Source: Radio Times – 27th February-5th March 1999
The chimes are a-changing as News at Ten takes a bow after 32 years. Here presenter Trevor McDonald shares his memories.
I occasionally get the feeling that News at Ten was in my stars and that we were always destined to have the professional equivalent of a planetary collision. I was on a visit to London 30-odd years ago when plans for the new programme were announced. A half-hour news programme was a radical departure for British television and certainly for commercial television. In a country where tradition is respected above all else and where change always give rise to dark suspicions, ITV was still struggling to find its voice and its place in a culture dominated by the BBC. I wrote an article for a Trinidad newspaper abut the proposed new programme, giving great prominence to the fact that there’d be two newscasters and that it would be interrupted somewhere near its halfway point by a commercial break. This was talked about variously as revolutionary or as rank heresy. I must have picked this up from what the British papers of the day were saying, because I’d certainly not met anyone from ITN or ITV.
Many years passed. Then, in that apparent predestined collision, I joined ITN in 1973. A few years later, when I wasn’t travelling the world as a reporter, I became one of ITN’s presenters. I felt I had reached the pinnacle of my career. Six years ago, I became News at Ten’s single anchor and on Friday 5th March, I hope to be presenting the final edition. Whatever complex emotions I feel when we sign off, I will still have an overwhelming sense of the circularity of life.
There’s always been something quite special about working on News at Ten, as a reporter in the field or as a presenter in London. I felt it on my first day. It generated palpable excitement. There was an almost discernible buzz. ITN did other news programmes, of course, but from what I can recall News at Ten was referred to as “the programme”. It was the one that mattered.
And that was as it should have been. It was the ITN flagship, ascending rapidly in the firmament of British television news and helping to solidify ITN’s name as an international news provider. The News at Ten desk had an aura about it. It was bold, incisive, adventurous and rigidly professional and possessed about it a feeling that it had assembled the brightest and the best in our profession. Everyone about the place had an enviable journalistic pedigree. People knew what they were about.
There was never, as far as I can recall, any hysterical shouting about “holding the front page” or more appropriately in our case of “new lead coming up… hold the top story”. Instead people went about their assigned task with quiet efficiency and in an atmosphere of almost hushed reverence. There was never the need to shout. We were a well oiled machine, part of the cutting edge of television journalism.
The towering presences over News at Ten were its presenters. From its inception, the programme’s policy was to employ, with very few exceptions, working journalists to read the news. That was a marked departure from other established presenters who’d never done anything else. ITN’s presenters on the other hand could be in the studio one week and the Middle East the next. It caught the imagination of the viewers, defined ITN’s innovative, authoritative style, and made household names of Reggie Bosanquet, Andrew Gardner, Sandy Gall, Anna Ford and the extraordinary, brilliant Alastair Burnet.
ITN’s reporters transported that new style to the trouble spots of the world to which they were sent. Reporters, almost all vastly experienced in national newspapers, were encouraged to break out from the straitjacket of totally passive observation of what was going on to add a human dimension to what we did, without ever sacrificing the accuracy and balance of our stories. Because they were seen asking pointed questions of world leaders or on the front lines of battle they provided a pivotal link with our viewers in reporting events. Thus in 1974 did Michael Nicholson greet Turkish paratroopers, as they fell from the skies and on to Cyprus soil, with the words “Michael Nicholson, ITN. Welcome to Cyprus.” It was quintessentially the News at Ten way of doing things. Nicholson had compromised none of the virtues of great reporting, but he’d made the connection between a historic event and the growing primacy of a medium in which ITN and News at Ten were now energetic players.
What I remember most about my early days on News at Ten was the sense of adventure and fun. Northern Ireland was certainly an adventure for me. I had never seen armed soldiers patrolling city streets, guns fired in anger and bombs left intentionally to kill, to maim and to destroy.
The fun came in other ways. There were long collegiate lunches and endless gossipy dinners after work, tennis with Reggie where champagne always seemed a central feature, although I seem to remember that we always played fairly early in the day, and the honour and pleasure of being asked to share a glass of whisky with Alastair Burnet or with the editor’s eminent guests after the programme. There was, to crown it all, a bar in the ITN building. We were eager patrons – eager to discuss, praise or criticise what we’d done that day.
News at Ten has maintained the robust approach to television news reporting that made me first a fan and then sustained me through the years as an employee. In so much of what we have done in recent years we have reached back to tap the spirit that helped to bring us into being. Let anyone who works here describe what happens at ITN when a big story breaks. Suddenly the newsroom is filled with people who weren’t on duty, but who on hearing the news have drifted in, unasked, to assist their colleagues. For me, that’s always been a source of profound inspiration.
On the screen we have never been po-faced, tried never to be pompous and were determined to be accessible without losing our authority. We have followed the idiosyncrasies of American presidential campaigns, reported wards, famines and every kind of tragedy in the human experience. We have tried to make sense of the changes in the old Communist bloc and in almost every other part of our constantly changing world. Throughout all that time and with a continuing sense of awe, we have followed man’s adventures beyond our earthly bonds and into the frontiers of outer space. All of us in the media have done those things, but somehow, we at ITN came to think of them as News at Ten stories. Perhaps that’s because we tried to invest them all with our stamp, our identity, or way of doing things.
And of course, it’s not over. In our new programmes The Evening News at 6.30pm, which I will present, and The Nightly News at 11pm with Dermot Murnaghan, we’ll be trying to do those identical things all over again. For me it’s another turn in the wheel of life’s extraordinary circularity. So the end of News at Ten is no ending. For us it’s the start of a new chanllenge, new worlds to conquer, with new programme platforms to continue the grand traditions of ITN. The perceptive TS Eliot agreed that “to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
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