The editor had a passion for cricket, and the interview didn’t really go anywhere until I mentioned that I played cricket myself – then he gave me a job. I didn’t do very much there – I remember ghosting the “Field, Wood and Hedgerow” column – but after deciding I should be on something bigger, I got on to the Western Mail and Southwest Echo’s graduate training scheme in Cardiff.
After a couple of years there I went to The Daily Mail, working mainly in Manchester, where I had to follow George Best around the city’s nightclubs. But I suppose I wanted something grander than that, and I saw that the BBC was advertising for new producers for the local radio stations it was just starting up. I got a job at Radio Bristol, where I doubled my salary and met Kate Adie, who was starting as the women’s programmes producer.I did a year there, and was then recruited by HTV, where I did another year on their local news magazine programme. I left there to join the BBC in Southampton, as a regional staff reporter, and then, in 1972, I got a job as a national TV reporter and moved to London, where I covered Middle East stories and the invasion of Cyprus.

Three years after that I became industrial correspondent, covering all the strikes there were in the mid-Seventies, and as I did that I became very interested in the oil business; this was the time when all the platforms were being built in the North Sea.So I went on to become the BBC’s energy correspondent, and for some of that time I was based up in Scotland. And, in 1979, a Scotland correspondent’s job was created for me, as the BBC in London wanted its own correspondent to report on Scottish stories, rather than going through BBC Scotland.Then, in 1981, I got a BBC special correspondent’s job, and came back to London. But I was always on the move: I was sent to Northern Ireland for one day, and came back three months later having been sent from Northern Ireland to El Salvador. Then the Falklands Crisis broke, and I was sent from El Salvador to Chile.

But I spent the war itself in Buenos Aires, for which I was lionised on my return but which wasn’t the least bit dangerous, really. I was then appointed South Africa correspondent, but agreed to alternate with John Humphrys reading the Nine O’Clock News until I left London.I was based in Africa for four years, and that was the most interesting time of my career. These were the dying days of apartheid, and it was the most amazing story to cover – at once so complicated and so simple. And, in 1984, the cameraman Mohamed Amin and I did the original films about the famine in Ethiopia that started off Band Aid. The emotional numbness that I felt at the time is difficult to recapture: we knew things were bad, but even then we weren’t prepared for what we saw.

And because most of the white people there were doctors, nurses and aid-workers, people were under the impression that I’d be able to help in some way, which underlined to me convincingly how useless a journalist is in these circumstances.Then, in 1986, South Africa introduced its state of emergency, which made it very difficult to report on the unrest, but it was also quite a challenge to find alternative ways of getting across what was going on. The Supreme Court overturned this after about a year, but then, after another 30 hours, the regulations were reimposed and we were expelled from the country.When I got back to London I read the One O’Clock News for a while, and then the Nine O’Clock News when it was relaunched in 1988. I’ve continued to do that ever since, alongside various other things: I do The Moral Maze on Radio 4, and 999, which I suppose is an upmarket tabloid TV programme, but it’s very well made and I think its heart’s in the right place. And that’s where you find me now – a male, middle-aged authority figureInterview by Scott Hughes. I am not, by inclination, a believer in golden ages, but I am convinced that if the World Service had a golden age it was during the time when John Tusa was managing director (1986-92).

John Tusa agrees with this, but the trouble is that he seems to believe this was entirely down to him

It wasn’t. Over the years Tusa had more than his fair share of luck and the backing of some highly skilled deputies. Additionally, world events conspired to persuade Margaret Thatcher that the World Service was somehow not part of the despised BBC and therefore was worthy of generous additional funding.
Tusa’s great strengths as head of the World Service were his extraordinary charisma, his effortless ability to move in circles at all levels of society, and his inspirational leadership. But much of this would have been for naught without the other two members of the World Service triumvirate: his deputy managing director, David Witherow, and the man responsible for strategy, Anthony Rendall. Their contribution was to dissuade Tusa from his visionary excesses while developing and implementing those ideas that could be made to work.For most of us at Bush House, working with John Tusa was both uplifting and fun, but his many friends and admirers also recognise that he is in possession of a substantial ego garnished with a generous serving of vanity: he appears to believe, apparently without qualification, that he, not John Birt, should be running the BBC.It is here the problem lies: the two Johns dislike each other with a vengeance, having fallen out very soon after John Birt was recruited from London Weekend Television to be deputy director-general. They are very different people, but they share two key personality traits: both are driven by a need for public recognition; both are apparently devoid of self-doubt.The animosity between Birt and Tusa now gives every appearance of being the driving force behind Tusa’s continued backing for the Save the World Service campaign. Does he truly think that the restructuring, imposed without warning a year ago, can now be undone? Or is he simply creating mischief for Birt, with the side benefit of some personal publicity for himself?There seems every chance that history will judge John Birt’s stewardship of the BBC very harshly.