From the front line
For more than 50 years broadcaster Kate Adie has brought us news of conflicts from around the world. And now these stories are more important than ever, she says
BBC
Listen to From Our Own Correspondent at 70 on Saturday at 8pm on Radio 4
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There’s much that stands out in Kate Adie’s long BBC career. Terrifying brushes with death – a Tiananmen Square protestor died from a bullet that grazed her elbow – nights sleeping in a bath in Bosnia, interviews conducted at gunpoint, frontline dispatches that changed our understanding of conflicts…
It’s those reports from places like Iraq and Afghanistan that help characterise Adie in our mind’s eye. But there’s more to her than desert
boots and battledress. At the start of her career on local radio she drunkenly sang the weather forecast live on air. She once walked in the footsteps of Bristol sex workers to identify the men trawling for business. She received several offers.
There was the occasion during a chaotic IRA funeral in Northern Ireland when she hit a priest who had punched her cameraman. And because she possesses intelligent curiosity she observed the open-casket bodies of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Belfast and of film star Gracie Fields on Capri.
Such curiosity didn’t come naturally. It evolved during her fledgeling years as a broadcast reporter. “I felt my own ignorance keenly,” she says in her autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers. “I trained myself to stare at a street of houses and be nosy about what went on inside. What did a sheet hung up instead of curtains indicate? Why did half the country garden fanatically while others tolerated a wilderness of mud and tin cans and broken gates?”
I felt my own ignorance. I trained myself to be nosy
Kate Adie
It’s that inquisitiveness – coupled with an enduring concern about a world so often in crisis – that has seen Adie helm Radio 4’s flagship series From Our Own Correspondent for the last 27 years.
Both she and it have just celebrated big birthdays: she recently turned 80 and this week the programme, affectionately known as FooC, marks its 70th anniversary with a special hour-long episode recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre, featuring contributions from the BBC’s bestknown foreign correspondents.
Kate Adie in 2024. Alamy
Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet and Fergal Keane, among others, join Adie to recount stories from the front line. Keane describes how covering the Rwandan genocide, which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in 100 days, destroyed his sense of idealism – “I went into a country that had been emptied of living people. It changed me because I saw the very worst that human beings could do.” Bowen admitted that he’d gone from being a young war reporter in 1989 who felt indestructible to one who now feels “thoroughly destructible”. “I have no appetite whatever for danger,” he tells the audience.
But it was Adie who, on the night, provided the most powerful advocacy for foreign correspondents and the role they play. “You go into places which are knowingly dangerous but your absolute reason for being there is to get the story back. It is not to say, ‘I am here’, it is to say that what I have seen and what I am experiencing has to be seen by other people.”
Such was the imperative during the Tiananmen Square massacre when she ran with a single cassette of film footage, dodging bullets and police, back to the Beijing Hotel where the rest of the BBC team were. “We saw people slaughtered… after thousands upon thousands of quiet, mild-mannered, reasonable students had asked for discussions about change… None of them talked about revolution.
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“I hear people saying today ‘I can’t bear to watch the news. It’s so awful. It’s depressing, it’s violent, why does it matter?’ China has become ever more authoritarian, and then you go to Russia, where people are denied the kind of freedoms which we take for granted and our old friend the United States… The country which has, as its emblem, a statue saying they wish to welcome the poor and dispossessed, is now rounding them up. These three huge countries have an effect on us. We’re tiny. That’s why we get these despatches.”
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