Departures
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Leaving's the theme of this edition. Bridget Kendall, the BBC's Russia specialist, is hanging up her headphones but not before she talks about secret agents and considers what the past can tell us about that country's future. Past and present are on Kevin Connolly's mind too. He's off to a new BBC posting and points out that within half an hour's walk of his home in Jerusalem some of the defining dramas of the ancient world played themselves out. He also talks of the pleasures and pitfalls of Middle East reporting today. And Gabriel Gatehouse hums the theme tune from 'The Great Escape' while considering departures in his essay about the EU referendum and the Euro2016 football tournament in France
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You've downloaded BBC radios from our own correspondent. |
| 0:03.4 | This is the edition broadcast on Radio 4 on Thursday, June the 16th, 2016. |
| 0:08.6 | And it's introduced by Kate Adi. |
| 0:11.3 | Hello. |
| 0:12.3 | Today departures are on our mind. |
| 0:15.0 | The correspondent who spent most of her BBC life reporting from and about Russia is off to |
| 0:20.0 | pastures new. |
| 0:21.6 | She talks of some of the most extraordinary moments of her |
| 0:24.1 | career, studies an essential manual for spies, and wonders if history can tell us |
| 0:29.7 | what will happen next in Russia. A man in Israel is moving on too. He has news of |
| 0:35.8 | one of history's most expensive meals and tells us his is not the first |
| 0:41.0 | undistinguished British departure from Jerusalem. |
| 0:44.8 | Days to go until the big European vote will departure be the result of that one too? |
| 0:50.5 | And what of today's big football match? |
| 0:52.8 | England fans wonder if defeat at the hands of the Welsh this afternoon |
| 0:56.8 | will mean they too will have to pack their bags and leave. |
| 1:01.6 | Now it's not every BBC correspondent who hears from a Russian president when he or she leaves the corporation, |
| 1:08.0 | but when Bridget Kendall announced recently she was moving on, she received a letter from Mikhail Gorbachev, wishing her all the best. |
| 1:15.4 | There was even a little joke. |
| 1:17.2 | He said he hoped that Bridge Exit, as he put it, would not cause as many arguments and |
| 1:22.0 | as much opera as Brexit. |
| 1:24.0 | Bridget, who later went on to become Washington and then diplomatic |
... |
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