Despite the good weather I watched the City v United football match yesterday afternoon, it was such a spectacular event and a goal after 12 seconds just made it exceptional viewing. And I don’t even like football, I do however love live television. I grew up in the age when everything was live, no smart recordings, no slow-mo, no fancy gismos only plain taking and visuals photographed especially for the programme. There was a lot of ingenuity, for instance in one programme about the First World War, Brigadier Broadhurst was talking through a famous battle with a map showing the main areas of fighting, there was a tiny hole in the map at the location . As he talked about the bombs going off, Isaac, the props man, stood out of sight behind the map, took a draw on his cigarette and blew the smoke through the hole so a plume of smoke rose up from the battle and the narrative was even more realistic.
And the day two renowned ballet dancers came into the original Studio One – the size of a large bedroom – and they were poised to do their pas de deux, she in snow white tutu, on her tip toes, most uncomfortable, and he in his silken leggings.
They were introduced by Ivor Mills, they posed and waited for the music. In those far off days music came in the form of a record but when Aubrey switched on the turntable nothing happened. Remember this was live. Back to Ivor who apologised and re- introduced the two and up they went into position. No music, for some technical reason the mechanism failed again. On the third attempt and after about four minutes of waiting for the off, the two got to dance to perfection. But for the rest of us at the production desk it was a disaster. And poor Ivor was fit to be tied but it didn’t show on air. Off air it did! Hosting a live television show is a hit and miss affair, anything can go wrong and those who are introducing items are often left to devise a way of overcoming a glitch. Gremlins are often talked about in broadcasting, the little things that can wreck a well thought out and rehearsed item. Philip Schofield had it mastered down to a tee. He was the consummate professional and the public loved him. Then last week, he fell from grace with a dreadful thud.
During that awful interview with Amol Rajan even the two cameramen reported that he was genuine, shaking like a leaf and looking hollow and the tremble in his cheek was visible. I sincerely hope there are no further revelations about his life to come because, as it stands at the moment, my heart goes out to him. He’s being pilloried not only in the press but by some of his colleagues and we’ve a glimpse of the unpleasant culture behind the morning programme. It seems that Philip is doing his best to protect ‘the young man’ he became close to, he’s paying for his legal council apparently and refuses to expose his identity although it’s well enough known. Philip Schofield has been going through very traumatic times in his own life recently, the criticism of queue jumping at the queen’s lying in state, his admission of being gay couldn’t have been easy but was accepted both on screen and off, the news of his brother being sentenced for sexual abuse.
And then there’s the friendship with his ‘mate’ as he calls him – not his lover nor his partner as some papers keep saying – but someone he helped into a career in television. If I’d a penny for all the teenagers who shadowed me in both television, radio and newspapers I’d be a rich woman – we have all done it. Sometimes you take an interest in their progress and continue to involve them in work experience throughout their career, never for me at least in a familiar way as Schofield did.
Does his mate not bear some responsibility for what happened? He obviously picked the presenter as his mentor, I expect flattered him, perhaps even fell for him in a big way; working with a star is heady stuff and it’s easy to get carried away. It sounds as if Schofield put a stop to the budding affaire and his secret came out when he least expected it. What would you do? In his state of mind over the last months I’m sure he wasn’t thinking straight and didn’t want to heap more trauma onto an already traumatic situation so he lied.
For those who are against him their words are vitriolic, perhaps through having an axe to grind or sheer jealousy, if it is only because he lied to her that Holly Willowby has turned her back on the man who has been her best friend and her mentor through the years then I’m sorry for her cold heart. If Eamonn Holmes has more to say and divulge why doesn’t he keep it for the enquiry, he sounds and looks as if he delighted to have the opportunity of putting his former friend through the ringer,
As they say, it will all come out in the wash, maybe it will be dreadful and there will be more unpleasant facts to face within the family of This Morning but in the meantime I know what Philip Schofield meant when he talked of Caroline Flack, not the reasons why she took her own life but that her life was so black it was her only way out. His daughters are loving girls who will take care of their dad in the hope that this will be resolved and he’ll find a life to live in the future.
TOP OF THE WORLD TO YE!
Timing is everything and in 1953 it was spot on. How did it happen? Happenstance? Carefully choreographed? Certainly it was a very special moment on Coronation Day Tuesday June 2nd when, in pouring rain, three million spectators lined the four and a half mile route to Westminster Abbey when suddenly loud speakers announced that Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit of Mount Everest.
This was the ultimate challenge that had everyone buzzing, would they do it? Probably not, weather conditions were not conducive and anyway, the coronation was claiming the headlines.
Unknown to them, however, four and a half thousand miles away and over four hours ahead of London time, a group of exhausted men wondered if the news would reach London in time for the celebrations. In fact it did arrive and was presented to Queen Elizabeth in a red dispatch box just after dinner on the Monday evening, just hours ahead of her coronation. And that was all down to one newspaper reporter, 26 year old Jan Morris, then known as James Morris before transitioning gender in 1960s.
Best Laid Plans
Morris was selected by the London Times to cover the story, she was young, fit and healthy and a good reporter. She was determined to get her report through before anyone else so elaborate plans were laid to maintain secrecy even down to the coded message of success sent to Fleet Street.
Snow condition bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.
When decoded back in London it read: All Well!//Summit of Everest reached on May 29 by Hillary and Tenzing. All Well!
Morris reported that on the summit the two men hugged each other, Hillary took photographs and Tenzing buried sweets and biscuits in the snow as a Buddhist offering to the gods and the Goddess Mother of Mountains.
The Times newspaper had agreed to cover half of the expedition expenses in return for exclusive press rights. Red rag to the bull! Every leading publication attempted to grab the story, some sent reporters to Katmandu to be near the action, some even believed the coded message which threw them off the scent.
The expectation members were a very diverse crew of highly experienced mountaineers – a brain surgeon, an agricultural statistician, a travel agent, a zoologist amongst them. There was also a bee keeper from New Zealand, Edmund Hillary who became the face of success and the first man to stand on the summit of Everest with his companion Sharper Tenzing. They were the first of many including Belfast man Dawson Stelfox the first Irishman to reach the summit of Mount Everest on May 2 1993, a day that also made history as, back home that afternoon Mary Robinson was shaking hands with the Queen, the first Irish president to do so with a reigning British monarch. More recently the sad death of Noel Hanna from Dromora Co. Down who died in the Himalayas in April, a man who has been described as Ireland’s most accomplished mountaineer,
Brave Adventurers.
Not least Edmund Hillary, born in Auckland New Zealand he went on to become the first person to reach the South Pole travelling overland and then successfully tackled the North Pole. He established the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation supporting the Sherpa people of Nepal and was considered one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
In his book, Jan Morris Life From Both Sides, Paul Clements describes how, armed with her trekking equipment, a typewriter, ribbons, note books and the Oxford Book of Greek Verse and after saying goodbye to Elizabeth and his 14 month old son Mark, Morris set off to travel a substantial part of the way to the summit, daunting as she had never climbed a mountain before and now faced the hazardous Ice Fall, climbing through landmarks like Hellfire Alley, The Atom Bomb Area, The Ghastly Crevasse and The Nutcracker. Negotiating deep snow and bitter sheets of ice yet all the time sending back regular dispatches to London, These were relayed by trustworthy runners who could complete their journey often in five days covering 35 miles a day to the nearest cable office or telephone in Kathmandu. She trusted them and paid them well to protect the dispatches from falling into the hands of other newspaper journalists.
Gentlemen’s Agreement
By mutual consent, Hillary first-footed the summit a few seconds before Tenzing and Morris ruminated on how their lives might be altered by this choice and indeed she’d wondered if they would come back safely at all or should she start thinking about obituary notices.
Clements writes that after the conquest, back at base Hillary sat eating an omelette and drinking a mugful of lemonade. Beside him in the tent Morris got the inside story straight from the man who walked on the top of the world only hours before, the supreme moment for which the writer had been waiting and which would come to mean so much.
Very much the professional newspaper reporter and not a mountaineer, Morris’s desire to stand apart from the others was linked to her conflicted feeling about gender. Inside she knew she was not one of the boys and she believed that men more than women respond to team spirit. The hyper-masculine environment of the expedition and the physicality it demanded caused Morris to reflect on her own situation, it had she said later taught her ‘new meanings of maleness and emphasised once more my own inner dichotomy.’
Jan Morris continued her craft as a renowned travel writer and foreign correspondent, painter and storyteller and until her death in 2020, this transgender pioneer, lived with her wife Elizabeth in Wales.
Paul Clements spent many hours with Morris talking, searching through unpublished documents and archives, and whilst Everest is an outstanding part of the story he uncovered it’s only one of many this book contains.
Jan Morris Life From Both Sides Publisher: Scribe Publications. Cost £25
