Opening this year’s Clifton Literary Festival, which runs from 11–13 November, is former BBC broadcast journalist Michael Buerk. Ahead of his appearance, we asked Buerk about his ground-breaking reporting, extraordinary life’s work and his time at BBC Radio Bristol…
Renowned for his distinguished 52-year career at the BBC, during which he captured some of the most defining moments in Africa’s recent history, Michael Buerk is indelibly linked to his reports that awoke the world to a famine that was ravaging Ethiopia. His powerful words teamed with footage shot by Kenyan cameraman Mohammed Amin, depicting the true horrors of poverty and starvation, were broadcast to an audience of millions on 23 October 1984. Buerk’s report led directly to a large-scale international relief effort, estimated to have saved over a million lives, and became one of the most famous television reports of the late 20th century. What’s more, Buerk’s dispatches inspired musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to piece together the charity supergroup Band Aid, releasing the song Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1984 and later launching the 16-hour charity concert Live Aid in July ‘85, which became an iconic moment in history, raising millions for Famine Relief in Africa.
Since then, Michael Buerk’s journalistic and story-telling skills have been recognised with multiple international awards for television reporting. He was named ‘Television Journalist of the Year’ by the Royal Television Society in 1984 and has won a BAFTA for factual broadcasting, a ‘Golden Nymph’ at the Monte Carlo Film, Television Festival Europe’s premier prize for television journalism and two of the three most important honours for broadcasters – the US ‘National Headliner’ and ‘George Polk’ awards.
After an early career in newspapers, Buerk’s journey as a broadcast journalist began in Bristol, where his voice was the first to be heard on BBC Radio Bristol in 1970. From there he would go on to deliver the first news bulletin of the millennium as a BBC News anchor.
Working alongside Kate Adie at Radio Bristol, Buerk became a familiar figure in the local community. Now, as he prepares to return to the city on 11 November to speak at the Clifton Literary Festival, we sat down with the former newsreader to talk about his time on air and his subsequent career, which made him one of the greatest journalists of our time.
Speaking from a yacht in a small bay in southern Turkey as he enjoys an overdue holiday, Buerk spoke affectionately about his early days as a journalist. “BBC Radio Bristol was the first of the main tranche of BBC local radio stations. They advertised a job and I thought all my dreams had come true when I got it.
“The thing about local radio is that you don’t have the resources that you have in television but, on the other hand, you do have total control in what you’re doing. You don’t have to rely on a crew and there was lots of air time to fill. The great thing about local radio was that you were striving desperately to be part of the community, to be the notice board for them. It was glorious, it was one of the most enjoyable times of my life, setting up something new with a load of people in their twenties.
“The SS Great Britain had just arrived and there was something quite totemic about that and the association with Brunel. My wife Christine and I lived in Easton-in-Gordano before the M5 was built. She was working on the Western Daily Press, and I was working with the BBC. I commuted to work across the Suspension Bridge, which was so dramatic.
“One particular highlight was when our education producer – who was an extraordinarily talented guy called Ken Blakeson, an ex-teacher and would-be chief scriptwriter for Coronation Street and playwright for Radio 4 – put together a marvellous Passion Play. We all had a part – I was a centurion as well as a donkey. Kate Adie was Mary Magdalene. It was just wonderfully homespun but it was a pretty sophisticated production, particularly for local radio and it ran on Radio 4 as well.”
After a year at BBC Radio Bristol, a move to HTV, based on the Bath Road, gave Buerk a taste of life in front of the camera. He then left Bristol to become a BBC network reporter from 1973-76, Industry correspondent from 1976-77, Energy correspondent from 1977-79, Scotland correspondent from 1979-80, a special correspondent from 1980-82, and, most notably, Southern Africa correspondent from 1983-87.
During his time overseas, Buerk reported from more than 50 countries, including South Africa, where he spent four years before being asked to leave the country by the government for his uncompromising reports on the brutalities of the apartheid regime.
My wife Christine and I lived in Easton-in-Gordano before the M5 was built. She was working on the Western Daily Press, and I was working with the BBC. I commuted to work across the Suspension Bridge, which was so dramatic
In 1991, Buerk was airlifted out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s sprawling capital in the highlands, after a munitions dump exploded, killing his Kenyan sound recordist, John Mathai, and injuring cameraman Amin.
Looking back on his time in the field with “mixed feelings”, Buerk shared his own thoughts on the reports that were watched by the world. “Certainly, in Africa at the time, I was going from insurrection, to war, to a natural disaster, to a famine, and, of course, to the final meltdown of apartheid. A lot of it was very dangerous, a number of my colleagues were killed. It was depressing in the sense that you were forever dealing with evil and inequity and sadness and deprivation and suffering and you did wonder what you were doing it for, what the relationship was for the viewer, what they were getting out of it. The response to the Ethiopian reports were heartening in a way but I always worried about whether it was dark entertainment, people sitting in the comfort of their living rooms watching people suffer. Could I possibly share the experience of actually being there?
“I was very gloomy about that until those particular reports [in Ethiopia in 1984]. It showed that actually people were capable of the moral imagination of those positions and taking some sort of view that they could play a role in doing something about it, which I don’t think had happened before, and I don’t think really has happened since. I’m not quite sure what made that special, what it was about us or them or that particular time but of course it was heartening.”
On returning to the UK, Buerk became one of the main anchors for the BBC Nine O’clock News, later the BBC Ten O’clock News. He also began presenting non-news programmes, such as BBC1’s 999, as well as the ethical debating programme, The Moral Maze, on BBC Radio 4, which he continues to host with much enthusiasm after 32 years on air.
“In journalism, one’s concern is always to make oneself understandable but the Moral Maze is a programme that doesn’t make concessions, simplify or make superficial just to make it palatable. We also have clever people on the panel and we go to great lengths to find articulate people with points of view to challenge. There must be fairness but it is also about testing arguments to destruction.
“The older I get the more I realise the importance of the moral dimension of the arguments about current events and I get more and more interested not just about arguing about Liz Truss or Jeremy Hunt but what the aims are and should be, what’s the underlying issue that we’re arguing about rather than the mechanics or even the politics of something, what’s the moral issue at stake here? That’s what I enjoy the most.”
Buerk’s powerful reporting and life-long dedication to truthful journalism continues to inspire the next generation of journalists on the home front and further afield. In this city in particular, however, some 52 years after his voice was first transmitted into homes around the county, his enduring legacy is important and influential.
Michael Buerk will be in conversation with David Parker at the Clifton Literary Festival on 11 November. For more information about the festival, visit: foccal.com.
Image credit: BBC/Abigail Zoe Martin
