BBC reporter John Simpson's 30-year career has taken him to the world's trouble spots
FROM time to time I am rung up by one of the newspapers and asked for an interview. I usually agree, but I don't expect to like it. On the basis of an acquaintance of perhaps an hour-and-a-quarter, interviewers seem to feel a need to explain me. Their research often consists solely of reading other newspaper interviews I have done, or reading through the cuttings about me. So a phrase originally invented by the Daily Mail's gossip columnist and put in the mouth of one of my colleagues, that I was pompous and arrogant, gets regularly repeated. It's not necessarily that I'm not pompous and arrogant, you understand, merely that these people don't always discover it for themselves.
HAVING read the above passage in Strange Places, Questionable People, BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson's riveting tome, it was with some trepidation that I approached our meeting. That and a general distaste for journalists interviewing other journalists, the fruits of which hold as much appeal for the average reader as root canal work.
Simpson, however, is a foreign correspondent nonpareil, a reporter who has been shelled in Afghanistan and gassed in the Gulf, seen tanks in Tiananmen Square and flown into Iran - and a revolution - on the same plane as Ayatollah Khomeini.
In his 30-year career, he has booked himself a front-row seat at just about any event of import you might care to mention. He has reported from 103 countries, he writes in his book's foreword, and interviewed '122 emperors, monarchs, presidents, dictators, prime ministers and other assorted despots and loonies', including a flatulent Colonel Muamar Gaddafi.
A life of peril seemed almost predestined: on his first day in the job as a fresh-faced BBC television reporter, he was flattened by a British prime ministerial punch after asking a harried Harold Wilson if he planned to call an early election.
He's here to film a segment of Simpson's World, a genial weekly feature on BBC World comprising peripatetic pieces to camera with the sorts of people and in the sorts of places from which his book's title derives. Past locales include the lapis lazuli mines of Afghanistan, Colombia, Iran, South Africa, Algeria, Iraq, Turkey, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Yemen and Indonesia. This episode promises to be a trifle tamer: a walk in Wan Chai with the South China Morning Post's China guru, Willy Wo-Lap Lam.
Simpson presents an imposing figure with his shock of silver hair and big, bulky frame. He grips my hand with what seems to be a bear's paw. His size has doubtless proved helpful in defusing countless sticky situations in which he has found himself over the years. Then again, when the bullets are flying he presents a hefty target.