Abstract
Charles Wheeler was the finest broadcast journalist of his generation. In a long career at the BBC, his extraordinary reporting on radio and television vividly brought the world’s most momentous events to audiences at home. This book, by his eldest daughter Shirin, is long overdue. It’s partly a memoir, partly a reflection on his journalistic legacy, but mostly it’s a history of an amazing career. The risk, of course, of having a daughter write her father’s biography is that personal feelings might get in the way. The author skilfully avoids this by telling her father’s story largely through his own words, as delivered in programmes and dispatches.
The title is apt. Charles Wheeler had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, always at the centre of events. As a boy in Germany, he saw a man being hustled through a hotel lobby in Hamburg. That man was Adolf Hitler. In the Second World War, he was a naval intelligence officer working with a swashbuckling mobile commando unit under James Bond author Ian Fleming. His first encounter with journalism was as a copy boy for the Daily Sketch. He got the taste. After the war, turned down by Fleet Street, he was advised to apply to the BBC – “they’ll take anyone”. Speaking fluent German, but no Spanish or Portuguese, naturally, in the way of the BBC, he was sent to the Latin American Service. Itching to be a reporter, he was turned down as a radio correspondent, but found his way to what was then the remote television outpost of Panorama. An illicitly smuggled camera meant they got exclusive footage of the anti-Communist uprising in Hungary in 1956.
He was then appointed BBC correspondent in Delhi. Even early in his career, Charles did not pull his punches in his dispatches: “Ceylon has been ruled by a cabinet composed very largely of mediocrities, and led by an inexperienced eccentric whose only strength lies in his possession of dictatorial powers.” The book portrays a man with a strong sense of morality. On the road, he was sometimes shocked by other reporters’ lax attitude to the truth. He once grabbed the phone to stop a newspaper colleague filing an invented story that a group of miners trapped underground had resorted to cannibalism.
In 1965, he was sent to Washington. It was the tempestuous era of the American civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, then Watergate. It was a posting that cemented Wheeler’s reputation. Shirin highlights what she thinks made her father’s reporting stand out: “One of Charles’s keenest instincts was to seek out and recognise the significance of a historic moment in those people most often kept out on the margins.” She quotes this memorable piece to camera during the Watts riots: “They [the rioters] talk about police brutality in these terms ‘They push us around. They arrest us for nothing. They call us n*****s. We’ve had this for years – for as long as we can remember’. And the point simply came when someone decided he couldn’t take it any more.”
Another hallmark of the Wheeler style that the book highlights is his distrust of authority, not least his own bosses. When John Birt first arrived at the BBC, he was sharply critical of its current affairs output. At a testy meeting with staff, Birt denied he had been critical. Wheeler came back at him, quoting from the notes he had taken. The atmosphere in the room froze.
Charles was on Newsnight from the start. First, as a studio presenter, but after a disastrous episode with one of the programme’s frequent technical breakdowns, he was gratefully released to go back on the road. It was the second heyday of his career. His work on Newsnight won him many awards, among them for his brilliant reporting of the Kurdish mass exodus across the mountains from Iraq.
This fascinating book chronicles a remarkable career that began with dispatches sent in Morse code and ended with live transmissions on global satellites. Wheeler’s work inspired many budding journalists – myself included. The coda to the book is the typically pithy advice Wheeler said he would give to aspiring journalists: “You stand for telling what you believe to be the truth of the situation you’re covering. That is your basic position; it’s the only guideline that you need. Are you telling the truth?”
