I never had any disasters with programmes! Because when you realise that the story isn’t turning out you turn it around another way. No… I mean, I worked on a huge range of programmes from a programme about women being scared to go out at night – and that was actually Stuart Prebble’s idea, that programme, I was researcher on it – it was called Nine out of 10 Women, and it was just about women being scared to go out at night – and I always remember it was the front page of the Daily Express, and I didn’t know if that was good or bad. I mean, was it good that the Daily Express’s male journalists were so shocked that nine out of 10 women were scared to go out at night, so they put it on the front page, or was it bad, because they should have known that anyway. But I thought that was a great programme to work on, because some of the best journalism isn’t some revelation about the CIA and El Salvador, it’s about revealing the truth about every day life that people are suffering. But then there were other fantastic things, I went to South Africa and did a programme about the role of the ‘Third Force’ and interviewed Nelson Mandela, and that’s a completely different sort of programme, which was fantastic. I think what I loved about it was you could do anything – you never knew what you might do. And there was no limit to what you could regard as being a programme idea.
