Talking to Bangladeshi Television

A very enjoyable chat the other night on Bengladesh television network NTV Europe with Talking Point anchor Syed Neaz Ahmad. Also enjoyable to meet network Chief Executive Officer Subrina Hossain and her very friendly team.

Neaz and I spent time discussing my book God's Triangle, which recounts the sad and true story of Australian Baptist missionary, Florence M. "Florrie" Cox, who was stationed in Calcutta, Mymensingh and Faridpur during the First World War.

We also chatted about my thriller The Mortal Maze, a morality story about a BBC correspondent in the Middle East and trapped into becoming a spy. Neaz was keen to know how my time with the BBC had shaped this story. The answer is "a great deal".

Another subject was my progression into print then broadcast journalism as a youth in my home country, Australia, before spending 27 years with BBC World Service radio and television in London.

For anyone interesting in the Talking Point discussion, click here: Part One  Part Two 
Part Three 

Read about Ian Richardson's visit to Bangladesh to research God's Triangle. Click here: Bangladesh Diary

Working for the wonderful wireless (now better known as "the radio")

My brother, Jeffrey, contacted me from Australia the other day to report that he had been browsing through the books in a charity shop in the city of Geelong when he came across 3AW is Melbourne - 75 Years of Radio, a weighty tome published in 2007.

 

3AW was my employer for five years in the mid-1960s when I worked in its Macquarie Network newsroom in Melbourne as a writer and reporter and, sometimes, an overnight (very bad) newsreader. As my brother flicked through the book, he found that I had made a contribution to the chapter on the radio station's news department. The book is long out of print and no longer available -- except, perhaps, in a few charity or second hand shops -- but I tracked down my own copy and scanned the relevant pages.

Journalists and radio buffs may find it interesting to read of a time when Australian commercial radio took news seriously, both as a generator of audiences and as a public service. When I was at 3AW, we had a newsroom staff of around 20 journalists, including a political reporter, Frank O'Brien, based in the state parliament building, and a police reporter, Mal Cochrane, stationed in the scruffy press room at police headquarters in Russell Street.  Frank had a Saturday job, calling the horse races for ABC radio, and politicians who liked to bet on the gee gees would often seek his inside information about likely winners. Mal was what was then called a "leg man". Put another way, he would gather all the necessary information, then phone it in to a desk writer to turn into a story. In addition to Frank and Mal, there would be at least one or two general reporters darting about in their radio cars from one news event to another.

We also had radios tuned to the police and fire services, so we were always immediately aware of serious crimes and disasters. We all had to know the code numbers used by the police. I still remember after all this time that a "12 and 16" was a road accident requiring an ambulance. A "35" was a stabbing and a "69" was not code for a sex act but for a murder.

Sometimes we would beat the police to the scene. Our monitoring equipment, both in the newsroom and in the radio cars, was officially illegal, but the police and fire services knew we had it and the police would sometimes make informal press announcements over their networks. Sometimes they would reveal that they were having difficulty getting to the scene and would ask us not to approach it until their patrol cars arrived.

It was incredibly draining, competitive work, but it could also be very exciting. Under editor Corbett Shaw, who died last year, I learned a great deal about what makes writing for the ear so different from writing for the eye. Another skill I acquired was that there was no such thing as  "writer's block" when churning out bulletins in a ferocious cut throat environment where every second counted. Thinking time at 3AW was a very rare commodity.

Corbett was a tough, chain-smoking boss. I was recruited from Radio 3BO, Bendigo, where I had a most enjoyable two years under editor David Horsfall. I found 3AW an entirely more rugged world, but I greatly admired Corbett's supreme skills as a radio news editor.

Corbett willingly promoted those who "delivered the goods" for him, but it was not unknown for him to hire someone on a Monday and fire them by Friday. On one Saturday, when he discovered that his journalists had taken an extended lunch break at a nearby pub, he drove into the newsroom from his home in an outer suburb of Melbourne, fired everyone -- I think there were about five journalists on duty that day -- and took over the shift himself.

In my time with 3AW, it was usual for female journalists -- both in print and broadcasting -- to be assigned only "soft" stories, usually about women's issues. Although just a few women journalists were employed in the newsroom at AW in my time, Corbett was always prepared to give them what might be called "proper stories" to do.

If Corbett had a sense of humour, I don't recall that he ever brought it to work with him. I doubt that anyone would have contemplated an over-familiar shortening of his name to "Corb" or "Corby". When I finally fell out with him in 1968 and resigned over issues too complicated to recount here, I told him I was going to seek experience abroad. He wished me the best, but his parting words were that while I was a competent journalist, I wasn't good enough to make it in international broadcasting. I confess to gaining a petty delight in informing him six months later that I had been offered a job in London with  BBC World Service News -- the start of a career that lasted almost 30 years with that fine organisation.

Most of the daytime and evening bulletins at 3AW were read by professional broadcasters, rather than the newsroom journalists. The majority were hugely skilled, having to read most stories on sight, due to the bulletins often being delivered to the studio just seconds before transmission. But not all were brilliant. One, a former famous radio actor, had to be sent on his way because he couldn't stop himself from announcing "Here are the headlights" instead of "the headlines".

3AW's news output -- particularly the half-hour breakfast, lunch and early evening bulletins -- was greatly respected and a "must listen" by the great and the good of Melbourne. Certainly these bulletins were superior to the rather tired and unimaginative ones then put out by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But that didn't stop some mischievous stunts, most of which on reflection were rather infantile.

One such stunt, pulled a couple of times in my memory, was to give a newsreader a story announcing his own death. As our style was to put proper nouns in full caps to give the newsreaders a chance to scan ahead for tricky names, none of them failed to spot the fake story in time to skip it. 

Then there was the time when a bulletin had to be read from the mobile studio parked in the courtyard. As the bulletin progressed, a colleague turned the fire hose on the studio, causing it to rock furiously and noisily. Incredibly, the bulletin was completed without the newsreader exploding in rage or collapsing in laughter, but the listeners must have wondered about the background noise. 

On another occasion, a former colleague threw fistfuls of wheat into a studio during a live sports broadcast, then followed it with a startled and noisy rooster. The presenter tried to kick the rooster away with his foot but that just caused it to make even louder squawking noises. Eventually, the presenter began laughing uncontrollably, generating complaints from the stations that were receiving the sports information on relay. Despite the complaints, the prankster was allowed to keep his job.

There was another stunt that began well enough but turned out to be not so amusing. The station management thought it would be a great idea to have the alternating overnight female presenters do a joint show for New Year's Eve. It proved to be a very bad idea. The women arrived for duty having partaken of alcohol and were in high spirits. While a friend of mine was reading the bulletin, the women did the can-can across the studio, eventually causing him to laugh just as he was reading a story about a fatal road accident. The family of the dead person complained but somehow the matter was hushed up and the two women survived to do further separate and much more sober shifts.

Then there was the occasional embarrassing clanger, the worst being when a music program was interrupted by a news flash announcing the unexpected death of a famous Australian woman. I can't now remember who the woman was, but the flash was immediately followed by the tune that had already been cued on the turntable by the DJ, unaware of what was to be revealed in the news flash. That tune was The Old Grey Mare Ain't What She Used To Be.

Nowadays, 3AW's newsroom -- along with most others in Australian commercial radio -- are sad shadows of what they used to be. Radio newsrooms have been reduced to one or two journalists being on duty at any given time, rarely able to venture out to do any on-the-spot reporting. Some radio stations do no local reporting at all.

A friend gave me one example of what happened when his city was hit by a devastating storm a few years back. It was at the weekend and the local station was closed and relaying network programs from elsewhere in Australia. These programs could not be broken into without the manager's approval, but he was away somewhere out of contact. The result was that the station failed to broadcast any advice about the storm. Despite this being in serious breach of the requirement that the station act as an information service during a civil emergency, I understand no disciplinary action was taken by the broadcasting authorities.

That grump aside, it you fancy learning more about the Good Old Days of Australian commercial radio, click here. You will also find other items, some quite amusing, in my 3AW archive. A Walkley magazine obituary written by Corbett Shaw's son, Roderick, is here.

Finally, a little plug for my books: The true and tragic story of a Baptist missionary scandal and cover-up, God's Triangle, and a thriller set in a BBC bureau in the Middle East, The Mortal Maze.

Thank you, Blonde Lawyer

As any author will tell you, writing a book is a long and often-tedious task. Then there's the problem if getting it published and circulating it in the great wide world in competition with hundreds of thousands of other books. Therefore, I am pathetically grateful whenever I get a four or five star reviews.  Here's one from someone who appears to write from the heart:

Thank you, Blonde Lawyer, whoever you are, wherever you are, for this Amazon review of my true story of scandal and cover-up called God's Triangle

And here is one of the other very nice reviews:

And now if you want to read some of the other God's Triangle reviews and comments, go here

A PHOTOGRAPH THAT NO-ONE WAS SUPPOSED TO SEE

As a keen genealogist I have many family photographs that I regard as “special”, but this one is particularly so because I wasn’t supposed to see it. Nor were any other descendants of the bride and groom.

      The couple were my great aunt, Florence “Florrie” Cox, and the Rev. Frank E. Paice, on the day they were married in the Circular Road Baptist Chapel in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in December 1914. Both were Baptist missionaries from Melbourne, Australia, and went on to be stationed in East Bengal (now Bangladesh).

      The marriage, which began with high hopes in both families, fell apart in scandal. This was partly because Frank had developed a fondness for a fellow Australian missionary, Olga Johnson, but the greatest contributing factor was the discovery on the honeymoon that Florrie had no vagina.

      Florrie had what was identified after her death in 1950 as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). She looked and felt that she was a woman, but had male chromosomes and no internal female organs.

      The marriage took place in an age when sex was a taboo subject in strict Christian families. It was quite common for females never to be told in advance about menstruation. In Florrie’s case, she was never aware that mature women should be having periods. Nor did Frank know this until much later.

      In my years of research into why the marriage ended in a covered-up annulment divorce, I found few photographs of Florrie and no photographs of the wedding. That is, until I met a distant cousin who had been researching a different branch of the Cox family.

      The cousin showed me a postcard copy of the photo accompanying this article, but had no clue who was in it, other than the words “Florence and Frank 1914” written on the back. We came to the conclusion that this was probably the only copy in existence because all the others had been destroyed by the more immediate family members of Florrie and Frank.

      After the divorce went through in a secret session in the Supreme Court in Melbourne, Florrie led a quiet life, often battling depression, and regarded by her family as an embarrassment. Frank went back to India, married Olga, became a pillar of the engineering world in Calcutta, then returned to Melbourne years later to be prominent in local government. Both he and Olga died in the 1960s with very few people – not even their only child – knowing about the scandal or that they had ever been missionaries.

      One question that is frequently raised by those who see the wedding photograph: “Why is Frank sitting while Florrie stands?” One answer was that he didn’t want it to be obvious that he was shorter than his bride. But there are also suggestions that the photographer wanted the focus be on the bride, allowing her to display her wedding dress and her bouquet to their best advantage.

The investigation by Ian Richardson into what happened to

 Florrie Cox and Frank Paice is available here:

https://www.godstriangle.com/

The morality of fictional journalists

Sarah Lonsdale's The Journalist in British Fiction book launch and symposium, City University, London, July 7 2016.

Why did Edwardian novelists portray journalists as swashbuckling, truth-seeking super-heroes whereas post-WW2 depictions present the journalist as alienated outsider? Why are contemporary fictional journalists often deranged, murderous or intensely vulnerable? As newspaper journalism faces the double crisis of a lack of trust post-Leveson, and a lack of influence in the fragmented internet age, how do cultural producers view journalists and their role in society today?

My contribution... 

My screenplay and book have undergone a name change since I first started work on them a few years ago. Originally, the title was The Moral Maze. I knew about the BBC radio programme of the same name, but did not feel that would be a problem until I realised that it would be a disaster when promoting the book on the internet. Do a Google or Yahoo search on The Moral Maze and up comes hundreds of thousands of references to the radio programme. Any reference to my book and my film would have been buried.

My wife, Rosemary, then came up with the suggestion that the letter T in red be inserted in the title, so that it became The Mortal Maze. This meant that a Google or Yahoo search would take potential readers straight to my book, always a great marketing plus, although I am still waiting to be made rich by being the author of a rocketing global best seller.

The change of name effectively gives the book two titles – both of which reflect how television journalists now face not just the moral challenges that have always been there, but nowadays much greater physical dangers.

Having settled the most-important matter of the title, I was then faced with a dilemma: should I set the story in the BBC or in some fictional broadcasting organisation. My concern was that I didn’t want to do anything to damage the BBC’s hard-earned reputation as the world’s foremost and most trusted broadcasting news organisation. As you will have detected from my accent, I’m originally from Australia. I grew up as a boy in the bush, working on small weekly newspapers owned by my family.  I loved listening to BBC news programmes, such as Radio Newsreel, relayed by the ABC, never for a nanosecond thinking that one day I would be editing some of them.

Although the BBC had – and still has – its faults, I remain immensely proud of having worked for it for more than two decades. There can hardly have been a day when I didn’t walk through the entrance doors of Bush House or Television Centre and be excited by what might lie ahead that day.

 After much thought and after consulting some journalist friends, I decided to go with The Mortal Maze being set in the BBC. As much as anything, this was because it would be widely known that I had been a BBC news editor and the story would really be about the BBC regardless of what I called the organisation. My friends assured me that the BBC was big enough to cope with any critical aspects of my story. They also reminded me that it would hardly be more damaging than the comedy series W1A, which the BBC had made about itself.

I knew that it would be implausible and extremely dull if the main character in The Mortal Maze, Jackson Dunbar, was a goody-two-shoes without flaws. So, I gave him a gambling problem that provided me with a vehicle for some of the ethical issues that journalists often face. In particular, I wanted to explore the often-grey question of when a journalist is spying or merely reporting. And how much pressure would be required to force a journalist to put to one side deeply-held principles?

I began taking a particular interest in this area of journalism while working abroad as a field editor for the BBC, then as head of newsgathering for BBC World Service in charge of around 200 staff correspondents and stringers.

BBC correspondents overwhelmingly are immensely proud of their journalism and would do nothing to discredit their work, but there were a few who I felt had two masters – the BBC and the intelligence services. One of these would spy for the money – because money was what mattered to him most – and another would do it for patriotic reasons. If I had taken that second person aside and accused him of spying he would have been genuinely aghast. For him, he was not spying. He was simply passing on information out of a civic duty.

And in fairness to the reporters in these two examples, the accuracy of their stories was never in question. There was, however, one BBC stringer who I and others were convinced was a spy for South African intelligence. He was not very clever with it and cast serious suspicion on himself by being able to get to places no-one else could with no visible means of support. I fired him -- not because I was able to prove he was a spy, but because he rarely delivered his promised stories. 

As most of you will know, one of the Cambridge Five Espionage Ring, Guy Burgess, spied for the Soviet Union while working for the BBC. And the author Frederick Forsythe, another former BBC correspondent, confirmed last year that he worked for British intelligence for 20 years.

Few would defend the traitorous spying activities of Guy Burgess, but was it okay for Frederick Forsythe to spy, as he was doing it for our benefit, or so he believed anyway? I don’t think so. In my view, journalism and espionage are totally incompatible. Journalists should always aim to be detached observers. Putting aside any moral questions, once journalists cross the line into spying, they put themselves and others in their profession at great physical risk. Already journalists find themselves increasingly targeted in the world’s hot spots and we should do nothing to make that bad situation worse.

As I checked a draft of this speech I realised there was a danger that The Mortal Maze might be seen as a rather pompous, self-righteous moral lecture – hectoring even. There are, of course, several ethical messages in the story, but I also wanted it to be exciting with lots of unexpected developments, amusing revelations about how television journalism achieves its aims – and, above all, a memorable surprise ending. I hope I have succeeded, but that’s for others to decide.

Here’s an extract from The Mortal Maze. It follows on from when the television reporter, Jackson Dunbar was given a tip-off by his one-time friend Thomas Fulham who blackmailed him into become a spy. The tip-off provided Jackson with a spectacular scoop when he witnessed a government minister’s convoy being blown up in the middle of a busy shopping centre. But Jackson is so appalled by what he witnessed that he told his cameraman Pete Fox to get lots of close-ups in an attempt to let the world know the full horror of what has taken place...

That evening, as arranged, Thomas Fulham turns up at the BBC bureau. He is in a hurry and has no time for pleasantries. “So what do you want to show me?”

Jackson goes to the video machine. “I take it that you saw my reports on the assassination?” he asks.

"Not an assassination, Jacko, a neutralisation, if you don’t mind. But, yes, of course I saw your reports and I was impressed, as always.”

“Right, Thomas, I now want you to see some of the scenes that my bosses felt were too dreadful to show.”

Jackson pushes the ‘play’ button and immediately the monitor shows a series of graphic close-ups of wounds and body parts. He winds up the volume, filling the room with piercing blood-curdling screams. Thomas flinches.

Jackson spools through to another section of the video. It shows wounded and terrified children howling at the top of their voices. Thomas angrily hits the ‘stop’ button, unwittingly causing the video to freeze on a close-up of the little boy trying to shake his dead mother alive.

Thomas is furious. “What the fuck is this all about?” he shouts.

“I thought it was just possible that you might feel some shame. I wanted to show you the full, brutal, unadorned result of the actions of you and your ilk. What would you say if those kids had been your children, Sophie and Sam?”

Thomas’s fury now has no limits. “We’re at war. The death of a few innocent women and children is the price that sometimes has to be paid for the higher good of democracy.”

It is now Jackson’s turn to lose control. “I’m out of this, Thomas. No more of your dirty games.”

“Sorry, Jacko, that’s not an option for you – at least not yet.”

Thomas leaves, slamming the door behind him. Jackson switches off the video editor and slumps into a chair behind his desk. He takes several large breaths to try to calm himself. After a few minutes, he hunts through the cupboards until he finds a half-empty bottle of whisky. He flops into a chair and drinks straight from the bottle.

The Mortal Maze as a paperback or Kindle ebook is available through Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com or Smashwords.ePub.  And The Journalist in British Fiction & Film, written by Sarah Lonsdale, is available HERE

How do journalists get their scoops?

The Mortal Maze, an authentic thriller for journalists and non-journalists alike. Now available as an ebook and paperback...

And here's what some of the early readers think:

The Mortal Maze comments

Book publishing: typos and other dumb errors

When I published my first book -- a non-fiction story, God's Triangle -- it was edited by one person and beta-read by four other people. As far as I know, it contains no errors. However, my new thriller, The Mortal Maze, has been professionally edited and proofed at some expense by two people, been edited again (free of charge) by a third person and checked for errors by at least six beta readers. Yet when the book proofs came back from the printers earlier this week we still found a significant number of typos. How come? What's so different with this book? Is it because several of the readers told me they got completely carried away by the story, thus failing to note errors? Or could there be some other reason? 

One interesting suggestion is that proof readers be required the read a book twice -- once front to back, then from back to front. That way, it is said, few errors will be missed.

Anyway, The Mortal Maze is now available error free (I hope).