Michael Buerk became one of British television's superstars. He got there by adding a gruelling apprenticeship in journalism to natural ability. Young people aspiring to be journalists would do well to read the 70 pages Buerk gives to this apprenticeship. It was a long and testing trek from the Bromsgrove Weekly Messenger through the South Wales Echo, and thence to the Daily Mail in Manchester, before he even reached the foothills of the BBC in London.
But 20 years on, these tedious preliminaries were at his back when he faced and took with both hands the biggest challenge and opportunity of his professional life. For Michael Buerk is justified in saying that the two reports he contrived to gather, against fierce obstruction, and send out in October 1984 on the Ethiopian famine were by far the most influential pieces of television ever broadcast. They created an outpouring of generosity throughout the world, and are much of what the world today remembers about Buerk.
The impact of those broadcasts eventually unlocked a billion dollars from governments which up to then had shunned Ethiopia. Ronald Reagan instantly pitched in $45m. Bob Hawke, then prime minister of Australia, wept - a not unusual occurrence. Bob Geldof swung into action with Band Aid, the biggest assembly of rock musicians ever drawn together. "Do They Know It's Christmas?" rang around the globe and sold 50 million copies. Geldof felt that he had to do something, as he put it later, "to expiate myself from complicity in this evil". He was right there. I had learned enough about the villainous and incompetent Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and his infamous Derg from earlier encounters with them to know that they had let the famine rip in the hope of cooling the heels of those rebelling against them. Buerk tells us that Geldof added to his credit by calling Mengistu "a cunt" to his face.
We all remember something about that phenomenon. What is new here are Buerk's innermost feelings about his achievement. He is not ashamed to say how much he enjoyed the banquets and the stream of awards that marked his triumph. "Reporters are insecure people, by and large; I am, anyway, and recognition from my peers felt very good at the time. It was only afterwards," he writes, "that a queasy sense of self-disgust crept in with the hangover." His triumph had sprung from filming a lot of people dying. He felt the need to recapture his self-respect, to stay the right side of the dividing line that separates the reporter from the campaigner, and not to appear to capitalise on a journalistic stroke of luck. Those are the feelings of a decent man.
On the road Buerk took, our paths crossed often enough in Northern Ireland and nasty parts of Africa for me to read from these memoirs how much more dangerous is the life of a television man than that of a newspaper reporter. To get the picture, they must move as close as they dare; we can stand back a little. Buerk nearly lost his life half a dozen times. His closest call came when filming a blazing ammunition dump outside Addis Ababa.
He spent months reporting some of the consequences of apartheid in South Africa, including Sharpeville Mk II, and found it thoroughly evil. So did most of us, but I felt less emotional about it than Buerk, because I sensed from talking with different people in South Africa that it was doomed and dying, and this was bound to harden the backlash before it expired.
Buerk found newscasting, at which he excels, a doddle, unexciting. "Most of the time it amounts to little more than reading out loud." For a while, however, his peers at the BBC, with whom he seems to have had an oddly remote relationship but to whom he was obedient, thought it was best for him and the corporation. They were hardly unreasonable in thinking it well to pull such a property out of the firing line for a bit. Very likely Mrs Buerk agreed with them. He writes sparingly but movingly about their close relationship. None the less, he managed to break out from time to time, to report the Lockerbie air disaster and madness in Mogadishu.
This is a long book, but Buerk is a good narrator. He even contrives to make his ancestry sound interesting. I suspect that newscasters are more skilful than most of us scribes at holding short attention spans; for they live in the knowledge that if they bore people they will be snuffed out with a snap of a switch. Buerk's early training and aptitude for television got him to the top. The things that have kept him there, one surmises on reading this book, are a happy marriage and consistently keeping both feet planted firmly on the ground.
Bill Deedes's most recent book is Brief Lives (Macmillan)
