent! I can’t tell you what my first Nine was like because I can’t remember. And I can’t remember because I was frozen with fear.
All I registered was that ten million people were watching me and waiting for me to make a fool of myself. Ten million people! Each of them ( with the possible exception of my nearest and dearest and the BBC management) willing me to fail — if only because I wasn’t Dickie Baker.
This was worse than being on autopilot, unable to think. I was in a state of suspended animation. When it was all over, I tried to imagine subjecting myself to this agony again tomorrow night and on and on. It was like looking down a very long tunnel with a torture chamber at the end.
If we’d had email and the ludicrous Twitter mob back then, I suspect the bosses would have pulled John and me off the air immediately, crawled to Dickie to beg his forgiveness and pleaded with him to come back.
But snail mail took longer and when the letters finally began to flood in, John came up with a brilliant strategy.
When the BBC is criticised by the audience, its instinctive response is to say sorry. John took the opposite view. We agreed that instead of handing all our hate mail to the department responsible for complaints, we should deal with them ourselves. Every single one.
Instead of grovelling and promising to try harder in future and be a bit more like Dickie, we would fight fire with fire. The more abusive the letter, the more abusive our reply. And we awarded each other scores for who could write the most creative abuse. John always won.
I almost felt sorry for the poor viewer who wrote to tell him that he was the news-reading equivalent of an inarticulate talking dog.
To this day, I wish that I’d been there when he opened John’s reply to find himself accused of being lower than a camel’s crotch and far more smelly.
Our replies didn’t have to be clever, you understand, just rude.
And here’s the extraordinary thing. We’d expected retribution to be visited upon us by our bosses who would, obviously, be overwhelmed by complaints from the
recipients of our bile. But exactly the opposite happened. The more vicious our abuse, the more cringing their apology when viewers wrote back to us — as, invariably, they did.
They almost always began: ‘I’m so sorry if I’ve offended you by describing you as the worst newsreader in the history of broadcasting . . .’ I’ve never been able to figure it out.
But, eventually, the flood of letters reduced to a trickle and then pretty much dried up when the poor old audience realised they were never going to get their beloved Dickie back.
The newspaper and magazine critics were more difficult to deal with. No point in sending them abusive letters: they’d be delighted to know their barbs had hit home.
Richard Ingrams, who was then the editor of Private Eye and a Spectator columnist, was probably the most vicious. John and I spent happy hours discussing ways we might kill him, or at least cause him the maximum inconvenience.
I think it was John who suggested we should find out
where he parked his car and pour pee into his petrol tank. I don’t suppose we were serious about it, but the childish plotting helped a little.
From the bosses, there was an ominous silence until the day I was called into the editor’s office. It was a Wednesday and he told me I’d need to come in the next day to read the news.
I reminded him that John was on the rota. Not any longer, he said. He’s on a plane, on his way to Uruguay.
I gather the Director-General, no less, had decided that enough was enough and one of us had to be sacrificed to appease the audience.
Why John and not me, I have no idea. I thought he was far more authoritative and convincing than I’d ever been.
But the decision had been taken and that was the end of John’s days as a newsreader. But the start of his rise to becoming the finest foreign correspondent on the planet.
As for me, I was left to soldier on for another five years. In the end, I fell victim to the America Rule: whatever American broadcasters do, the British must eventually copy. In this case, the America Rule dictated that one newsreader may be good, but two is better.
And, in the perfect world, one will be a grizzled male and the other a rather beautiful, younger female. I’ve never quite understood why.
Even after all these years, I still feel uncomfortable when I watch one presenter staring raptly at the other reading from the autocue. In a typical half-hour news bulletin, there will be four or five minutes of copy to be read. Does it really take two people to do that?
Anyway, I was told by my clearly discomfited boss that, in future, the Nine would have two presenters — and the other would be Julia Somerville.
Then he waited for me to ask the obvious question. It was the only one that mattered: ‘Who will read the headlines?’ He looked down at his shoes and mumbled: ‘ Umm, Julia.’ And that’s when I decided that my time as a newsreader was up.
I could perfectly well see the BBC’s reasoning — or at least I tried to pretend I could. Julia was a terrific journalist and broadcaster and (I think we can all agree on this) rather better-looking than me.
In fact, she was beautiful — and it would be foolish to pretend that good looks don’t play a part in a hugely competitive business. Why shouldn’t they? Television (the clue is in the word) is a visual medium.
So, one way and another, when the Today programme offered me a job one October night in 1986, I was ready for it.
ADAPTED by Corinna Honan from A Day Like Today, by John Humphrys, to be published by HarperCollins on October 3, 2019, at £20. © John Humphrys 2019. To buy a copy for £16 (20 per cent discount, p&p free), go to mailbookshop. co.uk or call 01603 648155. Offer valid until October 4, 2019.