Jeremy Bowen and the front-line quest for peace
On a clear, early summer’s day in 2000, Jeremy Bowen, who was then the BBC’S Middle East correspondent, set off from his hotel in Beirut accompanied by a cameraman called Malek Kanaan and a driver called Abed Takkoush. The three of them were heading to the south of Lebanon to cover a big news story: the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area, ending a 15-year conflict. After a few hours on the road, and nearing the border with Israel, Bowen decided to stop to do a piece to camera. He and Kanaan went to find a suitable spot for filming, leaving Takkoush in the car.
The tape of what happened next was heard on Friday’s edition of
Man in the Middle East (Radio 4). There was a thunderous crack, a pause, and then Bowen’s voice, shocked, distantly audible. The car had been struck by a shell from an Israeli tank, bursting into flames. Takkoush died moments later.
Bad news comes out of the Middle East with such regularity that it can numb the senses: the suffering, viewed for the hundredth time, comes to seem normal; the geopolitical problems, unresolved year after year, come to seem unsolvable. Bowen’s series, which looked back across the quarter of a century that he’s spent covering the region for the BBC, mixing front-line reportage, personal history and political reflection, was an urgent call for wakefulness.
It succeeded. Time and again, across the 10 short episodes that aired over the last fortnight (another 15 are due later in the summer), I found myself staring at the radio, ears alert, imagination running at full bore. Friday’s episode was a particularly powerful example; but there were many others, from Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Israel. Bowen’s narration was candid, humane, peppered with uncanny details that brought the pictures into focus: the bangers and mash that he had just cooked when news of the assassination of the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin broke; the socks and neatly tied shoelaces on the feet of the dead, who didn’t expect to die when they were getting dressed. He left listeners with a closing thought, borne of violent experience: “politics, not bullets, is the key to peace”.
Soon after John Noakes’s death was announced on Monday, The World at One (Radio 4) aired a clip from a 1969 edition of Blue Peter. It shouldn’t have worked on the radio, but it did. In the clip, co-presenter Valerie Singleton was earnestly explaining the importance of animal welfare while an animal of some kind, audibly uncomfortable, whinnied in the background. There was a scuffle, and then Noakes’s jovial Yorkshire accent rose above the din with the immortal words: “Ooh, get off me foot!”.
For listeners of a certain age, this clip will have instantly conjured images of Lulu the baby elephant, a harried keeper, an attractive young presenter and a slippery studio floor. I was inspired by the clip – and by an interview with Peter Purves, also on The World at One, in which he described Noakes as the bravest presenter in the business – to go looking for others. And, of course, there they were: climbs, skydives, motorbike races, bobsleigh runs; testaments to an exuberant broadcasting talent – and proof that Purves was right.
Tim Harford’s 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy (World Service, Saturday) is a marvel of brevity, clarity and original thinking, and the best multi-part documentary series I’ve heard since Radio 4’s A History of the World in 100 Objects seven years ago in which Neil Macgregor illuminated various items in the British Museum. Here, each short episode illuminates a different invention or idea that has shaped the modern world; there have been 30 so far, touching upon everything from antibiotics to Google, air conditioning to intellectual property. All are available indefinitely as podcasts; there’s not a single dud among them.
This week’s topic was the tally stick – an old and elegantly simple means of recording and trading debts across an economy using split pieces of willow. Calling upon examples from 13thcentury England and Seventies Ireland, and using the plainest of language, Harford used the sticks to show how money works. I’ve always been fuzzy on that topic, but left the programme with what felt like a real understanding – and with a sense of wonder at how much some broadcasters can achieve in 10 minutes.