Meet Kate Adie

There aren't many countries which Kate hasn't visited

The presenter of the BBC Radio 4 edition of From Our Own Correspondent is Kate Adie, Britain's best known female correspondent.

After becoming one of the few news people to secure a BA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies, Kate launched her BBC career in local radio.

Well-known

She was a station assistant on Radio Durham. Many people, she says, thought this meant she worked for British Rail!

Then there was a stint at BBC Radio Brighton, which Kate describes as "almost completely disastrous," before moving on to BBC Radio Bristol, where her colleagues included Michael Buerk, later a foreign correspondent and one of the best-known television newsreaders.

Experience of national and international news was gained at Television Centre in London.

The newsroom, she remembers, "was a shabby sprawl, light years removed from any idea of style or the world of entertainment, lacking even the filthy glamour of Fleet Street".

Industrial trouble

Reporting then meant a staple diet of industrial trouble, weather stories, race riots, demonstrations, disasters, politics, murder and social unrest, sport and royals. Not to mention Miss World, Crufts, pools winners downing champagne and drama productions which angered that campaigner on behalf of the nation's morals, Mary Whitehouse.

Kate Adie was awarded an OBE in 1993

There aren't many countries which Kate hasn't visited during her BBC career.

She was in Sardinia reporting on a series of kidnaps there and in Belgrade where she was arrested trying to gather material for a story about the then Yugoslav leader, General Tito.

She was back in the Balkans covering the war there in the early nineties and there were reporting stints in Russia, the United States and Africa.

She was with the Coalition forces as they chased Saddam Hussein's troops out of Kuwait in 1991. The two foreign assignments she's most often associated with are the American bombing of the Libyan capital Tripoli in 1986 and the Chinese authorities' clampdown on dissidents in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989.

Marathon broadcast

She's reported from Northern Ireland and was the BBC journalist on duty in London in 1980 when the siege of the Iranian Embassy was dramatically brought to an end by the SAS.

We don't behave like that in my country - and anyway, I'm only a reporter. Kate Adie

Her commentary which, incidentally, interrupted the World Snooker Championships, was heard in millions of homes as stun grenades went off, people jumped through windows and others emerged from the building with their hands in the air.

She had no idea at the time that she was broadcasting to one of the largest audiences ever: it was a marathon broadcast and one for which she had no script. Just describe the scene, she kept telling herself, and keep going.

Today, Kate presents From Our Own Correspondent, reports for BBC World and makes other programmes for BBC Radio 4.

She is also involved with a number of charities and is in demand in Britain and overseas as a public speaker. She has written two books. Her autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, was on the best-sellers' lists for much of 2003.

In it, she reports that one of the dangers of the job is getting shot at. Three bullets, she says, did very little damage, but the fourth nicked a collar-bone. This shot was fired by an irate Libyan. Kate turned to him and said: "We don't behave like that in my country - and anyway, I'm only a reporter."