My favourite photograph by journalist John Simpson

“Here I am, third from the left, in a BBC News publicity shot with fellow news presenters (l-r) John Humphrys, Moira Stuart, Richard Whitmore, Jan Leeming, Kenneth Kendall and Richard Baker. 

My arrival in 1981 coincided with a revamp of the news bulletins. Up to that point, they’d employed people like Richard and Kenneth, who were former actors. They were very good, but the BBC decided they had to have journalists who knew about the news to present it, so they hired John and me. 

We were very much the outsiders in this photograph and weren’t popular among BBC staff because we’d been shoehorned in instead of these much-loved characters and somehow got the blame. It was a very unpleasant period. 

John and I presented the Nine O’Clock News on alternate nights (on the other nights I reported the main story of the day) and we were thrown in at the deep end, having never done it before.

To make matters worse, our editor wouldn’t allow us to have a run-through before going on air because he felt this would affect our spontaneity. It’s a complicated business presenting the news, but the first time John and I read the autocue in earnest was the night when the very first item began to roll. 

It was as different from the smoothness of today’s news as you could imagine. There were misspellings, freezes and we’d often hear anxious voices in our earpiece telling us to play for time because the next item – or three – wasn’t ready. It was nerve-racking and you knew that if something went wrong, you could be humiliated. 

I thought I’d like news presenting, but I felt trapped reading other people’s words. I was putting my name to things I wasn’t quite certain about because somebody else had written them. I make mistakes, too, of course, but at least they are my mistakes. I was just the frontman and I didn’t enjoy that. It may just be that I wasn’t any good at it.

I was given the boot the following year. It was never quite clear why. One theory was that I’d done a critical long news report about how the Conservative Government had given the Argentines the impression that we wouldn’t defend the Falklands if they were attacked.

Margaret Thatcher went crazy and the following day I was told I wouldn’t be presenting the news anymore. 

I don’t know whether that was the cause, but it was a coincidence. 

After this, I was sent to South America and I was the first British journalist to get into Argentina in the immediate aftermath of the war, which  was a very frightening time.

John stayed on at the Nine O’Clock News and did very well.” We Chose To Speak Of War And Strife: The World Of The Foreign Correspondent by John Simpson is out now (Bloomsbury, £25).

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