It was in the Blue Room at Bomber Command Officers’ Mess in 1943 that I first met Richard, very briefly. He was sitting alone waiting to lunch with one of our senior staff officers. One of my colleagues approached him and asked if he would care for a drink. ‘I don’t usually drink at lunchtime, but you are so kind, I will, thank you.’
Eight years later when I was working at the British Forces Network in Germany in Hamburg he came with the other members of the Twenty Questions team. We met again this time at the Garrison Theatre. ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘I met you some years ago at Bomber Command Headquarters, didn’t I? What are you doing getting mixed up in the broadcasting business?’
I had always remembered the first meeting, but there was no reason at all for him to, except that he remembered almost everyone he met no matter how unimportant they were. Ask anyone with whom he worked, from the doorman to the cameraman, and they will tell you the same. They will also recall his immense good humour. One night on Panorama he was caught by the camera when he was combing his hair. In the next evening’s Tonight we gently ribbed him about it. On his way the following week to the Panorama studio he smiled at me and said: ‘Tonight, my boy, I’m doing a strip-tease. Follow that if you dare!’
One of the nicest things about Richard was that he was a great source of advice. There was never any sense of jealousy at the threat of challenge of the new boys; instead there was that constant stream of encouragement and, when asked for, help. In 1949, when I was fresh to the television world, he advised me to ‘do as much as you can, spread your net wide, go anywhere in order to get experience, any experience in writing, interviewing, producing, directing or commentating. Don’t specialise too early, otherwise you will find that you have put yourself in a limited position. The time to start saying no to certain kinds of jobs is later rather than sooner. Once you are in that position always take holidays, never feel yourself getting stale and remember there is more in life than just television. Sometimes I think that we are so concerned with television itself that we forget that we ought to be living and enjoying life just like other people.’
Wise words to a new boy and very welcome words. There were very few in those early days willing to let you take any share in their experience and none was more experienced than Richard. That he cared was a great encouragement.
Through the eight years I was in charge of current affairs and talks programmes on BBC Television I spent most Monday evenings at Lime Grove. That reconstructed old film studio seemed to acquire a special air of magical excitement on Panorama nights. There was always a knot of schoolboys with autograph books in the darkness outside the main door on the look-out for visitors whose names were in that day’s headlines, or would be in the morrow’s. Sometimes a senior Minister, sometimes an anonymous group would come – for instance, women who were seen knitting throughout one Panorama and then questioned on how much of the programme content they had absorbed. One day in came a box filled with ice, into which a man was locked, and he freed himself during transmission. Mrs Barbara Woodhouse offered to give away to a good home a calf named Conquest, which we watched snuggling down in a pen in the studio with her enormous and beautifully trained Great Dane Juno. The Watford telephone exchange was swamped with eager calls at the rate of 6,000 an hour.
You never knew what to expect. One day it was a French girl of nine who was set the task of writing a poem on London at the beginning of the programme. She was seen writing hard for a while, got up and bounced a ball once or twice, went on writing, and Dimbleby finally put his excellent French to use by translating the charming verse Minou Drouet had composed. Another day there was a full-grown elephant in the fourth-floor studio, carrying a man gently across the floor with its trunk.
With Minou Drouet
When we decided to make Panorama a weekly programme in 1955 I asked my deputy, Grace Wyndham Goldie, to supervise its new look. She immediately set on it that stamp of quality which marked all her television enterprises. It was she who first demanded that Richard Dimbleby should be the new anchorman, and before soon moving off to energise in turn the start of Tonight and then of Monitor she had firmly settled the guiding lines for Panorama: integrity in its coverage of current affairs, showmanship in its intelligent exploitation of the television medium.
The changing team of Panorama reporters have contributed a wide selection of talents. Most have had to be ready (as Dimbleby forecast even during the war for his two roving European reporters) to fly off at a moment’s notice to where news was about to break. All have been interested in politics, some with one foot in it. Some left Panorama for the House of Commons, like Christopher Chataway and Woodrow Wyatt. Some came to Panorama after failing to be elected, like Robin Day and Ludovic Kennedy. Some combined journalism with a political past, like John Freeman and Angus Maude. There were ex-editors from Fleet Street, Malcolm Muggeridge and Francis Williams, and others whose background was essentially in broadcast journalism, Max Robertson, James Mossman, Michael Charlton, John Morgan, Michael Barratt, Ian Trethowan and Leonard Parkin. Others came and went. They were a talented and restless group, with a tendency to wish to leave after a few years, perhaps later to return again. Panorama reporters were welcomed by such world figures as President Kennedy, Pandit Nehru and the Shah of Persia. They were frequently involved themselves in controversy, for Panorama had to be involved in controversy, and they had to prise out cats which various vested interests preferred to keep in the bag.
Panorama: clockwise, Rex Moorfoot (Editor), Dimbleby, Christopher Chataway, John Freeman, David Wheeler (Assistant Editor), Woodrow Wyatt, Christopher Burstall (Production Assistant), Margaret Douglas (Production Secretary)
In Panorama’s whirlpool, as Grace Wyndham Goldie has pointed out, Richard Dimbleby himself always managed to remain at the serene centre, not at the tumultuous edge. He did not want the reputation of a Robin Day or a Malcolm Muggeridge, and so, as she put it, he became on television a kind of living embodiment of stability, a reassuring symbol that somewhere at the heart of disturbance lies a basic kindliness and an enduring common sense’.
The production teams were constantly turning over, as inventive production assistants and producers, trained in the hard school of Panorama, went off to produce new programmes of their own.
Michael Peacock was the first of several editors, each of whom brought some special attribute to Panorama: Rex Moorfoot, Michael Peacock again, after a spell with Outside Broadcasts, Paul Fox, David Wheeler and now Jeremy Isaacs.
Richard Dimbleby remained the one constant factor. He would arrive on Monday mornings and go very carefully through the elaborate studio moves, which were never the same from one programme to the next. A length of film needs to run for eight seconds on a television projector (telecine) before it reaches full speed. An anchorman has to be able to cue the start of the telecine machine and then speak for exactly eight seconds. Dimbleby was impeccable. He would finger his spectacles, indicating the start of the eight seconds, and finish his sentence invariably just as the first frame came up – or if it was late in coming he would spin out his words until out of the corner of his eye he saw the picture arrive on his monitor. He enjoyed demonstrating maps and summarising complicated situations. ‘Let me see if I can simplify it’ he would say, and one felt he was a teacher manqué as well as a surgeon manqué.
His long apprenticeship in radio had made him a master at reading a prepared commentary to a film sequence, and he could get through a last-minute session in the Lime Grove dubbing theatre much faster than most, for his readings were always right first time.
With King Hussein of Jordan
After a day of very careful preparation he changed his clothes and ate a light supper. He would then greet, and set at ease, the important, and the unimportant, and the often temperamental protagonists we had invited to the studio. Dimbleby was invariably an excellent host, and Panorama’s guests were always anxious to meet him. So too were many distinguished visitors to London such as King Hussein of Jordan, who dined with us one night because he wished to see television in action. We took him on a tour of the studios, and finally ended up in Panorama, where a memorable interview took place with the King and Dimbleby, like Johnson and Boswell, each calling the other ‘Sir’ in every sentence.
H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh had introduced the International Geophysical Year on television, and reported on his travels in a children’s programme. The first time that he, or any other of the Queen’s immediate family, decided to allow himself to be questioned on a regular current affairs programme was at the hands of Richard Dimbleby.
There were occasions when Dimbleby almost acted as a national Ombudsman, or a restorer of national confidence. When the world was on the brink of nuclear war over Cuba, and Panorama was mounting a special programme, a woman telephoned to say she would send her children to school only if Richard Dimbleby said it was safe. He made a point of saying to an authority in the studio, ‘I am aware that a great many people today are extremely worried and frightened by what has happened, and have some awful feeling that something dreadful may happen quite quickly, suddenly. Do you think there is reason at all for short-term immediate nerves on this?’
There were several occasions when he was game to subject himself to any kind of treatment in the studio, be it an ice-cream tasting contest with Francis Williams to guess which was made with real cream, or being flung around the studio in an aircraft seat on wheels to test the shock of sudden braking, or swallowing a tiny transmitter and picking up the signals from inside his massive frame, or being spun round in a space simulator at the RAF Medical Centre. For the last programme before Panorama’s much needed annual summer break in 1959, he demonstrated the new American craze for balloon jumping from an airfield at Weston-on-the-Green. It was fascinating to watch his considerable mass reduced to nothing as his weight was counterbalanced by a balloon on his shoulders, and Dimbleby leapt ten to fifteen feet in the air and covered the same distance between strides along the ground.
He had his little vanities. One was getting the make-up assistant to black the balding patch on the back of his head, until it could no longer be disguised. In the studio there was always fun with the technical crew. During a programme which demonstrated the gimmicks of the 1964 American Election campaign, Dimbleby opened a bottle of Barry Goldwater Cologne for Men. An electrician chargehand next to him commented on the pungent aroma, and asked if it was coming from him. Dimbleby put the neck of the bottle against the chargehand’s arm meaning to ‘spot’ him, but accidentally poured a large quantity on to him. The electrician washed it off but the smell remained strong. After the programme he declared that when he got home his wife would ask searching questions as to the origin of the perfume. Dimbleby immediately wrote a note on a page of his script:
‘Dear Jackie,
This is to certify that I, Richard Dimbleby, have soaked your husband in Barry Goldwater Cologne. He is concerned in case you suspect him of wrong doings.
Personally I think it improves the brute.
Regards,
RICHARD.’
Dimbleby used to keep the studio crews in fits of laughter with earthy stories, mostly unprintable. There was wonderful teamwork, and constant banter, between him and Joan Marsden, Panorama’s regular floor manager. The floor manager wears a receiver on the belt with headphones to pick up the director’s instructions and pass them on to the studio performers. During an edition of Panorama from Sotheby’s sale room which was beamed to America by Early Bird, Joan raised her finger to give Richard the customary ‘one minute’ cue. As soon as he had finished that particular link and a piece of film was running he beckoned her over and said, ‘For Heaven’s sake don’t do that or you will find yourself having bought a picture for £10,000 – “Sold to the lady with the double deaf aid!”.’
She is one of many people for whom Monday nights at Lime Grove have lost something of their magic.
Inaugural programme, Early Bird, with Joan Marsden
By the spring of 1965 the growth of Dimbleby’s cancer was accelerating. He was ill at ease in April when he introduced a television programme commemorating some of the great broadcasts made by his American colleague of nearly thirty years’ standing, Edward R. Murrow, who had died of lung cancer.
Edward R. Murrow
‘Jesus wept’ – two words of exasperation from a Dimbleby racked with pain, which reverberated round the world from the Royal Tour of Germany in May 1965. To most people, but not to some clergymen, Dimbleby had made an appalling irreverent blunder. Richard Francis was his Panorama producer during the Royal Tour of Germany:
It happened at the end of a tough day, Thursday 27 May. For hours the commentators of a dozen or more television networks had been doing their separate commentaries from Berlin on the Queen’s crowded progress round the city. Several times there had been technical breakdowns on the links between Berlin and West Germany. And Richard had to fit his commentary spells in with coverage of the First Test from Edgbaston.
Now, at 8.50 p.m., we were due to transmit from Berlin to Great Britain the edited highlights of the day, with a description, live on the circuit, by Richard. But to our horror all communication with London was lost just as the programme was about to go on the air. Six minutes late one vision line and one sound one were reopened and off we went. Richard was in good form and the delay soon seemed unimportant. But after two minutes, on another line, back came a message: London was not receiving us. We checked back, they were getting neither sound nor vision. Reluctantly we stopped the videotape. ‘Richard’, I said aloud, ‘hold everything. We’re not on the air. London isn’t getting us.’
‘Jesus wept.’
Which would have passed unnoticed, if London was not in fact receiving us perfectly! After a furious control-line conversation we started up again, still under the impression London hadn’t heard a word. What we did was to repeat the first couple of minutes. Richard’s professionalism made it worse; his introduction was word for word the same!
The supreme irony was yet to come. Despite losing the first ten minutes we were now ordered to end on schedule, at 9.15. And that meant fading the recording just as the Queen was approaching the Berlin wall. What an anti-climax.
Richard for once was silent at the end of a programme. More precisely he was speechless – with anger. Anger not for himself, but because he hated any BBC programme to fail, particularly one like this. There was no getting away from it, it had been a shambles. Glumly we thanked our hosts, ZDF; it was not their fault. The tension was only broken when one of the German engineers approached Richard and clicked his heels. ‘Mr Dimbleby I thank you very much. I am tonight very honoured. I always wanted to work with your BBC.’
Berlin Wall, 27 May 1965
Of course Richard knew Berlin well. Before and at the end of the war, and later with the building of the Wall, he had made many broadcasts from there. The day before the Queen arrived, as was his wont, he had driven round the route she was going to take. Typically when he got to the Potsdamerplatz he told of his previous broadcasts from the place. There was the time in 1939 when he had described a mass rally passing down the Potsdamerstrasse and through the Platz. In their day they were to Berlin what Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus are to London today. Now they are desolate and deserted, and divided by the Wall. And just on the Western side he found the nail-head in the cobbles driven in at the end of the war to mark the limits of the American, British and Russian sectors. It was from this point that he had introduced Panorama on the night of 31 July 1961. Two weeks later the Wall was built.
At the Brandenburger Tor he stopped the car and got out. He saw an opportunity to gather something of the real flavour of life at the Wall. Two British M.P.s were manning an observation box at the bottom of the Street of 17th June. Recognising Richard they welcomed him to their raised platform. Fifteen minutes and a few small but revealing observations later, Richard continued his tour. The next day, when the Queen arrived at the Wall, his commentary was that little bit richer.
Walter Cronkite and General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower in New York talking to Richard Dimbleby and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery in Churchill’s War Room in London
Richard spent most of the month of May 1965 either on or in the air. He started by flying the Atlantic three times in four days. After filming ‘New York’s Finest’, the police, he returned to introduce the Early Bird inaugural programme from London. The same night he flew out to introduce Panorama from Wall Street. Next day he rushed back to prepare for ‘VE+20’ with Monty and Ike taking part. That was the programme in which Richard took viewers round Churchill’s underground War Room, and proudly introduced David Dimbleby’s commentary from Belsen. After that a crowded fortnight following the Queen round Germany and continuing with Panorama each Monday. Seventeen transmissions and a dozen flights in one month.
It had been a tough ten days since Her Majesty started the tour. The night before she was due to arrive, Richard introduced Panorama from the Hotel Petersburg, at Königswinter. Two hours before we went on the air there was a terrible thunderstorm, and rain got into everything. When the programme started, we in the control van could not hear what Richard was saying. Never mind, we thought, he will follow the pictures. We didn’t know that his monitor had packed up just before transmission and he was commentating blind – imagining that our pictures were following his words. Fortunately he repeated almost exactly what he said in rehearsal, the pictures matched, and very few viewers would have noticed.
On the first evening of the Queen’s trip Richard was asked to comment on the arrival of Her Majesty for the banquet at Schloss Bruehl. This was due at 7.25 London time and so would fit in well with the end of Tonight. It would take about ten minutes.
Unfortunately the royal car was delayed nearly half an hour. Richard, as ever, continued implacably although the pictures offered little to talk about. Anxiously London demanded information about the Queen and why she was late. So too did Richard, with anguished facial expressions whilst he talked. The German police were approached; they knew she had left for the banquet but had no idea how far she had got. There were enormous crowds blocking the route. German Television were approached; they knew nothing. Then their producer had an idea: ‘Perhaps Herr Dimbleby knows?’
Richard was never the luckiest of people with his flights. Coming back from Hamburg at the end of the Royal Tour his Trident had to make an emergency landing. All three of the hydraulic systems failed in turn, and the plane was left without any brakes. It headed for Amsterdam, the nearest alternative airport, and Richard went back to exchange a jolly word with the rest of the BBC party. To his amazement he saw a block of seats occupied by London policemen in uniform. They had been in Hamburg to embellish the Queen’s visit. Jokingly Richard asked them if they were ready to die bravely. According to him, their reaction was to put their helmets on!
