Well over thirty five years ago, in the run up to Christmas 1986 or ’87, I think, the BBC got an invitation to see a Santa waterskiing on the Thames under one of the bridges. I imagine it was some kind of publicity stunt, but for what I have absolutely no idea any more. And Christmas being (in those days) a quiet time of year for news, they decided to cover it.

Off we went, cameraman Albie Charlton and I, to capture this rather trivial event for posterity.

We set up somewhere on the South Bank, and sure enough, there came a speedboat towing Santa under the bridge. Not Earth shatteringly important but maybe mildly diverting.

Problem was, the organisers of this stunt hasn’t bothered to coordinate with the Met Police’s Thames division, who soon showed up in their blue boat with their blue lights and nicked Santa and the pilot for some obscure breach of the rules of the river, hauling them into their boat and zooming off with them.

We thought this was quite amusing, and so did the editor of the lunchtime news who put it out as an “and finally.” (The BBC didn’t actually call it that, but you know, last trivial item before the weather.)

What nobody realised was that on a quiet day that close to Christmas, LOADS of small kiddies would be watching, and so, no sooner did the item finish than the switchboard lit up like, well, like a Christmas tree with outraged parents yelling that their kids were horrified and demanding to know if their presents would still arrive.

I believe they had to run a line in the early evening news that Santa had been released without charge and would be operating as normal.

I do wish I had evidence, but I didn’t take any stills at the time (one of the regrets of my career) and a search has turned up no sign of the video. If anyone has or finds anything, do tell.

In late 1989, the Warsaw Pact, and indeed the Soviet Union, were basically dead on their feet. The governments of Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia amongst others were changing and parting company from the Soviet Union, which itself was slowly falling apart.

One consequence of this was that East Germans could do an end run around the interior German border by going into Hungary (my first draft of this said it was Czechoslovakia, but a little research suggests it was actually Hungary) and crossing into Austria and onto West Germany. In September, I was sent out, with sound recordist Roger Snow and correspondent Michael MacMillan, to do the story.

It only took a couple of days, after which MacMillan went home and Roger and I were asked to head for Munich and meet up with a different correspondent (and for the life of me I can’t remember who. Possibly Chris Wain) to cover a NATO exercise which was to take place the following weekend.

We had a couple of days to kill so, it being September in Munich, we went to the Okboberfest. (I know, I know)

We had a wander round and decided we wanted lunch. Under the circumstances, beer and sausage seemed appropriate. But every beer tent we went into was absolutely rammed.

Finally, we found one where we could at least sit down. We had some beer, as you see. <glugglugglugglug> We probably had some sausage too. Honest

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Then we had another beer <glugglugglugglug>

And Roger turned to me and asked, “Do you feel in the slightest bit pissed?”

No. I didn’t. After two LITRES of beer.

That was why the tent was half empty. The Germans knew it was selling low alcohol beer. Funny thing was, though, we never realised. It tasted just like, well, beer. Clever brewers those Germans. It’s taken us thirty odd years to catch up

The NATO exercise was fun when we got to it as well but that’s another story

Just watching the BBC News Channel. They’re previewing the midnight fireworks from Embankment in London.

Took me back to the night I was on that job.

I *think* it would have been NYE 2000 into 2001 <*> but I’m not 100% certain. Not really important. The Millennium Wheel was in place, though.

One warm sunny morning in August some considerable time ago, I woke up in a strange place. It was a chalet style ski lodge, built, I was told, for a long passed winter Olympics.

Standing on the grass outside the door I looked out at a beautiful, steep sided, densely wooded valley, dotted with small villages and towns. I swear that even now I can smell the freshness in the air.
A bus came and took us all off for a day’s filming.

In the early afternoon, the bus stopped at what might have once been a farm; maybe cattle, maybe chickens. There were two long, low sheds.

But the sheds no longer housed cows or hens. They housed men and boys–some no older than 13 or 14. They sat and lay in long rows, no more than three feet apart. Thin, dirty, resigned. Our tour guides stood around glaring at us, fingering their Kalashnikovs.
It was called Manjača, and it was one of several internment camps operating in Bosnia in 1992 as a consequence of the Yugoslavian wars.

I was there because Paddy Ashdown and Russell Johnston had bullied the Serbs into letting us in.

i found it a sobering experience, not least because I really couldn’t see what separated the guards from the prisoners apart from a national label

This happened only 25 years ago, only a three hour flight from Heathrow or Gatwick. In our own backyard near enough. It’s what can happen when you divide the world into Them and Us. When you let yourself give in to unthinking nationalism and the fear of the Other.

Eventually of course the wars stopped and the various parties sat down and *talked* and now two of the former Yugoslavian republics are members of the EU and more are on track to join and it *won’t happen again*

The EU is where you talk first. But its more than just avoiding conflict. It’s where you actively co-operate with the others to make things better for all of you. It’s about NOT turning inwards and creating squabbling fortress nations but welcoming new ideas even new ideologies if you want. It’s about being part of something bigger and more varied.

So when you go and vote later (you are going to vote later, aren’t you?) please do vote Remain for a more peaceful and more prosperous Europe.

(By the way, there’s a better written and better recalled story of that trip to Bosnia in Paddy Ashdown’s autobiography, *A Fortunate Life.* It’s not a bad read if you ignore Paddy’s slightly pompous style)

This story is one I’ve told many times in person,  so if you think you’ve heard it before you can go and have a beer or something while I get it off my chest.

I was reminded of it when Andrew Steele, my former boss (well, my former-boss’s boss’s boss but who’s counting?) told it as part of his valedictory address at the combined summer barbecue and retirement party they held at BBC Park Western on Thursday night. This is the full, true (as far as I can remember) and unexpurgated reality.

It would have been March or April 1990. I’d been a cameraman, a fully fledged, post holding cameraman, for rather less than a year, so I was still pretty much the new kid on the block.  There had been torrential rain and flooding in parts of North Wales and one town, Towyn near Llandudno in Conwy, was apparently particularly badly hit. I was sent up there to cover it. For reasons I don’t actually remember I didn’t have Denis Howard my usual sound recordist (sound recordists, those were the days, eh?) for this. I was temporarily partnered with someone who shall remain nameless –he’d been a sound man for a few years having started a little while after me.

We drove up to Towyn and the next day filmed around and about for a while. Towards the end of the afternoon we realised it was approaching high tide and went out to an area where the sea had come over the defences and was inundating the railway lines. I got some nice pictures of all that and we headed back to the car to take the cassette to the link truck a couple of miles away.

That was when we found it had all gone a bit wrong.  We’d driven up the main road with no trouble but–well remember I said it was approaching high tide?  The sea had come in and flooded the road both  in front of and behind the car. We’d parked on a bit of a high spot so the car was more or less dry but there was no way we could drive through the new lakes on either side of us. We didn’t even have a clear idea of how deep the water was.   We were trapped.

I called the producer at the truck and explained and we settled down to wait.  After a while the BBC Breakfast crew came past. They’d had the foresight to fly up to Liverpool and hire a Range Rover so they were still mobile. They took the pictures off us (“Nice pictures,” someone said later)  and we waited a bit more.

It was getting dark when I decided I could see the waters receding. I don’t think they were; I suspect I saw what I wanted to see but that’s hindsight for you. I told the sound recordist it was shallow enough to  try driving out. He started the car and we edged cautiously into the pool.

We got about twenty yards before the engine sucked up a lungful  of water and died. I shouldn’t have been surprised; the water was about level with the doorsill at that point. We tried starting the car but (obviously) it wouldn’t and that flattened the battery. Now we were even more stuck.

Ages later, or it may only have been half an hour, a fire engine came past and the crew, bless ’em, stopped to see if they could help. They tried jump starting the car but even the huge battery in the truck couldn’t get us going. (Of course it couldn’t. The cylinders were full of water. ) Eventually they towed us out of the flood to a safe bit of dry land near the links truck. We grabbed our camera gear, locked up and walked the rest of the way. I think we cadged a lift back to the hotel with the the second news crew. The next day I saw the car on the back of a low loader being taken home.

One of the nice things about the old job was the cameraderie. After a wet, miserable day like that you get together with your colleagues and have a drink and chat and cheer each other up. I tried to buy a round for the four of us  in the bar and couldn’t find my wallet. Panic. Where the hell had it got to?

I figured it out eventually. When the fire brigade had dragged the car out of the flood I’d dug out my wallet to give them a tenner (“…for the widows and orphans fund” as Andrew said in his speech.) I was wearing waterproof overtrousers at the time and must have put it back through the pocket slit but not into the actual trouser pocket below. The wallet was probably halfway to Ireland by this time.

It took a while to live all this down–in fact I’m not sure I ever did. Even as recently as last year people were still making jokes about not sending me to cover flooding.

One of the reasons I couldn’t live it down was because the other cameraman on that job made it his business to spread the story about and  keep it alive. Fate saw that he suffered for it though.

About six months later we were, again, both on the same story– a miner’s rally and conference near Durham. I was working for Newsnight; he was again on news.  He was covering a march and at some point his sound recordist, a really nice bloke on attachment from TV studio sound, dropped the car keys. That would have been awkward but survivable given that they had a set each. The problem was that  the keys had the registration number on the tag. Someone–probably a miner–found them, located the car and in what we surmised was retaliation for the BBC’s perceived bias in reporting the miners’ strike some years earlier, drove it into a field and set fire to it.

Total write off, along with a fair bit of expensive TV gear. Not the camera, that was in use, but quite a lot of other stuff. The blackened skeleton of the steering wheel was on display behind the assignments desk for years.

So now I could point out, every time my fraternal colleague had a few beers and began the story of how I drowned a car, at least when they’re wet, they’re that much harder to burn.