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The Fellowship: Kate Adie interview feature
32KATE ADIE obeTHE FELLOWSHIP
Words by Matthew BellPortrait by Ken Lennox ¥ Images from Alamy,BAFTA/Doug Mckenzie, BBC Photo Library
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t is unlikely that any other recipient of a BAFTA Fellowship bears as many scars of war as Kate Adie obe – and carries them so lightly.
I nothing vital.” Reporting for the BBC, she was grazed by a bullet in Beirut and hit by shrapnel in Bosnia, which is still inside her. She had flesh torn from her elbow in Tiananmen Square by a bullet that killed the man next to her and was shot at close range in Libya.
Adie survived and receives this year’s Fellowship in recognition of her trailblazing career as a news correspondent. “It’s a great honour. You don’t come into journalism expecting these things,” she says.
The world’s killing fields are a long way from Sunderland, where Adie grew up after the Second World War. She remained in the North East to pass a degree “that didn’t offer a lot of job prospects – I studied Swedish and old Icelandic”.
Nevertheless, it was as a student that Adie had her first brush with the media, captaining Newcastle University’s team in BBC Radio 4’s student quiz, The 3rd Degree. It ended in defeat when she “flumped the tie-breaker”, but the show’s producer and question master, Max Robertson, best known as the BBC’s lightning-quick tennis commentator, took pity, taking Adie to a local curry house.
“They asked me what I was going to do with my life but I had no idea,” she recalls. “I remember saying, ‘What you do looks fun,’ and they chorused, ‘It is.’ That stayed in my mind.”
On leaving university in the mid-60s, Adie sat the Civil Service exam and “to my horror, I passed”. A life in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, or similar, beckoned, until Adie spotted an ad in her local paper for the BBC’s new local radio network. She applied for the most junior role of station assistant at Radio Durham. Adie, who is the most self-effacing of people, thought the interview “disastrous” but, naturally, landed the job.
A year later, she left for Radio Bristol where she remained until the early 70s. “I did everything from Thought for the Day to the farming programme. I knew a great deal about sheep,” she says, with a hoot of laughter. Adie, though, was a producer, not a journalist. “The newsroom was not a place where women were welcome,” she says.
A move to regional television news in Plymouth put Adie in front of the camera for the first time, presenting an item about an old people’s home in Barnstaple. “It was absolutely terrible and the second one, in which I nearly squeezed a rabbit to death, was even more disastrous,” laughs Adie, who finds reminiscing about her early, sputtering television career hilarious.
More laughter accompanies her memories of her next job, “a catastrophic nine months” at BBC South, working for “a news editor who hated news… I was doing soft stories, which is what they gave women,” she continues. “I was doing this fluffy rubbish – I couldn’t put my heart into it.”
A gangland killing offered Adie a way out. Following a tip-off, she was the first journalist at a Brighton crime scene,
discovering “a corpse hanging over a fire escape”. Her editor refused to run the story and then fired her for failing to cover a local embroidery exhibition instead. Fortunately, the BBC’s London newsroom had a firmer grasp of “news” and ran the report, which led to Adie landing a job on national television. “I was lucky, lucky, lucky,” she says.
As a junior reporter, Adie covered industrial strife, race riots, politics and, giving her a taste of what was to follow, Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. But everything changed for Adie on 30 April 1980, when six armed men stormed the Iranian Embassy in South Kensington. On day six of the siege, the gunmen killed a hostage and threw the body out of the
embassy, which prompted the SAS to storm the building. All but one of the hostages was rescued and five gunmen killed.
Reporting for the BBC, crouched behind a car door, was Kate Adie. Her live broadcast drew a huge audience and put her name on the public consciousness map. Surely, Adie must have been terrified? “No – I’d done three years off and on in Northern Ireland. We knew what a bomb sounded like,” she says, matter of factly.
Over the next two decades, Adie reported from many of the world’s worst trouble spots, from war in the Gulf and Balkans, to violent protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the US bombing of Libya and the Rwandan Genocide. Her expert outside broadcasts earned her a BAFTA nomination in 1990
for her secret report from inside a Chinese hospital, and in the same year she won the Richard Dimbleby Award, a BAFTA special award and gift of the Academy that recognises the best presenter of factual, features and news.
Adie describes her job as that of an “an eyewitness reporter”. She is adamant that a journalist should never become the story: “It is utterly irrelevant what the reporter thinks. You’re putting out information for people to make up their own mind.”
On the battlefield, says Adie, fear is a constant but necessary companion: “If there’s one sort of colleague you never want to stand next to, it is one who never feels danger. I’ve met immensely brave people and they all know what fear is.”
Adie was part of a press pack that was famed for its camaraderie, helping journalists cope with the atrocities they had witnessed. “We made sure, even in the worst conditions, that we sat down at the end of the day, had hot food and, as they say in the business, ‘a small dry sherry’, to find out how everybody’s day had gone. We didn’t allow people to dwell on things and internalise,” she says.
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CELEBRATING OUR 10 TH YEAR OF PARTNERSHIP WITH BAFTA
Adie served as the BBC’s chief news correspondent from 1989 until 2003, during which time she appeared on Radio 4’s long-running From Our Own Correspondent. This year, she celebrates 20 years presenting the programme. “It offers good eyewitness, more reflective stories from reporters who have been through it and can write wonderfully,” she says.
She doesn’t miss frontline reporting, which, she argues, like the huge press packs, no longer exists: “The business has changed so much. I was lucky to be working in an era when there was a huge amount of opportunity and television news had fantastic viewership.
“I’ve been immensely lucky and privileged to be able to go to so many wonderful places,” she reports. “I never intended to be a television reporter, but I found that it brought the world and extraordinary events into people’s living rooms.” •
Matthew Bell is a television journalist and writer
