This is a global original podcast.

Hello and welcome to full disclosure, a podcast project conceived chiefly to let me spend more time than would be available on my radio show with people who, well, who merit the time and the space.

And it occurs to me, John Simpson, that given the lengthened variety

of your career, that even with an hour, we will barely touch the sides.

Yes. I don't know. It's all been the same sort of stuff there, really. You know, sort of,

there used to be a very good comedian.

I wish I could remember his name,

but he once wrote that something like everything Simpson does

is exactly like something out of a book by GA Henty.

And, you know, that hurt for a long time.

But there is, of course, you know, a certain amount of truth in it.

We're beginning at the beginning.

You were born in, in Lancashire, but you didn't stay there long.

No, I was only there for a few days.

My mother, and my father was back from the war.

It was in 1944.

I suppose it was before D-Day and he was given a bit of leave.

And he came home and he and my mother lived in a top floor flat in London and a V1 bomb hit a house about two or three down, killed everybody in the house.

And by the time the sort of shockwaves got to my parents flat, you know, the ceiling came in

and my father was absolutely outraged because my mother was eight and three quarters months

pregnant and he grabbed her, put her in a taxi, took her to Kingscross railway station in London, pulled out a handful, whatever, all the money had got in his pocket, gave it to the rather bemuse clerk behind the counter and said, give her a ticket to wherever this takes her.

And though he worked it out that it took her to Blackpool.

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