Bernard Ponsonby - Transcript
[Interviewer is Tim Amyes, Date of Recording 07 07 2018]
[Start of Recording]
[00:00]
I: Copyright of this recording is vested in the Scottish Broadcasting Heritage Group. The name of the interviewee is Bernard Ponsonby who is Political...
R: Editor.
I: Editor. I am Tim Amyes. I'm retired. The recording is taking place in Premier Street in Glasgow and the date is 7th July 2018. Thank you, Bernard. Where were you born?
R: Glasgow on 3rd March, 1963.
I: And the education you got?
R: I had three primary schools. The first was aged five, which was St. Dominic's in Castlemilk. The second one was St. Martin's in Castlemilk because they'd built an additional primary school because the population in the sixties in Castlemilk was increasing and then when I was nine the family moved to Cambuslang and I went to my third primary school which was St. Cadoc's, half way, Cambuslang. My secondary school was Trinity High School, Rutherglen up until 1981 and from '81 to '84 I was a Law student at the University of Strathclyde.
I: So, you just said you took a degree in Law.
R: Yes.
I: And you passed your degree in Law?!
R: I did not pass my degree in Law! I was there from '81 to '84. I think, probably, the famous pupil in the year was the late Paul McBride QC. He had come very, very early straights from St. Aloysius. Passed the exams in the first two years with flying colours and then the third year the temptations of the hostelries, in what is now called the Merchant City in Glasgow got the better of me so I left after the third year!
[02:14]
I: And you took a job?
R: The first job that I had, I had been sort of politically active as a student and just before the '87 Election I went to work for a guy called Dr. J. Dickson Mabon. Dick Mabon had been a Scottish Office Minister for six years in the seventies, between '64 to '70, latterly as the Deputy to the then Secretary of State for Scotland, Willie Ross and from '76 to '79 he was the Minister of State of the Department of Energy when Anthony Neil Wedgewood Benn was the Secretary of State. He was trying to get into Parliament for a Parliamentary Constituency called West Renfrew in Inverclyde which was the tightest three-way marginal in the UK, being one of the '83 Election by Anna McCauley for the Tories and there were very little votes in it between Tory, Liberal and Labour and I went to work for him up until just after the '87 Election and then I went to work for the Scottish Liberal Democrats as a Press and Policy Officer and then during the course of the tenure there was a parliamentary by-election in Glasgow-Govan Constituency on 10th November 1988 and I was the Party's first Parliamentary Candidate. I was roundly stuffed, lost my deposit but one or two people in the media thought I might be able to make a fist of it in broadcasting and the day after the Govan Election there was an STV reception at the Liberal Democrat Conference in the Corran Halls in Oban. David Scott who was, at that time, Head of News and Current Affairs of STV said, "I would like you to come and work for STV in the run up to the next election." Didn't hear anything from David Scott for several months but in the meantime people at the BBC had said, "We would like you to come and work for us!" And so, eventually what happened is I went to work in a freelance capacity with BBC Radio Scotland, working on the Corridors of Power programme, which was the political programme which went out at noon on a Friday. It was presented by the late Jack Regan who, at that point, was Head of Radio News at Radio Scotland. I was the political reporter on it and the diarist was one Andrew Marr who at that point worked in the lobby for the Scotsman. So, I was at the BBC from about just after the summer of '89 up until the end of September of 1989 and what happened subsequently was that in, I think it was about August of 1990, I got a phone call from John Brown, who was then the Producer of politics programmes at STV and when he phoned me up to take me to lunch I knew pretty well what this was about! So, he said, "Would you come and work for STV?" I said, "Yes". And that was twenty-eight years ago and the rest is history!
I: And that was Contract or that was on the staff?
R: At my insistence, actually, I asked for a nine-month contract initially because I had, I was freelancing with the BBC and I had with a friend of mine, Dennis Sullivan, set up a Public Relations business, P.S. Communications - Ponsonby Sullivan Communications. And I was doing that a couple of days a week and freelancing with the BBC a couple of days a week and I promised Dennis that in the summer of 1991 I would give him three months because we'd just set up this business and almost immediately I had withdrawn from it and the understanding always was, that if there was a job in broadcasting that came up that I wanted, that he would be quite happy for me to go but I did promise that I would work for three months in the summer of '91, which I did so, for that reason, I asked for a nine-month contract. Left for three months and then came back in September 1991 and I've, again, on a contract basis, but after two years they basically regarded you as Staff so I was issued with several contracts and then, after a while, they stopped issuing me with contracts. I think they were at the point where they bumped you into the pension scheme.
[07:51]
I: Did your previous political affiliations have any view on your employment?
R: No, not at all and, in fact, if you looked at all the people who had worked in politics in STV and some people who have subsequently worked in politics in STV since I have joined, there was a kaleidoscope of views. I mean Colin MacKay who was Political Editor from '73 to '92 had been active in the Liberal Club at Glasgow University, he presented a programme called Ways and Means which at one point was co-presented by Hugo de Berg, who stood as a Conservative candidate in the Coatbridge and Airdrie by-election in 1982. Margo MacDonald obviously had won the Govan by-election for the SNP in November of '73 and Margo came on board as a politics presenter at one point. George Reid had been a presenter of Current Affairs programmes in the past for STV and George went off to become an SNP MP in the seventies, winning Clackmannan and East Stirlingshire. Jimmy Gordon was the first Political Editor of the Company. Jimmy fought East Renfrewshire for the Labour Party in 1959 before going off to go into business, Radio Clyde. Founding member of Radio Clyde in '72. Raith Stewart worked with me as a researcher, he had been a Press Officer for the Conservative Party. Noel Dolan was a Producer who had been in the Labour Party and latterly was Chief of Staff for Nicola Sturgeon when she was First Minister and there are all sorts of other people who have come from different backgrounds and I can honestly say, and I should also say, of course, Fiona Ross was the Political Correspondent at that time and her father was the aforementioned Willie Ross, Labour Secretary of State for Scotland. Gus Macdonald who was Director of Programmes subsequently left the Company in 1998 to become an industry minister in the Labour Government after Labour's election victory in '97. So, a real kaleidoscope of different points of view! And I can honestly say I didn't come across anyone who ever pushed their own point of view.
[10:49]
I: Did you particularly want to get into the business or did it just happen?
R: It just happened! I didn't know what I wanted to do having not finished my Law degree, as I said I first of all worked for Dick Mabon doing really Press stuff without knowing terribly much! Without knowing anything about journalism in fact! So, I came into contact with a lot of journalists and back then, if I can put it metaphorically, it seemed a very convivial profession! They seemed to spend a lot of time eating and an even longer time drinking, hardly ever doing any work but having a riotess old time and I did think to myself, that's something not only that I could do but that I also quite fancied doing! And when I was Press Officer for the Liberal Democrats I, at that point, came into contact with Newspaper Editors, senior Producers and Executives in television and at that point I thought, 'Yeah, working in television, that's really what I am meant to do!' I found it, in a sense.
I: And what did your job entail when you started?
R: When I went to Cowcaddens for the first day in October of 1980 I went through the little turnstile at the front of the building that you had in those days. I was greeted by John Brown and Colin MacKay, did a tour of the building which seemed absolutely vast! From Studio A, Studio C to the Editing floors, to the Dubbing, the News Edits suites and I was shown to my desk and given a little directory of everybody in the building. I think it was on a pink card which, sort of, opened out and you would get little titles like Directors. In those days there were quite a number of them and you would get Production Assistants and there were quite a number of them and my job for the first year was a researcher working on the then political programme, Scottish Questions, which at that point was co-presented by Colin MacKay and Louise Tait. There would normally be two items on the programme per week and, as a researcher, I would research one of the items very, very thoroughly because my job was to ensure that when (and I principally worked to Colin - in fact, Scott Ferguson used to joke that my job description was to "keep Colin curly!") and if we were doing something for example on education, my job would be to make sure that Colin knew as much about this subject as the Minister so I would talk to Civil Servants, I would talk to all the Stakeholders in the education field, I would make sure that I knew what the Government's position was, what the Stakeholders' position was, what the fault lines were in a policy, come up with suggested questions for the interview in Studio in order to try and get the most out of it and, in those days, I think that (and this is certainly not the case now where you do it on the hoof and very often on adrenaline and on your nerves!), back then the view was that on a political programme, you had to have people who knew their stuff in order that Presenters had the confidence to have a go at Ministers knowing that they knew as much as the Minister! That was really what we did and there were three researchers on the programme at that time - myself, Karen Ferguson and Alan Smart - there were two, as I say, full-time Presenters, Louise Tait and Colin MacKay. John Brown was the full-time Producer. Margot Cunningham was the full-time PA and we worked also with the Westminster correspondent who, at that time, was David Whitton and David's assistant at Westminster was a young man called Michael Goff. If you look at this as a politics team, it would not be possible to assemble a team like this in Scotland now - a) you don't have that degree of expertise and b) the salary bill for the programme alone would have been absolutely enormous for the production of one 2505 programme at half seven on a Thursday night.
[16:16]
I: And what would the Production Team consist of now if the same programme was aired?
R: If the same programme went out you would have, well, Scotland Tonight is effectively a bit like Scottish Questions, the difference being that Scotland Tonight goes out four times a week and not once a week and you would probably have one Producer, one Presenter and a couple of the Production Team, probably no more than about five people on that programme to produce four twenty-five minute programmes a week and the salary bill now would be a fraction of what it was twenty-eight years ago! In a sense when you put it like that, it probably is an argument for saying that certain programmes may well have been over-resourced but the point that I would emphasise is that it is (and this is no disrespect to the people who now work on programmes now), they can be moved around within the building, they don't have real degree of expertise, they might not have terribly many contacts, they don't really have the time to pull together an authoritative brief for the Presenter and the way it was done then was about harnessing expertise to get the best possible product for the viewer. You can say that there was too much money spent on it and that the people who worked on it had too good a time and didn't do enough work and that may all be a legitimate criticism but back then when researchers were hired, you were hired because you had an area of expertise which is why, when you were doing a political programme, in a sense it is a positive thing to recruit people who are in different political parties because they bring expertise, they bring contacts, they bring perspective. Just in the same way that if you were running the Sports Department, you would go in and look to hire ex-footballers because they give you expertise and perspective. And the big difference between now and then is that we tended to hire expertise back then for the purposes of making the most authoritative programme and that we hire people now who don't necessarily have any expertise, they don't have terribly much experience therefore they can't bring the same degree of perspective.
[19:10]
I: What was your first live programme?
R: Well, my first, I can remember my first interview! My first interview was an interview with Professor Bill Miller, Professor of Politics at Glasgow University. Danny Livingston was the Cameraman, Dorothy Le Grove was on Sound and of course, in those days, camera crews tended to be paired off. It was Danny and Dot or Danny and Ken McNeil and Gordon Coull and John McGuire and Kelvin Gray and George Mitchell, so you tended to work with a team. So, quite early on in fact, I'd started in 1990, quite early on John Brown, the Producer, had me doing some reports on the programmes. Although I was a researcher ostensibly, I pretty quickly became a Researcher Reporter. My first live politics programme would have been, I think, some time in '92. Louise Tait stayed for one season of the programme from, she stayed for the whole of the '91 run and then she stayed for a little bit of the '91-'92 run and she left which meant we were a Co-Presenter short and John Brown, John Brown was very keen - sorry, John had left by then. Alan Smart had taken over as the Politics Producer. Alan was very keen that I do it and Blair Jenkins called me in to his office one day and said "You're the new Co-Presenter on politics." So, my first live Scottish Questions co-presenting with Colin MacKay would probably have been around February/March of 1992.
I: And did you enjoy that experience?
R: I think I've done so many now that I can't really recall it! I just remember being obviously nervous and I think when you start out you are also a little bit tight with your body language. Scottish Questions came from Studio C in Cowcaddens and although it wasn't a s big as Studio A, it was nevertheless quite a big studio and in those days, although the cameras were manned, you didn't really have like now where all the cameras were locked off and, effectively, you vision-mixed your way through stuff now. And this sense of having a Floor Manager giving you a live count and people in the studio when communication with the gallery, yes, it made me nervous! And I still actually get nervous before live broadcasts but that's probably quite a good thing. And I think if I looked back on the stuff back then I would say that my, whilst there was nothing wrong with the presentation of it and it was all articulate enough, I probably was a bit stiff and I think the sort of loosening up and making presenting a natural exercise really comes with experience and, you know, you only got one shot once a week back then.
I: And you'd also got the research experience that you were talking about.
R: Yes. I mean, some people who have a body of knowledge can either, if you were a Journalist you went down really one or two routes back then. You became a Producer and Alan Smart became a Producer, Noel Dolan became a Producer, Brendan O'Hara, who's now an SNP MP for Argyll and Bute, he worked on the Politics programme as well, he went down the Producer route. Paul McKinney who came in at a similar time to Brendan O'Hara, ad worked for Gordon Brown and he then went on to become head of News and Current Affairs. So, they went down the Producer route and it was either the Producer route or the Presenter route but I think the first time I had a conversation with John Brown in Dino's restaurant in Sauchiehall Street, he said, "We really envisage you becoming a Reporter and a Presenter."
[24:42]
I: So, you presented all STV Election coverage, is that right?
R: Yes. After '92, I mean I, it was...
I: So, we've reached '92.
R: Well, '92 I'd gone into studio with Colin MacKay to co-present Scottish Questions and then a matter of weeks later, the Company announced that they were binning about a dozen members of staff of which Colin was the most high profile casualty and the sad thing about that for me was that when I'd got interested in politics I used to watch, as a kid, just about every political programme on the go, including the STV programme Ways and Means which went out from 1973 to 1986 and Colin was the sole Presenter of that programme in the thirteen years that it ran. So, here was I and I used to be a kid and a viewer of this programme, who was then co-presenting politics with someone that I had admired and I was looking forward to a long, fruitful relationship with Colin in Studio and a matter of weeks after I went in to Studio with him it was announced that he was being binned and Colin left the Company in June 1992.
I: What was the background to the '92 situation?
R: Well, the background was quite simple, really. The new franchise period was going to run from the 1st January 1993 for however long it was, a decade or what, and if you recall in 1992 there was this auctioning and this bidding system which Thatcher had introduced in the Broadcasting Act of 1990 and it was really the piece of legislation that destroyed ITV and destroyed commercial television as a powerhouse for really making quality-quality television because you had to bid for the license and the license would go to the highest bidder so long as you passed a quality threshold and Gus Macdonald had bid £2,000 because the bid had to be in multiples of two and other companies where it was known there would be a challenge, Yorkshire most famously had to bid thirty-six million pounds a year for its licence and, of course, if you're paying that to the Treasurer, you can't make programmes! So, this whole model was the beginning of the end of ITV really. But there was a sense in which Gus wanted, from 1993, to out-muscle the BBC in programming terms and the licensing commitments that were made by STV in '92 were that from the 1st January 1993 it would broadcast a thousand hours of local programming! Now, that's not including Network programming, that's local programming and in order to do that, the budget for that was, I think, about £20m. As Gus used to say, the license doesn't cost us £2,000 a year, it costs us £20m and the £20m is the investment that we want to make in programmes. And part and parcel of that was to, I think, in '93 was to have fresh faces fronting programmes, doing things a bit more dynamically and, dare I say it, taking out people who were regarded as dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park who were of an age that was, by that point, dying out. So, what they did in News and Current Affairs, I think they binned eleven people in the early part of 1992 and the money that they saved with the eleven I think they hired twenty bodies for January 1993 which was, in a sense, almost Year Zero in programming terms including the famous ten-four's, so-called because their starting salary was £10,400 and the first three ten-four's that we had were Emma Kennedy who went on to work for ITN, Graeme/Graham Mitchell went on to become a Producer/Director, I think he freelances and Craig Oliver, now Sir Craig Oliver, who worked as David Cameron's Communications Director in No. 10. Those were the first three of the ten-four's in the Company but everything starts to change then because there were also sort of changes in working practices for technical staff as well as Journalists.
I: Yes, the change from film to video tape?
R: Well, the change to ENG, I think, came in in the late eighties. Mid to late eighties.
I: Electronic News Gathering.
R: Electronic News Gathering came in in the late eighties but even in the ENG set-up, you always went out with a two-person crew (Camera and Sound) and if the production values were slightly higher, you would go out with an Electrician as well just to make sure that it was properly lit and, if you were really lucky, you would get a Lighting Cameraman like Jim Peters or Malcolm Campbell or someone like that so you could, on occasions, go out with a three-person crew! I would have said from '93 onwards, as I said, there was a sense that '93 represented a sort of Year Zero, you would go from, sometimes, two-person crews down to just a camera! It was already beginning to come in even by that stage.
[31:54]
I: Back to the elections. You did the first election in...?
R: The first election programme I worked on was, would have been, Colin's second-last programme as Election anchor, The Districts Decide! , which he co-presented with Viv Lumsden. I was live on that programme at the Glasgow Count. I remember it well because it contains one of the best lines I've ever heard which was on open talkback, a screech was let out in the gallery which was the Production Assistant on the programme, Kerry Ashton, who came out with the immortal line, "Who do you have to sleep with to get off this programme?!", which was a very Kerry-line and, as usual, this programme seemed chaotic but it never looked quite as chaotic as it seemed and it was the first time I was on an Election programme where I was doing live inserts for any length of time. There was, of course, a General Election in '92 and Colin had anchored that and '92 was the last time he anchored Election programmes. What actually happened subsequent to that was that Gus Macdonald had decided that I was, bless him, too young to anchor! "We can't have an anchor of politics in their twenties! It looks ridiculous!" So, when Colin was relieved of his duties, they hired Donald MacCormick. Donald MacCormick, who had been a Network name, presented the Tonight programme for the BBC in the seventies and was one of the first Presenters of Newsnight when Newsnight succeeded Tonight in 1980 and Donald (Colin was forty-seven when he was relieved of his duties) and Donald MacCormick arrived in STV in 1992 for the '92-'93 run of Scottish Questions, aged fifty-four and Gus really had this view that if you're doing politics it requires a certain gravitas and you can't have twenty-somethings fronting these things. So, I was then co-presenting Scottish Questions with Donald MacCormick and for the first bit of the '92-'93 run, and then in January '93 they moved to single-presenter and Donald MacCormick was the single Presenter of Scottish Questions and Blair Jenkins called me in and said, "Don't take this personally! It's just that we're paying him all this money and we should be getting our money's worth so we're going to single-presenter but don't worry, we'll create a programme for you to do!" That was the genesis of Trial By Night which was a, sort of late-night, Friday night, debate programme so I then went off to present Trial By Night and then I was also doing some documentaries on the Scottish Reporters' Documentary strand, which started in 1993 and I was also doing the odd News Report as well so I was really very, very busy. And then Donald MacCormick left in 1994. By then Scottish Questions had run its course which started a new politics programme called Scottish Voices, which was the STV version of Question Time and we took, it went out at, I think, ten o' clock on a Sunday night and we used to take the programme to a different location every week, for example, the STV Outside Broadcast Unit was the first vehicle across the Skye Bridge because we did a Scottish Voices OB from Skye with the late Charles Kennedy and the former Chancellor, Norman Lamont, being on the panel from memory, so we went all over Scotland with this. I did that for a while whilst, at the same time, still doing Trial By Night and doing News and doing Documentaries and that period, sort of '93-'94, was insanely busy but highly enjoyable.
[37:16]
I: And did you enjoy doing the elections?
R: Yes. It's the most purest form of political journalism in a sense because if you're anchoring an Election programme, first of all you're seeing it as the viewer sees it. It's live. What you're supposed to do for the viewer is to contextualise what that result means and, if you're on air for seven, eight, nine hours you're literally, what you say and how you interpret it, is the big thing to do editorially. Plus, of course, you're interviewing all these leaders in various locations and there was no time to prep. It was all live and there was no prep. that can be done and you're having to interview them on the basis of the story as it unfolds so if you are a Political Journalist and an Election junkie, Election programmes are as good as it gets!
I: What was the worst experience in Election Broadcasting?
R: I actually can't recall having had a bad experience because I started presenting by-election programmes in '94. I remember the first one, I think, I anchored was the Monklands East by-election which was the by-election caused following the death of John Smith and then there was a by-election programme for the Perth by-election in '95 following the death of Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, which was won by Rosanna Cunningham for the SNP and then I anchored all of the stuff in the '97 Election including the overnight's results programme and then I anchored the programming for the Devolution Referendum in September of '97 and then the overnight's programme and then anchored all of the Scottish Parliament programming in '99 and the overnight's results programme and really since then I've anchored all of the election stuff. I can't really recall disasters like you're sitting there with nobody to go to and nobody to talk to.
Probably the most under-rehearsed of all of the programmes was the Referendum programme in September of 1997. We were broadcasting from a constructed studio in the bowels of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre because the declaration was being made upstairs and I was sitting with Bill Miller, who was the psephologist in those days and utterly brilliant! I mean, if you're going to go through eight or nine hours through the night, to have a resource like Bill Miller was just amazing and I know that Sir John Curtis, as he now is, is regarded as God but for me, the God of Psephology will always be Bill Miller and STV were incredibly lucky to have him! A really nice guy as well as a psephologist and a Mathematician and he always called absolutely on the money but myself and Bill were sitting with a panel which, from memory, was Ming Campbell for the Liberals, Henry McLeish who was the Devolution Minister at that time, Alex Salmond and not sure who the Conservative was. But a big component of these programmes was Graphics and so I am sat there and we went on and we still hadn't rehearsed the Graphics so I'm saying to Alan Smart, "Which monitor do I look at when I'm talking to the Graphics? What do the Graphics look like? Any chance we could get a look at them? We're about to go on air!" I mean, Alan's view was 'it'll be alright on the night, Gov!' "Well, we're on the night, Gov, any chance we could have a look at them?!" So, that was the most under-rehearsed of all the programmes that I've done. That only adds to your nerves if you're, because you're always thinking when is this going to go wrong? Of course, on an Election programme, if you get a glitch, either a sound glitch or you go to a count and the camera's a bit snatched because it's not settled and stuff, you get away with that in an election programme where you wouldn't get away with it in other programmes because it just says this is live, this is big, this is immediate!
[42:57]
I: And how was competition with the BBC if you wanted to get personality-run?
R: I think that probably, I mean I don't think that the viewer cared a great deal about who was on which channel. David Scott, on the other hand, when he was Head of News, liked to get the better panellists and all this kind of stuff. Fiona Ross was quite friendly with Donald Dewar who was the big Labour figure of the era and so we always managed to get the services of Donald Dewar on programmes ahead of the BBC. I was quite friendly - I'll rephrase that - I knew Alex Salmond quite well. Friendly would be over-stating it. And he would always, for example on Election Night, he would give STV the first interview. When he resigned as Leader in 2000, ourselves and the BBC had a bid in to do a one-hour documentary on his ten years as Leader and he decided to do it with STV, I think partly because I had a good relationship with him. When it came to the Independence Referendum, STV got the first Debate, I think probably in part because he had a better relationship with STV than he had with the BBC so you have to remember that on Election Night programmes, anoraks were watching this at one in the morning and everybody is in their beds so if you got the first interview only a handful of people know that you are getting it! But I think a story to illustrate how keen some people are to get the first, on a by-election for example, the first is to get the winning candidate, the first. And in Govan, the by-election where I was a candidate, the BBC got the first interview with Jim Sillars and David Scott was insisting that this would never happen again! And I can remember, I think it was the double by-election in Paisley in November of 1990. There were by-elections for Paisley North and Paisley South on the same day. Alan Adams the Labour Member for Paisley North had died and the late great, and much lamented, Norman Buchan had died as the Member for Paisley South and David Scott had decided that because you have to physically drag the candidate from the platform onto the gantry for the interview, what we needed was some burly STV representative to do this! So, Dermot McQuarrie was dispatched to drag the winning candidates to the STV gantry positions so that was David's way of doing that!
I: Dermot being a Director.
R: David also, the BBC in by-election programmes, in those days, they didn't after 1992 where they got their fingers burned for broadcasting stuff that was wildly out but in those days, they used to have an Exit Poll for the by-election and in the aforementioned double by-election in Paisley, in November of 1990 not long after I had joined, David Scott informed me that I was to go and get the BBC Exit Poll and that we would broadcast it before they did! I therefore had to find out who, I knew that the political parties would be told the content of the poll and given that I used to work for one, I thought there's a fair chance that they'll leak it to me and we'll know the results of the BBC poll. In actual fact, I didn't need to get it from anybody in a political party! I got it from a BBC journalist who will remain nameless who was at the count at Paisley Town Hall, was stocious drunk, handed me the results and they were phoned in and Colin MacKay, who was anchoring the Results Programme, said, "We can now cross to our reporter live in Paisley Town Hall, David Whitton, who has some news for us!" And David informed the viewers that there was an Exit Poll out tonight and proceeded to give the viewers details of the BBC's Exit Poll which hadn't been broadcast! Now, I don't think that, to the viewers, it's 'So what?' but it was an example of the kind of mischief that David Scott liked to create!
[48:45]
I: Did he used to work with the rest of the departments within STV? Were they all helpful to each other?
R: Yes, I mean there was a Current Affairs Office in Cowcaddens and that was on the First Floor, the Newsroom was on the Ground Floor and very often what would happen is that we would shoot things for Programmes and we would keep all the tapes in the Politics' Office and so people from the Newsroom were constantly coming up the stairs, running in and out and the Newsroom used to refer to the Current Affairs Office as the Reading Room because we all appeared to sit about not doing terribly much! In fact, Colin MacKay would come in and he would be sort of slumped against the radiator with a copy of the Daily Telegraph over him and if the door was kicked in and it was somebody from the Newsroom looking for a tape, he used to always go "Shush! We're resting for the General Election!" But in those days I, for a long number of years actually, the Political Programme would (and this was certainly true of post-'90...or when we get into the 2000s and certainly at the point where we'd taken over Grampian), we would take the STV Politics Programme for some of the, which was by that point Platform, which is what I was doing, and Crossfire which was the Grampian programme and in those days I was working six months in Studio and six months in the Newsroom so I started to, I mean I had been doing Scotland Today regularly from '92, mostly politics but not exclusively politics. So, I was News and Current Affairs really because I was on the News pretty regularly.
I: And you got Michael Martin's resignation as a scoop?
R: Yes, that was a, Michael Martin, the late Michael Martin had an Election Agent, the late Gerry Leonard. Gerry died last year, Michael Martin died this year and Gerry Leonard, who was a Baillie in Glasgow district and a friend of my uncle and Gerry represented, I think, a ward in the north of the city within the Springburn area and I remember, sort of, teasing him once saying, "You've never given me a bloody story in your life, Leonard!" "Oh, I'll put that right one day!" "Well," I said, "if Michael's ever standing down!" - I meant from Parliament, I didn't mean as Speaker - "I'll let you know! I'll let you know!" So, I'm sitting at the desk one day and Gerry Leonard phoned and it was in the middle of the whole Expenses row with MPs and he said, "I said that if Michael was ever standing down, I'd let you know. He's making a statement to the House at two o' clock." So we managed to take the station off air and do a News flash on that so that was quite good to get.
Perhaps the most important piece of information I ever got as a Journalist, which we didn't broadcast because somebody on the desk took fright, was on the day of the Dunblane tragedy. I was sent out, a keen junkie on the News Editor had sent me out to go straight to Stirling Royal Infirmary and a Reporter called Douglas McGuire, I think, who went straight to Dunblane and it was, sort of, well mobile phones were a very large, brick-sized things, but the crew cars always had a telephone and I don't mind sharing the information now but I was friendly with a guy called Simon Turner and Simon Turner was the agent for Michael Forsythe and Forsythe was Scottish Secretary at the time and there was no information that was running apart from there appears to have been a shooting at a school and Fraser Clelland was driving up towards Stirling and I phoned Simon Turner and he said, "I can confirm there are at least thirteen dead. Michael is getting a shuttle with George Robertson (who was the Shadow Scottish Secretary and, coincidentally, a resident of Dunblane) and we're meeting Willie Wilson (who was the Chief Constable) at one o' clock". I phoned the office and said "thirteen confirmed dead. Scottish Secretary to meet the Chief Constable at one o' clock. Shadow Scottish Secretary coming with him. Take the station off the air and I will do this by phone." And they took fright and that, of course, it was much more horrific than that but we had, I had that confirmation, admittedly from a single source, but from such a trusted single source that was in a position to know, that I would have gone with it.
[55:27]
I: And you became RTS [Royal Television Society] Journalist of the Year in 2016?
R: I've got a couple of them! They're all rubbish really! I mean I always think these things are slightly corrupt because whoever is sitting on the judging panel, you know, if they know you or they don't know you, I'm not sure there is ever quite a level playing field when these judgements came.
I: Have you ever upset any Politicians who have refused to...?!
R: I upset Michael Forsythe when he was an Employment Minister in '92. We were doing an item for Scottish Questions and I did an interview with him which was quite bad tempered. Gerald Warner in the Scotland on Sunday had said that compared to the avuncular Colin MacKay, my interviewing style was more akin to Herr Flick in 'Allo 'Allo! but then again, Gerald Warner was a raging Tory who subsequently went on to become a Specialist Adviser for Michael Forsythe so he was hardly neutral in the analysis. The complaint didn't go anywhere. There was a sort of half a complaint, I think, from Henry McLeish when he was in Washington when he referred to Foot and Mouth as "a little local difficulty back in Scotland!" and there was a sort of very bad tempered interview where he was in Washington and I was in Glasgow but I don't think there's anyone has ever said, "I won't be interviewed by him!" As I said, the Henry McLeish and the Michael Forsythe things are the only things that I can recall in nearly thirty years where there was a phone call saying, "We weren't happy with that!" Or, "We thought that was a bit over the top!" In retrospect, they had a point. Only up to a point. I was probably too keen to establish a style and was a bit too shouty with Michael Forsythe. With the Henry McLeish incident, his Specialist Advisor Peter McMahon, who's now the Political Editor of ITV Border and actually quite a good pal, had come on to accuse STV of following the Daily Mail agenda which sent me up the wall! I was incandescent to be accused of following a Daily Mail agenda and that probably got the interview off on a wrong footing. If I had my time over again, I would have done it differently. If I had my time over again and there was a live half-hour interview with David McLetchie, the late Leader of the Scottish Conservatives, which was, I think I went, live broadcast is difficult. It's easy to cross the line without knowing you've crossed the line because the live dynamic take it in a particular direction but he got himself in to a terrible fankle over a particular point. I had made the point. The poor man was bucketing sweat and with further interruption it just looked like I was trying to nail him to the floor and so, I absolutely got that interview wrong. As I said, it was slightly extenuating circumstances for the Forsythe and the McLeish interviews, I got that wrong and I crossed a line and I apologised to him subsequently for that but if you've literally done thousands of live interviews, some of them will go wrong for whatever reason. And, of course, in the age of social media, people listen to every word and they are looking for an inflection of the voice or a pejorative word to betray bias or whatever so you are now even more careful about how you express yourself.
I: So, it has changed the way you work?
R: Yes, well, I mean there's a paradox. You're not as well prepared. That's absolutely the case because there is not the same degree of in-house expertise to rely on compared to thirty years ago but because you can't be as well prepared, you have to be very careful not to go down a route of questioning where you are not totally across the brief. Because if you are not across the brief it will show or the politician will sent that you are not across the brief and will use it against you in the interview so you really do rely on guile and experience now in order to help carry you through.
[61:32]
I: A changing world. Any more you want to say?
R: I think some of the stuff around the Independence Referendum might be worth just putting on the record because it was obviously the biggest story that I've covered. As an example of trying to get programmes on air, a good illustration of how long you have to nurse them was Salmond and Darling, the Debate. The first of the Debates in the Independence Referendum, broadcast from the Royal Conservatoire on 5th August 2014 and we spent a lot of time getting that on air. I had a fair idea because I got on well with Salmond that he would want to do the first Debate with STV. Alistair Darling didn't really care about who got the first Debate. He was more concerned about audience make-up and although that programme went out with the highest ever viewing figures for a Current Affairs programme in the history of the station - at its peak it had 900,000 viewers which is an astonishing number of viewers for a politics programme. That's the kind of figures you would normally get for an Old Firm game. But the preparation for that programme started probably at the turn of the year in 2014 when I took him aside and said, "I would like you to do the first of the Debates with STV." And he said, "Fine, I'll do it with you. Fine." So, we knew that we'd the first Debate in January of that year; the only question was when it would happen. I then went to see Alistair Darling at the Labour Party Conference in March 2014 to say, "Will you debate with Salmond?" He said "Of course!" I said, "Will you debate with him? Will you cross-examine one another?" That is the format that STV had used in programmes. And he said, "I'm not saying no but we will need a strong chair." I said, "Well, look, I've been doing these programmes for years. If you ask most of the parties they'll say I'm relatively fair." But he got completely paranoid about the make-up of the audience! The only thing that Better Together did during the entire run-up to that Debate was talk about the audience. "How are you recruiting the audience?" They were paranoid and their allegation used to be that every audience was effectively a pro-nationalist audience and they didn't quite say that the broadcasters were rigging it but they were saying that we weren't doing quite enough due diligence to make sure the audiences were balanced. That was a charge. Actually, it was a charge they made against the BBC, in fairness it wasn't a charge they made against STV but the interesting thing was on the Independence side of the argument all the Nationalists thought that the BBC audiences were stacked, filled with Unionists! Clearly both sides can't be right! So, in the run up to it we had to reassure Better Together that the audiences were brought together in a fair way. They were. They were all recruited by a system free, a cross-section of the population across all constituencies in the country with a mixture of both points of view and of undecideds and we sat them out in the hall in such a way so that people couldn't cluster, to get together and create an artificial atmosphere and everything was done by the book and they both agreed to this cross-examination format.
[66:31]
I recall on the night of the programme going out into Renfrew Street and seeing the crowds snake all the way up Renfrew Street and round the corner into Cambridge Street and thinking at one point, we might not get them all in before this goes on air! It's a two-hour broadcast! It's a two-hour live broadcast and it is the first Debate in the regulated period in the Election! Everybody was watching us! I mean, all the UK broadcasters are there to watch this. We did eventually get the audience seated and either side of the stage I remember going off to see Alex Salmond, to wish him all the best and to wish Alistair Darling all the best and normally when I met Salmond he would slap me on the back, "How are you doing?" and he would exchange a bit of gossip for he loved, loves the gossip of politics and I love the gossip of politics! And he sat with his Advisor, Duncan Hamilton, and they sat at a desk and he acknowledged me, didn't get out the chair, no back-slapping and the first thing I noticed was his body language was so tight. It was so, so tight! And I said, "Well, all the best for the Debate, Alex, we'll have a chat at the end." And I thought, God! He's nervous! I've never seen him so nervous! And I then came back on to the stage and went to the other side of the stage where Alistair Darling was and I said, "Alistair, I just want to wish you all the best for the Debate." He was literally running on the spot saying, "How long have we got?! How long have we got before we're on?!" I said, "We're on in about two minutes. We're on in about two minutes." "Right! Right! Right!" And I thought, God, he's nervous as well! Here were two of the most experienced politicians in the country and I had never seen them so uptight and so nervous and they had done these kind of programmes hundreds of times and it was at that point I thought, well, given what's at stake here, I suppose this is, I suppose this is what you'd expect and then I started to get nervous as a result! But, as is usual with these things, that five minutes before you go on is awful! It's just awful! But once you're on the two hours flew by and the audience's applauses were pretty 50/50 each side and as the programme maker you hope, you hope that you're going to get a story and what that means is that you want somebody to win the debate. You don't want people saying it was a scored draw and to everyone's surprise, not to say amazement, on the cross-examination section which people just assumed Salmond would fillet Mr Darling, it was the other way round. Darling absolutely steamrollered Salmond on the issue of currency and Alex had chosen a series of questions to go on which were bizarre in the extreme and although I thought Salmond came back pretty well in that Debate in the final section of it, the audience section, the Press all had their story and there's no doubt that the worst headlines for Alex Salmond were on 6th August were, I think, 'First Blood to Darling!' was the headline in the Herald and that was about right.
[71:02]
I: Tell us about David Scott.
R: David Scott, very important figure. Gus Macdonald arrives in 1986 to become Director of Programmes, recruited by Bill Brown. He hires David Scott from the BBC. David brings with him a number of people - John Keen, Scott Ferguson, Blair Jenkins and David makes the focus of the News and Current Affairs output Hard News. There is no doubt that the News programmes became a lot sharper on his watch! He had been an Investigative Journalist for many years, particularly over the famous Paddy Mean case in the 1970s and there was an investigative documentary strand, Scottish Reporters, which was made as a consequence and David stayed in post as Head of News and Current Affairs for about six years before he went upstairs. He was succeeded by Blair Jenkins who was a brilliant Producer! Completely calm and utterly rational and sane and in the snap judgements that you need to make in the News sense, I mean, a hundred and ten percent reliable! I mean a very, very impressive Producer! Blair had been a Producer on the Nine o' Clock News in London and then had, I think from Elgin originally, went to BBC Scotland and then came to STV, News Producer, then succeeded David as Head of News and Current Affairs before he went upstairs. I mean David was a brilliant News man, Blair was an excellent Producer and a person of real integrity in the way in which he dealt with people and Scott Ferguson succeeded Blair and Scott was a completely, Scott was a sort of hybrid of the two. He had the journalistic nous of a David Scott but he also had the, sort of, a calm judgement of a Blair Jenkins. But what he had that those two didn't have was also a very creative eye because Scott was a Producer Director who just brimmed full of ideas. I think, probably, Scott Ferguson was one of the most naturally gifted television persons that I've worked with in my twenty-eight years. I didn't have, I didn't work with him a great deal it has to be said but when I worked with him, I thought this is a really creative mind and thereafter, when David left, we had a small period when Mark Smith was Head of News and Current Affairs very briefly before he went off to the Herald and Paul McKinney had a stint and then the final Head of News and Current Affairs, who's just left the Company, was Gordon Macmillan. Gordon Macmillan was, has been the longest serving Head of News and Current Affairs in the history of STV. He was there from 2004/05 up until 2018 so a thirteen/fourteen year stint and he did a very good job at keeping News and Current Affairs production up because of course the great change in the time that I have been there is that we made this thousand hours of local programming from January of 1993 and it's been reducing, reducing, reducing, reducing and reducing and the station now is not the hub of programme making but it once was. It probably will never get back to that again. Indeed there is a question as to how long it will remain as an independent company but Gordon Macmillan was excellent at ensuring that News and Current Affairs was at the heart of what the station does and with a much more limited budget compared to previous years and I think kept the output very, very credible. He was also, as the Head of News and Current Affairs, understood the technology of television better than any other Head of News and Current Affairs. We do three half-hour News programmes live and we do simultaneous lives in to all three programmes through the one gallery. This sort of stuff happens in the United States a lot but Gordon Macmillan was a real technical geek who was not as, I mean, he is no slouch editorially but he wouldn't be in the league of a David Scott or a Blair Jenkins or a Scott Ferguson but he has a sound editorial judgement with a tremendous technical knowledge about how News is gathered and should be presented and, as I say, the longest serving in the history of the Company.
[77:30]
I suppose I should also just say something and it will be interesting to see what happens, this is 7th July 2018 and the question to be posed is how long STV will survive as an independent entity. It is the last of the old ITV companies still standing. UTV was taken over by ITV a couple of years ago. We're in a situation where media companies are going to be taken over and I think if ITV is taken over, STV will fall in a matter of hours and there is the question about whether or not ITV simply want to consolidate in the UK and come in and take over STV. I hope I am wrong! I hope I am wrong but we are 2018 and I would be very surprised if STV is an independent entity in three years time. [78:44]
I: Time to finish?
I2: Yes, indeed.
[End of Recording]
