‘People see me out shopping – but they can’t place me’
Ahead of his new TV show about memory, Michael Buerk tells Margarette Driscoll why, at 73, he can’t yet afford to give up working
Not much impresses Michael Buerk after a lifetime of dodging bullets in Africa’s civil wars, anchoring the BBC’S evening news and moving chameleon-like from highbrow to low – who else could chair Radio 4’s Moral Maze and appear on I’m a Celebrity? – but a party he attended at 10 Downing Street has always stayed in his mind.
Buerk and his wife were among 200 people invited to an event hosted by then prime minister John Major and were introduced as they arrived.
“Christine had a cold and not only did Major remember every single person’s name, as he said goodbye it was, ‘And I hope your cold gets better soon, Christine’. I know it’s a trick of some sort but it was ridiculously impressive,” he says.
“I can remember the names of every member of my class at school, but if I meet someone at a party, I can turn around to pick up a glass [and] when I turn back again I’ve forgotten their name.”
His new show tests the theory that anyone can improve their recall, using techniques taught by memory Grand Master Mark Channon (who memorised more than 700 random numbers in the World Memory Championships). Buerk is quizmaster as fashion guru Gok Wan, 44, tackles the periodic table, former Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton, 81, takes on UK grime music and reality star Joey Essex, 28, attempts the life and times of William the Conqueror. “It was good fun – Valerie Singleton on
UK grime was to die for,” he says. “Joey Essex is a lovely guy, but surreal. He told me he has watches worth £60,000 but can’t tell the time. He’d learnt once but forgot.”
Can I Improve My Memory? is the latest venture in what Buerk calls “my post-career career”. At 73, he says he is a “silver striver”, one of the many past normal retirement age slogging away to top up inadequate pensions.
How much Buerk really needs the money is anyone’s guess, but he claims his relative penury stems from giving up a staff job as the BBC’S Africa correspondent to go freelance to present the Nine O’clock News and then
News at Ten. “The logic was that you got paid a lot more – ridiculously more – so I suppose the management did not want our pensions to reflect that,” he says. “I got paid more to sit in a stuffy studio reading off the autocue than to have my balls shot off in Africa.
“The result is I now get to do a lot of fun things. Last year, I sailed around Britain with John Sergeant, an old mate and another silver striver. It coincided with wonderful weather and I remember thinking, ‘Somebody’s paying us to do this’.”
You’ll have gathered that Buerk does not take himself too seriously. He is an elegant, accomplished broadcaster but hides his considerable light under a bushel of self-deprecation. Being famous has always been embarrassing, he says, but at least when he fronted the news, people knew who he was.
“Now people in the supermarket recognise you but can’t place you. They think you’re someone’s uncle,” he says. “The potential for humiliation is endless. I was working with a young girl recently and she said, ‘My grandmother used to fancy you’. I spent a week trying to work out which bit of that sentence was the most hurtful and decided it was ‘used to’.”
Of course he once did have a much more serious career. In 1984, he filed one of the most famous reports of all time. His words on a “biblical famine” in northern Ethiopia – with heartrending pictures shot by Mohammed Amin – inspired Bob Geldof to create Band Aid, with Live Aid and Comic Relief following, raising millions.
A generation on, that template is looking a little tarnished. Donations to last week’s Comic Relief were down £8million on last year, to £63million. In the run-up to the appeal, Stacey Dooley, one of the celebrities co-opted to report on one of the aid projects, was criticised by black MP David Lammy, who said “the world does not need any more white saviours”.
Buerk, too, senses the tide turning. “I don’t often agree with David Lammy, but he has a point,” he says. “I think Comic Relief has been fantastic, sensitive as well as raising a lot of money but I’m not sure you can go on ringing the same bell all the time.
“When you get so-called celebrities with no real grip on what is going on in photo opportunities with people who are deprived or distressed, it does make me feel uncomfortable. It’s part of a mindset that sees Africans as victims, in which Africans are objectified. I don’t know the people involved here, they may be deeply concerned, and to an extent I earned my living the same way: 10 years as a kind of business-class misery tourist, going from war to famine to drought, dropping out of the sky saying, ‘Take me to the dying babies’, so it ill behoves me to criticise, but it sometimes looks rather crass.”
He still visits the continent as often as he can, noting how development is bringing slow but steady change.
“When I first went to Mozambique there was a civil war; people were starving, eating the bark off the trees. It was back to the Stone Age. You go to Mozambique now and it isn’t Surrey, but there’s progress,” he says.
“I think there’s a wider discussion to be had now about aid and what works or doesn’t work. You have to distinguish emergency aid, which saves life in a crisis, from long-term aid, which has sometimes saved despotic governments from the consequences of their failures.
“As a correspondent in Africa, you see plenty of hopeless aid programmes that have done nothing or been counterproductive. The Zambian textile industry was thriving when I arrived in Africa but so many first-world clothes have been sent there – with very good intentions – that the textile industry has collapsed. It’s these unintended consequences and this infantilisation of African people we need to look at.”
His twin sons, Roland and Simon, have both settled in Dubai, which gives him an excuse to continue his travels – and the need to keep earning money. When he was approached about taking part in I’m a Celebrity he said, “Why would I ever do that?” Then the money kept going up until he said, “Why wouldn’t I do that?”
He has no regrets but is baffled by people who still ask if he enjoyed it.
“You’re banged up in the jungle with a lot of people you don’t know, deprived of your phone, your laptop, even anything to read,” he says. “They use techniques developed by the KGB and the Gestapo … I lost 8kg in two weeks… did I enjoy it? No, I did not…”
Yet next week he’s off on a celebrity barge trip, having signed up not knowing if he is the skipper or who any of his fellow celebrities might be. He shrugs and says: “Just close your eyes and do it.”
‘Comic Relief has been fantastic, but you can’t go on ringing the same bell’