NMP Live Meets John Sergeant, successful author, journalist, and broadcaster, best known for being BBC’s chief political correspondent 1988-2000. In our exclusive chat we asked John what it was like to witness Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, how he got into political journalism, and all about his time on Strictly Come Dancing. Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with John Sergeant
Why did you choose to become a political correspondent?
I always felt, I suppose, having studied politics that if that’s what I was going to specialise in then why shouldn’t I? You know it was kind of my subject and I have been very interested in politics for a long time, ever since I went to America when I was 18 in my gap year, and I heard Martin Luther King make his ‘I have a dream’ speech.
So from then on I was really very involved in following not just British politics, but American politics. I saw Winston Churchill make one of his last appearances in the House of Commons. So, I had quite a good background in terms of ‘this is an area I think I know a bit about and I want to continue with’.
When the time came for me to specialise politics seemed to be the natural place for me to be, but of course if you try and do with in the BBC they usually say no. They like to push you around, they don’t really like you to work out where you want to go, so that was quite a fight but eventually I did get that.
How did it feel to be in the crowd for Martin Luther King’s famous speech?
The curious thing about the Martin Luther King speech was that I didn’t know anything about him at all – I was just in the crowd of about a quarter of a million people who were in front of the Lincoln Memorial and it was called the March on Washington. This was the end of a whole series of demonstrations in 1963 that had gone right across the country, and the race riots, and all sorts of things leading up to it.
I had gone back to Washington having gone through the southern states and I thought well I, I really would like to go and see that, but the family I was with were frankly, southern racists. I mean they really hated the whole thing so I couldn’t tell them that’s what I was going to do, going down town was the only reference to it.
So I went on my own and there were a series of speeches. Some were pretty boring and then number 14 or 15, this guy stood up, and people forget that he was only 34 when he made the speech, so he was a young guy, he had been in prison for most of that summer but he didn’t make any reference to that, and he suddenly started talking about having a dream. And then, of course, the whole place erupted.
There were people who treated it really like it was some sort of church affair, because this was the Baptist preacher and the congregation were answering back saying ‘oh yeah!’ and the response from the crown was absolutely enormous and I thought that this guy is good! My father was a Vicar so I knew quite a bit about what it’s like to make a sermon in those conditions, and thought oh, this is difficult. But no, it was an extraordinary moment where you suddenly came across this amazing speech and it became then, curiously, more famous when he was killed five years later, people then went back to that because of course it was, he was then the perfect man and everything he’d done, his private life was pretty rickety, but all that was forgotten because he made the great speech.
And it was the great speech because America was having to decide, really, which way to go, would they follow the Martin Luther King path, which is really to have aspiration so you would remove racial tension, you would remove discrimination, but you wouldn’t set off a sort of bitter racial strife. So, that’s why the speech itself was always such an amazing moment we will look back on, because that was the crossroads, and he pointed that way, and America, thank goodness, followed.
Why did you decide to move into political journalism?
I think really it was after a long period as a general reporter covering wars and going all over the place, and meeting lots of interesting people. It did seem to be time to sort of move back a bit, and also allow for more thoughtful, more original reporting, which you can do at Westminster.
Often when you are just doing action stories it’s all a bit boom-boom-boom-boom and that’s it. So, I was quite pleased to get into a place where you could be funny as well as serious, where you could tell all sorts of different scenes and you could explain lots of policy, particularly about areas of the world that you have been in to. So, obviously in my case that meant Northern Ireland, it meant Vietnam in terms of the Vietnam War with the Middle East, Rhodesia, which was then what Zimbabwe was called. But they were all sorts of things that I had experienced as a reporter, so when people were talking about world events I knew a good deal about that, and it was fun to see it from the Westminster angle.
A lot of my time at Westminster was spent being absorbed by the story, and also seeing how the government and our ministers would react to these extraordinary problems.
What were your most memorable foreign trips as a journalist?
My first big foreign trip was to Vietnam, and that was pretty extraordinary. I was there when that famous picture of the girl was taken – she was a nine year old girl running along the road, and she was naked, and the attack had taken place with napalm and her brother, who I met years later, had shouted to her ‘take off your clothes’ because they were all on fire. So she just ran down the road, but it was the way the photograph caught this, and caught the mayhem behind.
I was in a field not very far away and I saw the planes going in with the napalm bombs going off, and I really had an extraordinary sort of ringside seat to some amazing events, not just in Vietnam but in other places, but it was such an important place in my life when I was young.
All the students were interested in Vietnam, everyone was interested in what it would be actually like, but to be there was very striking. For a young man, that was my first job, I was chef de bureau, and I was the BBC’s chief man in Southeast Asia, briefly!
Has a report ever gone wrong live on television?
I was outside the Paris embassy when Margaret Thatcher received news of the leadership ballot. When we saw the figures we realized that she would have to go in to a second round – the moment we saw that we realized she was in deep, deep trouble. She was fighting Heseltine, as everyone, perhaps everyone remembers, and she hadn’t scored enough. It was only two people; if two people hadn’t voted for Heseltine but had voted for her she could have avoided a second ballot.
So, once we saw that we thought, well, this is it. I was standing outside the embassy and I thought she probably wont come out, and I checked with one of her staff, I said ‘she wont be coming out?’, and he said ‘oh no, she will be consulting with colleagues’. So, I knew the camera would be right on me, and I would be straight into the 6 o’clock news very soon afterwards.
Peter Sissons, the newsreader, said what was the reaction from Mrs, Thatcher, and I said that was it, and on these occasions you are given an earpiece to workout what is going on, mine wasn’t working very well that evening, so I didn’t hear Peter Sisson shout ‘she’s behind you!’ and something like 13 million people shouted ‘she’s behind you!’ because that was the audience they recorded afterwards, and people said it was like a pantomime incident and that’s what it was called for a while, because all these people go ‘look, look, behind you’. But you have got to be careful about turning round, if you do that on television you can be a bit of a twit, but someone jumped up in front of the camera, and I then did turn, and to my delight, genuine delight, charging towards me was Mrs. Thatcher, Bernard Ingham, and the man from number 10 who said she wasn’t going to come out. And as she came across towards me they shouted ‘where is the microphone?’. I didn’t know, I genuinely did not know what they were saying, so I offered my own microphone.
She saw me and she thought well, if she talks to me she’ll be talking to a lot of people, so she then gave her statement saying it was her intention to go on and fight on a second round, and she then turned and swept out. But Ingham and the other man from number 10 have been pushing and shoving me and saying where is the microphone before this incident, so what people saw was a shambolic scene, and they were trying to get her past me to a microphone that had been set up in front of all the other reporters.
So it was an amazing misunderstanding and genuine fighting, pushing and shoving and all that sort of thing, and the curious thing was that the people watching it at home thought ‘my goodness, she has lost her grip on power’ but she had and she resigned two days later. So it was a great television exclusive, for me, for the BBC, and made me famous and finished her career off.
Could you have won Strictly Come Dancing?
I mean Strictly Come Dancing was just a daft thing that happened to me, I didn’t think there would be so much dancing involved, and I certainly had no idea that I would be taken up by an awful lot of people, something like 1.6 million people, I was told, voted for me to stay in Strictly Come Dancing, which is the same number of people who voted last year for Scottish Independence.
It really was a very bizarre thing, because I was one of the few people that had no idea about dancing, I thought that would make it more interesting, so I would turn up and all sorts of other people involved were taking it very, very seriously, and some of them had trained for years for all of this. I mean it was a most peculiar sort of atmosphere and I just thought it could be fun, and once the public could see that they then thought that the judges were being unfair and of course that is the thing that affects people in Britain more than anything else – if people think that something is being done that is unfair to a person, and particularly if they for whatever reason like that person, that’s pretty high combustion.
So, it did rise to quite a big deal, there was a danger, I don’t know how big a danger, but there was a danger that I might win, because week after week after week the judges were being daft and criticizing me, and people were getting very annoyed. So I did think that the only thing to do, particularly as an old loyal BBC hand, was to resign, but of course that got people even more excited. Not very long ago Tony Blair said to me ‘even I had to watch you’, so it was a big thing and it had a big effect on my career, and I suppose led to all sorts of other things. It did.
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