Hugh Sykes: Reporting from the frontlines

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hugh Sykes has reported for the BBC since the 1970s and has travelled far and wide to witness some of the most significant events of our age. Here, in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones, he discusses what some of those stories mean to him, and explains the journalistic values he applied to them. From the historic British coal miners’ strike of 1984-5 to the insurgency in Iraq, Sykes has faced down danger, surviving respectively an attack by angry strikers who threatened to throw him into a canal, and a roadside bomb. Yet he has always insisted on keeping his own feelings out of the story, in order to let his subjects communicate directly to listeners. Meanwhile, we hear too about his love of Iran, formed by years spent there as a child, about his preference for the medium of radio over television – and about how high spirits in the studio once nearly landed him in trouble with BBC bosses.

Producer: Michael Gallagher Editor: Bridget Harney

(Image: Hugh Sykes files a report on location – watched by a donkey. Credit: Hugh Sykes’ collection)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello this is Owen Bennett Jones with assignment here on the BBC World Service
0:04.2	where once again I'm in conversation with a distinctive journalist with a significant body of
0:09.3	work talking about their life, their reporting, and the interaction between the two.
0:15.0	And today a correspondent who many of you will have heard on BBC Radio.
0:20.0	It's Hugh Sykes.
0:21.0	He started his journalistic career while still a student at Oxford University, and he's been on the road one way or another pretty much ever since.
0:30.0	He doesn't like being called a war correspondent, but whenever a major conflict is occurring,
0:36.2	he always seems to be there.
0:38.2	And for his work he's won a number of awards, including most prestigiously, the SONI Journalist of the Year Award in 2004.
0:46.3	So Hugh Sykes, welcome.
0:47.8	Thank you, Owen, thank you so much.
0:49.2	Thank you for explaining just now why I didn't get a very good degree at Oxford University.
0:54.0	Exactly, because you are already doing your journalism.
0:57.0	Well, let's actually start even before that, because you were traveling around the world as a child, your father was a diplomat.
1:05.6	Yes, brought up largely in Germany between the age of four and eight, where I went to a German
1:10.2	kindergarten, and a few years later I then spent four years with my parents
1:14.4	when my father was sent to Tehran and Iran was a very formative experience for me I
1:20.3	loved it there these were the days of the Shah of Persia. And my parents gave me an extraordinary
1:27.4	amount of freedom. Between the age of 11 and 15, I must have covered most of Tehran, north, south, east and west by getting on red double-decker buses.
1:38.4	Yep, made in Britain very much the same as the double-decker buses that roam around London and I go to the end of the
1:45.0	line and I come back again and I pick up quite a lot of farcy on the way and people would talk to me
1:50.1	and I found it thrilling and adventurous and also to my childish delight I was able to buy more and more pet goldfish for my tank because at one end of one of the bus routes there was a bizarre.
	...

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