Moving on...and looking back

Always On covers the period from 2007 to today, the time I have been the BBC’s Technology Correspondent. This month I went public with some personal news - that in late October I will be leaving that job and the BBC after a career which began in 1981.

I was invited on to Feedback on Radio 4 this week. It’s usually a programme where BBC executives get hauled over the coals after complaints from the audience, but I had a much more gentle experience, with the presenter Roger Bolton asking me to look back on my career and reflect on the way the Corporation covers technology. There was one question from a listener about whether too many arts graduates like me - I studied French and German - are reporting on technology, but most of the comments were very kind. You can listen to the programme here.

But while I am wallowing in nostalgia, I thought I would look back at a few episodes from my 40 years at the BBC, a period when the broadcast news business was radically changed by the technology revolution.

Hitler’s Diary 1985

Having started my career in Leeds on the regional news programme Look North I came to London and by 1985 was a producer in the TV Newsroom. The story of Konrad Kujau, the man who forged Hitler’s Diaries, making fools of Germany’s Stern magazine and the UK’s Sunday Times, was huge fun and one of the few where my language skills proved useful.

I set up an interview with Kujau in his Hamburg prison cell where he was awaiting trial on fraud charges. The day before we were due to fly out, the correspondent on the story John Simpson was whisked off to Cyprus to cover a plane hijacking. So I and the the three man crew - camera, sound and lights, standard in those days - had to fly without him.

As the man in charge, I had to buy the drinks at the fancy hotel where we stayed and I gulped when I saw the bill for the gin and tonics the crew kept ordering.

But all was forgiven when we came back with the goods. Konrad Kujau was delighted to perform for the camera, forging the entry from Hitler’s “diary” for September 1st, 1939 in my BBC notebook. The interview was conducted in German but as he scrawled the Führer’s signature at the bottom of the page he said “Adolf Hitler - da, finished!” and put his pen down.

That turned out to be the closing shot of John Simpson’s report when he came to Hamburg to cover the end of the trial, where Kujau was sentenced to four and a half years imprisonment. And “Hitler’s Diary is still on my bookshelf at home, one of my best souvenirs.

It seems unlikely that any news organisation would fall for a fraud like Kujau’s today in an era when an army of online fact-checkers tears apart any questionable story within minutes. But then again, look at the extraordinary conspiracy theories that millions have believed over the last year - perhaps in the social smartphone era we are even more likely to believe fraudsters and fantasists.

1995 - A Message from Bill Gates

Soon, I was on the other side of the camera, making the switch in 1986 by going to Cardiff to be a reporter on Wales Today. After returning to London to work on Breakfast Time, I became a business reporter, working on TV News and on specialist output such as the Money Programme and Working Lunch.

In 1995, I spent two weeks in New York covering for the North America Business Correspondent who was on leave. I think it must have been during this fortnight that I first realised how excited I was by the story of the tech revolution.

I had just bought my first serious computer, a Macintosh Performa 630 with a 250 MB hard disk. I had connected it to the internet and the family had gathered round it and watched in wonder as an image of a painting in the Louvre animated ever so slowly, line by line, onto the screen.

In New York, the big business story for me was the soaring share price of Netscape, which floated at $28 in August and climbed above $170 by the end of the year. The excitement around the first major web browser signalled the birth of the dot com era.

But there was also my first interview with Bill Gates, who was on offer to talk about his first book The Road Ahead. At that time Microsoft was unchallenged as the dominant force of the PC era, but famously both Gates and his company had been slow to appreciate the impact of the internet. But in May that year he had suddenly woken. up, writing a memo telling his colleagues that “the internet tidal wave” was crucial to every part of the business.

The book laid out his vision of how this revolution - still described as “the information highway” would unfold. It would, he said, “forever change the way we buy, work, learn and communicate with each other.” It was a compelling vision of the future that got many things right - though of course Gates did not predict that his Internet Explorer browser would crush Netscape and thereby attract the interest of regulators who would try to break up Microsoft.

But I have to confess I remember very little about the interview. Like many tech luminaries of his era Bill Gates is not the most charismatic of speakers, certainly compared with Elon Musk or his long-time adversary Steve Jobs. But over the years I have come to respect his extraordinary achievements, especially during his second career as a philanthropist helping combat diseases like malaria and being targeted by crazed conspiracy theorists for his pains.

But I do have one thing to remind me of that interview - the book (without its companion interactive CD-ROM sadly) and its message written on the title page:

Well, it must have worked - I have had good luck with computers ever since, certainly as far as my career goes.

My next post will be another nostalgic one, with a few more episodes from my career. In the meantime, don’t forget…

Always On is available as a hardback, ebook or audiobook here.

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