World at One Newsletter (Nick Clarke)

[Pinball]

This weekly newsletter started last week, and issue 2 was emailed today. It's actually quite an interesting insight. There's more to Nick Clarke than a plummy voice!

If Radio 4 was a woman, I'd marry her and have 5 children :-)

Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 15:32:07 GMT
From: The.World.at.One@dev1.reith.bbc.co.uk
Subject: The World at One Newsletter
To: wato@lists.bbc.co.uk

The undoubted star of the past week has been Margaret Dixon - a one-patient antidote to the drudgery of parties trading Health Service statistics.  As soon as Michael Howard uttered her name in Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, our antennae started to twitch. Because deep in the collective memory of programmes like the World at One are those other patients whose names have marked the debate on NHS policy over the years:  Jennifer Bennett, Sharron Storer, Rose Addis.... Where would Margaret Dixon and her broken shoulder lead us? Politicians have learned to treat real people with kid gloves.

Within minutes, the editor of the day (confusingly, another Nick) had found a likely number for the unfortunate Mrs Dixon in Warrington, and soon after Tony Blair and Michael Howard had left the Commons, I was conducting a telephone interview with her. My line of questioning was dictated by past experience - and the possibility that Mr Howard's tactics might backfire: was she genuinely happy to have her medical problems held up to public view? or was she perhaps a Tory activist making a party political point? She dealt with all my questions calmly and unfussily, and I was left with the impression that her story was, on this first hearing at least, as the Tory leader had described it.

And in the process, the World at One gave the Margaret Dixon bandwagon its first media nudge. (You can listen again to that interview at our website - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/wato/ram/wato_20050302_1.ram)

By the following morning, the wagon was reaching top speed, and we charted the traffic up and down the West Coast main line - the Dixon family travelling south to appear at a press conference with Michael Howard, and the Health Secretary, John Reid, in the opposite direction, hoping to prove that the NHS in Warrington was in much better health than Mrs Dixon.

Which, of course, was the key question: was her account - of operations cancelled again and again - typical of a wider malaise, or simply one person's bad luck? With Dr Reid in transit, we ended our sequence by interviewing one of his junior ministers, Stephen Ladyman. It was a slightly tetchy affair, especially when he told me that he disapproved of exploiting individual cases to maker wider points about the NHS. Why then, I wondered, was the Health Secretary intending to visit Mrs Dixon at her home? Wouldn't that risk personalising the issue still further?

This week also saw Tony Blair's Middle East conference in London. Since all the press briefings were scheduled for late afternoon, we were not intending to devote much time to it. But we'd reckoned without Condoleeza Rice: her strong statement calling on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon persuaded us to call up the Syrian Ambassador. And it is perhaps a sign of the pressure the government in Damascus feels that he agreed to talk to us, and duly defended his country's position with some vigour. Syria, he said, was ready to leave as soon as Lebanon itself decided the time was right.

Another news highlight - breaking in the World at One's time - was the publication of the Government's Green Paper on the future of the BBC. It came in the form of one of those 12.30 statements which are not designed to make life easy for a 1.00 pm programme. We dealt with it this time by lining up a succession of live interviews with interested parties: Kelvin Mackenzie (fervent opponent of the licence fee) - the Channel 4 boss, Luke Johnson (mildly disappointed at being excluded from the pot of public service broadcasting cash) - and Sir Howard Davies, a member of the Burns group (irritation at a missed opportunity to reform the BBC). Some feedback from listeners protested that 15 minutes on this subject was far too long. We are sensitive to that sort of criticism, but we work on the basis that this a subject on which most listeners have a view.

On this occasion the BBC told us they weren't doing any interviews until later in the afternoon, after the Commons proceedings were over. But rather to our surprise, today (Friday), we had more luck with the BBC press office. The Today programme had carried the story of the documentary-makers who had apparently paid a ?4,500 appearance-fee to Brendan Fearon, the burglar who was shot and injured by the farmer, Tony Martin. Despite Today's on-air appeals for a BBC response, none was forthcoming. But by mid-morning, the call came through: the man who commissioned the programme, Richard Klein, would talk to the World at One. And he did. He wouldn't confirm the amount, but insisted the payment was within BBC guidelines, and the only way to secure Fearon's first full media interview. That won't silence the criticism. The Tories not only object in this case, they would change the law to prevent any criminal benefiting from his crime. The BBC guidelines would certainly need a makeover.

Until next week

Nick Clarke

Weekdays, 1-1.30pm on BBC Radio 4, 92-95FM and 198LW, digital radio and on the web at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wato/

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