Great survivor
Michael Vestey
Charles Wheeler has been, deservedly, the most admired broadcasting journalist of his generation; his colleagues, myself included, pointing to him as the type of reporter they would like to be. Now that he is 80 and still vigorously and elegantly reporting for the BBC, Radio Four broadcast a programme about his career in The Archive Hour: Wheeler at 80 (Saturday) presented by Jeremy Paxman.
Wheeler confessed to disliking television pieces to camera, as they're known, the reporter simply memorising his words and talking to the camera. Despite this, he's very good at them. In Washington I was told that when facing the camera in the studio his shaking legs made the table at which he was sitting rock. I suspect, though, he has a streak of shyness and modesty though he's determined to ensure the reporter has the ascendancy by not allowing the producer to map it all out in advance, the eternal struggle between the two.
He was amusing about his start in broadcasting after the war. He told Arthur Barker, the foreign editor interviewing him, that he spoke German and wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Barker told him there was no need to learn a foreign language. When he'd been the correspondent in Warsaw he hadn't learned Polish, simply copying out newspaper reports from the translations at the British Embassy. Wheeler got up to go when Barker said, 'Do you speak Spanish, Wheeler?' He didn't and Barker replied approvingly, `Ah, we have a vacancy in our Latin American Service.' He went to work there. Well, fortunately things have changed for the better since. By accident he ended up in Berlin, covered the horrors of the Berlin Wall, before moving to Delhi where he reported on a tiger shoot during a royal tour. He told Paxman, however, that when he remarked over a drink, 'I wish that bloody woman would go home, I'm bored with this trip,' he was overheard and declared persona non grata by the Palace for six years. Because the Duke of Edinburgh had a bandaged hand and couldn't shoot the then foreign secretary Lord Home had to step in but hated having to kill a tiger.
Later, in the mid-Sixties, he was assigned to Washington and found himself reporting on the race riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Paxman wondered if he'd found it hard to remain dispassionate and uninvolved in that dangerous environment. Wheeler said he did but added that one shouldn't he dispassionate. He even thought that black violence was justified in a riot because it made white America listen, a view that apparently horrified Washington dinner parties at the time. He seemed to have a problem with Alistair Cooke who, he said, felt he should interpret mainstream America. Although he didn't elaborate, it sounded as if Wheeler thought America should be reported in the raw. Both approaches are perfectly sound, of course, even complementary.
Paxman asked him if he'd tried to have Cooke sacked and Wheeler said he hadn't. He pointed out that the BBC had tried to get rid of Cooke and, as I revealed in this column a few years ago, sent out a senior radio executive to do it. Wheeler recounted how he met him on the aircraft and when told of his mission said, 'I don't believe it.' He rang Wheeler four days later and when asked what had happened said, 'Nothing. I couldn't bring myself to say anything . ' He returned to London and Cooke, at the age of 94, still does his weekly Letter from America.
Wheeler denied being anti-American and I don't think he is. I would say he was anti-Republican, if anything. 'What I've always felt is that they're so often misgoverned because their system throws up really awful people like the present incumbent.' Who are you to say that?' Paxman rightly demanded to know. Wheeler thought a reporter should say what he thinks. 'What he sees or what he thinks? There's a big difference here and people say you cross this line.' Wheeler: 'Which line did I cross? Did I see too much or did I think too much?' Paxman, stumped: 'Don't get clever.' Although I think Wheeler is wrong about this if you work for the BBC, I was never aware in his reporting that he had crossed that particular line, except for the memorable occasion in the 1970s when on television he addressed the ghastly Ted Kennedy, the 'hero' of Chappaquiddick, as `sir', which I imagine he later regretted. Otherwise, considering he is a heroic smoker, as Paxman put it, and remained afloat during the storms of the John Birt period at the BBC, standing up to him which Birt hated, he is indeed a great survivor and now presents excellent radio documentaries. We must hope his distinctive, husky, watery and slightly Gielgudian voice remains on the airwaves for some time to come.
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