Working alongside Kate Adie

Kate Adie - giving up frontline reporting

By Nick Higham BBC media correspondent

When I first joined the BBC as a reporter in 1988 I discovered to my horror that I'd been allocated a desk directly facing Kate Adie's.

Even then she was a legendary figure. I was a nobody, a television novice.

The thought of having to make eye contact with a giant of the trade every day I came to work was, frankly, intimidating.

I need not have worried. For one thing, Kate was rarely there.

Unsettling

She was usually off somewhere covering a war or a famine, or recovering at home on her return.

For another thing, she was always extremely nice to me.

And (an ignoble admission, this, but true) nothing made a dinner party go with a swing more readily than admitting not only that you worked for BBC News but that you actually knew Ms Adie.

But when she was in the office the effect could be unsettling.

Most television correspondents have sizeable egos, but our room full of education, home affairs, legal, media and science specialists was reduced to a bunch of shrinking violets by the sheer force of Kate's personality.

Kate had become not only a household face and name but also something of a forces' heroine

Even the sports desk were cowed.

She has views on everyone and everything. She has a fund of scurrilous stories and hair-raising anecdotes.

She has a wonderful contempt for anyone she thinks can't hack it. She has a loud and frequent laugh.

Whenever she appeared in the office she tended to take over.

Regular work rather took a back seat. But she was tremendous fun. And she was also a great reporter and a great television performer.

And she has been lucky; lucky to survive in often hostile and dangerous circumstances, lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

Adie covered the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square

She was already an experienced reporter, who'd done stints in Northern Ireland, when in 1980 she found herself in the right place on the night the SAS stormed the besieged Iranian Embassy in London.

The live coverage, with Kate's voice-over, attracted one of the largest television news audiences of all time (it interrupted the final of the World Snooker Championships, back in the days when snooker was the most popular sport on television).

At one point she had the wit and courage to admit that she didn't know what was happening. She could always be relied on to speak plainly and to deliver the truth as she saw it.

Libyan experience

What really made her reputation was an unwise intervention by the government a few years later.

In 1986 US jets based in Britain bombed Libya, after a terrorist bomb attack in Berlin.

Kate was in the Libyan capital Tripoli at the time and faithfully reported what she saw - that some of the bombs had missed one of their targets, the home of the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, and fallen instead in a residential area.

Each time she is in Libya she is causing us more and more troubles

Libyan authorities

Mrs Thatcher's government was outraged and the Conservative party chairman, Norman Tebbit, accused her of pro-Libyan bias. The BBC stood by her and Tebbit was forced to retreat.

That she was no favourite of the Libyan authorities either was demonstrated a few years later, when an official in the country's information ministry sent a telex to the BBC pleading with them to cut short a subsequent visit.

"Each time she is in Libya she is causing us more and more troubles as if we have nothing to do except Kate Adie," the official wrote.

"She never hesitates in insulting and scolding our representatives as if they are her own slaves while they are trying to give facilities. She insists on imposing her own rules and dictates orders and instructions."

She has not been afraid to make life difficult for the BBC's managers

In 1989 she was in Tianamen Square, alongside colleagues like Brian Barron and John Simpson, when the Chinese authorities crushed the student rebellion.

In the 1990s she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the first Gulf War she was attached to a British army unit in the Saudi desert.

Another journalist gave an insight into the Adie character when he wrote, after a lunch with the British commander, Sir Peter de la Billiere, of his frustration at how little he had discovered about the general's plans.

He had learnt little about allied strategy, he wrote, "but I have drunk deep at the well of Kate Adie's wisdom".

During the endless build-up to the attack on Iraq we grew used to Kate, in flak jacket and floppy hat, interviewing squaddies in their desert encampments. It was a waste of her talents.

Adie has part of a bullet in her toe from Bosnia

You could hear the relief in her voice when at last, following the Iraqi collapse, she came across a proper story: the wreckage of the retreating Iraqi occupiers on the road from Kuwait to Basra.

Her report was a minor masterpiece, the horror of the scene conveyed by the pictures and by the controlled understatement and characteristic clipped delivery of her commentary.

By then Kate had become not only a household face and name but also something of a forces' heroine: servicemen and women saw in her a reporter who understood them, stood by them.

Immensely helpful

She also respected them and shared many of their virtues, including courage, stamina, a mordant wit and an ability to enjoy themselves when opportunity offered.

She is a frequent and popular guest at military functions - and when the armed forces entertained the Queen to a day of war games in Portsmouth during last year's Jubilee celebrations Kate played herself in a dramatised reconstruction of a typical peacekeeping operation.

I was sent to cover the event live.

On the day of the rehearsal she was immensely helpful, bustling up with advice on interviewees and help with access.

But on the day itself she gave us an awkward moment when she turned to the audience at the end of the display, swapping her role as dispassionate BBC correspondent for that of something very close to a military mouthpiece, and delivering a short homily in praise of the armed forces' peacekeeping skills.

Star quality

She had also become so big a star that the BBC had difficulty deploying her.

One story, no doubt apocryphal, suggested that when she was sent to Northern Ireland at one point in the mid-1990s the level of violence rose appreciably and she had to be brought home: "Kate Adie's here," the locals had said to themselves, "it must be war".

Colleagues who worked closely with her sometimes found her difficult and demanding.

Rwanda was among Adie's many assignments

She has a quick temper and does not (as they say) suffer fools gladly.

She can attract unkind comments - sometimes, you suspect, from male colleagues of a certain age who have difficulty accepting her success as a woman in what was once a man's game.

She has not been afraid to make life difficult for the BBC's managers either.

It was typical of Kate to attack the BBC a couple of years ago for cutting down on "serious news" and carrying too many lifestyle and consumer stories.

She lamented the fact that an "old trout" like her had been sidelined in favour of younger reporters with "cute faces and cute bottoms and nothing else in between" (the phrase is a reminder that she has a pretty cute way with words).

Future role

Meanwhile, she was busying herself with good works. She was rarely on screen, but the viewers' loss was others' gain.

The National Youth Theatre, the Imperial War Museum North, her hometown of Sunderland and its university all benefited from her energy, her personality and her journalist's networking skills.

Though she has left frontline reporting she has not left the BBC.

She is continuing as the freelance presenter of From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4, and the presenter of occasional television programmes. And one thing is certain: Kate Adie is not the sort to fade gently away into obscurity.