John Humphrys in Basra
I’m usually looking after the baby first thing in the morning, and only able to listen to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme in snatches, in between shovelling porridge into his mouth and playing with his musical caterpillar. I heard enough to realise that John Humphrys reports from Basra were something special, and I’ve just been listening back to them on the Internet.
This is classic radio reporting. There is no need for pictures as the sounds and the descriptions do the job for you. Humphrys - who is normally in the studio back home - describes the desolation of the Basra Air Station, the worst sort of dirty gray desert, the acrid stench of the oil flares that get in the back of your throat, the discomfort of wearing a flack jacket in the heat, and the frustration of not being able to wander out beyond the razor wire and sandbags because ‘out there’ you are a target. These are all the details that the hardened war correspondents brush off with bravado, but which make it real to us softies back home. His work is hampered by regular rocket attacks.
He talks to real people, like the surgeon who says he can ‘have a go’ at any kind of emergency operation, and he takes a journey in a convoy with Lance Corporal Carl Rose who explains how the convoy must keep moving at all costs, and any civilian car in the way had better get off the road. Naturally this causes resentment, and shows why the troops are ‘part of the problem’, as Britain’s most senior British solider said recently. But it’s not all bad. The Lance Corporal graphically describes a visit to a village where they received a friendly reception from the kids and the local sheik. Other soldiers talk about the back to back tours of duty. You get a sense of an army of immense professionalism and dedication, but which is over stretched and under equipped, and not really making much progress. A female surgeon speaks of her anger that soldiers are badly wounded while travelling in the Ministry of Defence’s snatch Land Rovers. Another solider describe a ‘bad day” in which a mortar fell five feat away from him.
Humphrys reports are far more evocative that the one minute 30 seconds we get from Iraq on the evening TV news. They demonstrate the power of audio when done well. People’s voices somehow go right to the essence of who they are, without the distraction of pictures. The BBC still does audio better than anyone else. Of course a producer has spent days, possibly weeks, setting up the interviews, arranging the schedule (not to mention security), thinking about ambient sounds and locations, imagining how it will all fit together, and then painstakingly editing it and mixing it, which is a very time consuming process.
Podcasters shouldn’t get too above themselves. They’ve still got a lot to learn - though no doubt one day they will produce something as good as this.
