Craig Oliver: Trevor, it's great to see you. How are you?
Trevor McDonald: Thank you. I'm very well. Um, now that spring seems to be around the corner, I'm even better.
Craig Oliver: It feels like it's been a long winter, doesn't it?
Trevor McDonald: It's been a very, very long winter I've lived here now in England longer than I lived in the West Indies, but I still don't like the winters. It always brings to mind, uh, West Indian poet who said, ‘I brought the sun in my blood and now it dies. I must move closer to the flame, move closer to the fire to bathe my limbs in flame.’ I always feel that during the winter. I need to bathe my limbs in flame somewhere. You never get used to it.
Craig Oliver: It's a sort of grayness and misery as well, a bit of the weather, isn't it?
Trevor McDonald: And it seems, it seems to last forever. I don't know, as you get older. It seems to last longer.
Craig Oliver: But as you say, we're actually in offices, uh, overlooking the Thames where the sun is sparkling and it feels like spring has sprung. So that's a good thing.
I was thinking about you and, you know, looking into your life, obviously, to prepare for this. And, you know, the obvious thing to start on is that you were born in Trinidad in 1939. That feels, that must feel like a long way away and a long time ago.
Trevor McDonald: It feels centuries ago, and in the distance between, you know, London and anything in the Caribbean, Trinidad, where I was born, it feels even more, even a greater distance. But the interesting thing about life in the colonies, as Trinidad was a British colony, is that we felt we knew more about London than we actually knew. I mean, there was nothing about West Indian history in those days, we knew nothing about that. But we knew everything about you know, Wellington and Nelson and Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus and about Drake playing bowls and Plymouth Sound before setting off to hound the Armada around South America, you know?
Craig Oliver: So that's interesting. You felt that there was, there was just much more British history pushed than your own history.
Trevor McDonald: Oh, it, it was almost entirely British history. And there were some good parts about that, which is that our school books were also. Oxbridge, and so we were given a kind of public school education because all our books were from England and, you know, we were made to recite, you know, poetry and we knew more about Shakespeare and Byron than, anything West Indian.
Craig Oliver: Were you aware of people saying, hang on, there's something a bit odd about all of this, then, you know, that we're learning another culture?
Trevor McDonald: It was not so much talked about in strange terms as we, we lapped it up. I mean, there was nothing else to do. You know, you were, you were driven to Tennyson and, and, and Keats and, and, and Byron and so on. And we, you know, as colonies, we accepted it without any question.
Craig Oliver: Tell me about your family. What was family life like then when you were growing up?
Trevor McDonald: It was, uh, you know, I, I was terribly lucky with my parents. I had wonderful parent. But we had a, were West Indian life. It was, we were pretty poor. We had no, no money, but strangely, I think almost paradoxically out of that came this desire from your parents that, you know, you must do well. It was a terribly aspirational society. You know, my father used to say, reach for the stars and you might get to the top of the trees. And my mother endlessly used to quote something, I think it's Stevenson or something, where she used to say, ‘lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.’
And I used to think ‘footprints on the sands of time?’ I was anxious with my homework and I couldn't imagine you know, anything as grand as that, but, but it was drummed into you relentlessly. The importance of an education. We were all supposed to be doctors and lawyers. And, I remember once in the sixth form, I tried to drop Latin. And my tutor said to me that you can't drop Latin. You'll never be a doctor or lawyer. I mean, you know, and that was this kind of education that you, you know, and the drive that everybody instilled in you.
Craig Oliver: That's so interesting that sense that, that despite you were coming from, you know, poor background that you can achieve and that self-belief. But in you, did you, did that sort of manifest itself later in life? That sense that you can achieve?
Trevor McDonald: Craig, I never lost it. You know, it, and not consciously, but when you sit back and think about it, you realize that you are a product of that system which you know, drove you relentlessly to, to, to do something well. My mother used to point out the opposite side. She'd say, ‘That man, you know, he's no good. He has never a steady job, and he's in and out of prison’, and so on. And that was pointed out to you as a way of trying to make sure that you didn't end up in the same way.
Craig Oliver: And the view of colonialism now is it sort of pretty settled, in the sense that a lot of people say that you know that okay some of it might have been very benign but a lot of it was a form of oppression and that's a quite strong view now is that something that you feel strongly in?
Trevor McDonald: It s a strong, a stronger view now. I don't think we ever thought of it that way. We just imbibed it all almost….
Craig Oliver: It was just what's normal.
Trevor McDonald: Yes, almost without question. There is, as you say, a sort of revisionist view of it now. You see all the things that you know, were probably wrong with it. But in general, I, I, I come on, on the side of the fact that it did us a lot of good. I mean, you got an education, a view was held up to you that life could be better if you worked hard. I think that was probably the thing I learnt most.
Craig Oliver: That's obviously a massive positive and it sort of gave you a kind of launch pad and you've been unbelievably successful in your life. Tell me a bit about the poverty side of it. What was that like and what impact did that have on you?
Trevor McDonald: It was kind of tacitly accepted and without too much protest. My father was an oil refinery engineer with Texaco, but he did odd jobs for expatriates in the oil industry. He kept a market garden and for a time we kept pigs. And the poor man was always doing three or four things at once because he had four children.
And that was the, you know, constant of our lives really, that's what he did. And he knew that is what he had to do and he put everything in his efforts. I remember just, just one example of that. He worked, as I said, in the oil refinery, which was about 10 miles from our house. On Friday afternoon, if he was doing one of the shifts, which took him late into the day, I would be sent down to his place of work to pick up his papers. Not, not a paycheck, but his money, so that my mother could buy food for the evening.
Craig Oliver: So it was day to day.
Trevor McDonald: It was day to day, but there was never a great deal of protest about it. We accepted that that was the way we lived. We you know, got things from the shop and from the grocery on tick and that was understood as part of our life. And the, and the man would say, well, you know, you'll pay me next week. And, and we lived like that. We never had holidays, but we told ourselves we didn't need it in a place where the sun was shining constantly and there were beaches you know, all around. So we…
Craig Oliver: There were compensations?
Trevor McDonald: …found a way of, of coping.
Craig Oliver: Yes. And you became a journalist. Was that something you'd always wanted to do?
Trevor McDonald: Much to my parents disgust because, well, not quite disgust, but, surprise because they, they really wanted me to be a doctor, a lawyer. I was heavily influenced by listening to the BBC World Service. And I listened to these people, reporting from Moscow and from Delhi and from Johannesburg and, and from Peking as it then was. And I thought this is not a bad way of living. They were talking to influential people, diplomats and foreign heads of state, and um, they had traveled to these places, which I thought in itself was fairly glamorous. And it did occur to me that they were pretty well paid to do this, or perhaps.
Craig Oliver: And you thought I want to do that.
Trevor McDonald: I thought this would be a very good life for me. I was bred on the excitement, which seemed to be generated by the World Service.
Craig Oliver: And you were a journalist I think in Trinidad for like your 20s, basically So what sort of thing were you doing there? What were you what were you covering?
Trevor McDonald: That's terribly interesting because I did everything. I played records, although I couldn't be called a disc jockey. I did interviews, I read the news on the radio, uh, um, and then I also was sent to the airport. on big days to do interviews with people coming in. Uh, I remember interviewing Sammy Davis, Adlai Stevenson, and people like that at the, at the airport. And I reported on big occasions like the opening of Parliament. I also did sport or every sport, water polo, cricket, football, tennis. And it was because I worked for a man who said, if you were to succeed in this business, you have to try and find out what you're good at, but to do that, you must try everything.
Craig Oliver: You came to London, to work for the BBC World Service, which, you know, had obviously been almost like a soundtrack to your childhood, which must have been an amazing moment for you that when you came to live in the uk, what, what did you notice? What were the things that really stuck out to you?
Trevor McDonald: The first thing that stuck out is you thought you knew this place and you realize you didn't. You know, there was this sort of glamorous vision of what life in London was like. And when you actually come to live here, that's, um, you know, a bit of the glamour goes, you know, you get down to the nitty gritty of day to day existence.
It was strange, you know, because there was this sort of dysfunction. You'd read so much about it. You'd been told so much about it. And then you suddenly realized that you don't know very much about it.
Craig Oliver: And where did you life?
Trevor McDonald: I lived in Guildford in the first thing.
Craig Oliver: Our view, looking back is that it could be a quite unwelcoming place if you're a black man. Is that what you experienced?
Trevor McDonald: It, it was not unwelcoming, but nobody went out of their way particularly to, to welcome you. The welcoming bit was my great good fortune in landing a job before I left the West Indies in the BBC Overseas Service
Craig Oliver: Was that a bush house in the centre of London?
Trevor McDonald: In the the centre of London. Bush House was the most marvelous experience of my life, really. It was like a United Nations of broadcasting. There were people from Europe, Eastern Europe, who I'd never met or, you know, had any kind of contact with before. There were people from India, from Southern Africa, from other parts of Africa. There are people from Moscow.
Craig Oliver: There were often dissidents, weren't there?
Trevor McDonald: Especially the ones, um, from some of Eastern Europe. But you realize just what an amazing experience it was to work in that sort of international community.
Craig Oliver: Before I went to work at Number 10, my last job at the BBC was actually running the World Service in English, as well as it, uh, so I actually spent some time at Bush House.
Trevor McDonald: So you know what I'm talking about.
Craig Oliver: It was extraordinary, and what's weird about it is there's no sort of, you know, very few sort of communal areas. There's just these little pockets and you walk down one corridor and there's some people…
Trevor McDonald: The bar was one communal area.
Craig Oliver: The bar would have been popular. But there's like a, the Vietnamese and then you go in and there's the Ghanaians and then the Nigerians. It really is an extraordinary place.
Trevor McDonald: Extraordinary.
Craig Oliver: Then you went to ITN. And it's hard I think now for the younger people to understand quite how dominant ITN was in the television news space. It really, really, it was the first British broadcaster who'd done a half hour news program. It was doing a lot of stuff that the BBC cutting edge stuff that the BBC just didn't go near. What was that like going from World Service to ITN?
Trevor McDonald: It was, it was very interesting. I must tell you there is a slight sort of story about this because before I came to England, I, television had come to Trinidad and I did, although I didn't work for them. I, as a freelancer, I read the news on television, and I did an interview program, and so on, on television.
So, after the fourth drink in the bar on a Friday evening, I used to bore my Bush House friends by telling them how much better I was than they were, because I had done television. And they got, they got quite fed up with this and they said, if you think you're so good, why don't you go to this new place, which you just described? ITN, which was making a name for the, you know, half an hour news, uh, and, and so on. And I was almost pushed into doing it, um, because I, I don't think I had in my mind, or I had framed any idea in my mind about a career in television.
I'm pretty sure I didn't, but I was pushed by these friends and, and I did, I went for an interview and, um, it was not unfavorable. And after a while, somebody called me up from ITN and then they said, would you like to come back and have another chat with us? And they offered me a job. And I went back to Bush House, and they were gleefully awaiting the news that I had been turned down or something. And I said, I'd been offered a job. And they said, when are you going? I said, well, I told them, which was fact. I said, can I go away and think about it? Because I had no vision of, of a, a life in television.
Craig Oliver: Were you genuinely thinking of turning it down?
Trevor McDonald: I, well, no, I didn't think of turning it down, but I thought I just needed time to think what this meant.
Craig Oliver: So interesting, isn't it? Because that that is a pivot moment, isn't it? You know, like a moment in your life and then suddenly you go down this other road where everything, I mean, everything had opened up before, but really opened up for you.And it's a moment that at the time you're not necessarily aware of, but actually looking back was a real pivot.
Trevor McDonald: I don't think it's too much to say I was shocked to be offered a job. And then I began to wonder why was I offered a job. And that was an important turning point for me because I sort of suggested to the people I was going to work with, that I wanted to be part of everything that everybody else did. I said, although in as diplomatic, diplomatic terms as I could, I didn't want to be the token black. Reporter. I did have that sense.
Craig Oliver: Well, did you fear that that could be it, that you were the representative of minorities?
Trevor McDonald: I didn't want to go to Brixton to do stories about West Indian life and, and, and so on. I had no evidence at all during my career that, that, that was what ITN intended because it was quite the opposite. But I wanted to go. to one of the stories that was dominant at the time, Northern Ireland. And, um, it was very odd because I remember my West Indian friends would say to me, when I saw them when I went to cricket at the Oval or something. They would say, my goodness, ITN did this amazing thing of hiring you as a black reporter, and then they send you to Northern Ireland to get killed. I said, no, no, no, you don't, you don't, you don't understand. I asked!
Craig Oliver: But it's that it's such a, it's so funny, isn't it? Because that was such a brilliant move. Because again, any younger person listening to this, probably can't remember or realize the extent to which that was a dominant story. Every day, somebody being blown up, shot, killed, all the time. My childhood, I think, waking up or my parents having the radio news on and every single day. And actually taking somebody like you, who was not associated with the British establishment and then being put in, that was a brilliant move really, wasn't it?
Trevor McDonald: Craig it was more than that. I'm, i'm a card carrying coward I hate guns even the sight of them. I had never heard a bomb go off. I couldn't spell kalashnikov and so it was very very odd. It was such a shock for me. I'd never seen such violence. And, my colleagues used to tease me because occasionally we would stand outside the famous Europa Hotel, um, famous because….
Craig Oliver: Which weirdly people used to stay at? I remember staying there and somebody telling me, this is the most bombed hotel in the world, so why am I staying there?
Trevor McDonald: I know, and that's where I stayed. And occasionally, the IRA would tell people when the bombs are about to go off and we'd all go outside and, and, and wait. And this was such a strange experience. And I never forget whenever, although we were expecting this explosion, I would start running the other way. I never, I never lost the fear of, of it all.
I also, I never lost the sense of wasted lives. I remember one evening going to a house where a gunman had entered and killed three or four members of the family. And then a young child came in, about eight or nine, and said to the people who were giving us the interview, ‘No, no, no, he didn't run that way, h e ran the other way.’ And I thought, this young child had seen. Some of what was going on there. And I, I mean, I froze to think what effect this could have on children. I never lost the, the, the fear of being there.
Craig Oliver: And did ever reflect? Because actually you've been to some real hot spots around the world, but reflecting on that, of seeing people getting to the stage of killing each other and blowing each other up how did you sort of rationalize that and explain it?
Trevor McDonald: A lot of the time, Craig, I couldn't. I, you know, I constantly tried to, to try and find a reason why people were living in this way and, and how they behaved. And it, it, know, I kept searching for answers about how, and I'm not too sure I ever found an answer really.
Craig Oliver: But it's so interesting, you as well, you saying that you meet these people and actually they're civil and actually at the end of it all, weirdly, Martin McGinnis and Ian Paisley, who were two bigots of both sides end up sitting next to each other, liking each other, laughing together. These are two people who had, basically, that each side was killing the other and eventually they were able to come together, but there was a long, long period where they were sort of supporting and stirring up the violence.
Trevor McDonald: I remember one time one of the Protestant leaders said to me and I advanced that the question about you, you know, what, why you have this this business with the Catholics and so on. He said to me he said, ‘Do you know, well, you know, the Catholics have different ways of living and they have many more children than we have and so on.’ And I said to him, you know, Minister, I think you have to come up with a better explanation for your political differences.
Craig Oliver: I want to talk a bit about ITN in general because you know, it's obviously a big part of your life and it was a big part of my life. I was a trainee at ITN. And looking back at that kind of thing that you described there, there was always a sense of like, how do we find a way to tell this story? How do we make it interesting?
Whereas the BBC often was like, we're just going to cover it. The ITN was much more about like, what would happen if we took these people over here and talk to them in that way? I suppose the word that, that I came up to try to describe the culture to people, it was a kind of maverick culture. Do you think that's right?
Trevor McDonald: I think it probably is right. We thought very deeply about how we could make this interesting, accessible. And, and that was a constant theme to what we did.
Craig Oliver: You worked at the BBC and then worked at ITN, I worked at ITN and then worked at the BBC. And crossing over to the BBC, the way I sort of tried to describe it to people was that I've come from an organisation that's almost all heart, to another organisation that's almost all head. And that they actually, they could have both done with a bit of blending.
Trevor McDonald: Yes and, and I don't suppose there's any perfect answer. But I know we did at the morning meetings at ITN think, you know, this stuff in Gaza or Syria or somewhere, how do we make this accessible to somebody living in Norfolk?
Craig Oliver: And I think it understood the medium better, ITN, actually. Because the reality is you've got…I remember there was this two hour discussion when I was at the BBC about a story, and it went on and on forever. And the editor then looked at the person and said, ‘So can you do that in a minute? 40’... and I was thinking like we've just spent two hours discussing something, ‘can you do it in a minute?’
And the reality is that television is very, very short and so you almost have to give the impression and the feeling, more than you can give the kind of rational dissection.
Trevor McDonald: One, one minute 30, the editors used to say. Can you get that all in one minute 30? remember that as a constant refrain.
Craig Oliver: When you went to ITN. You became really famous and quite quickly, people like Lenny Henry were doing impersonations. Lenny Henry did a very affectionate impersonation of you. He called himself Trevor McDonut, didn't he?
Trevor McDonald: Yes, I still see him.
Craig Oliver: But you, I also, I also remember very, very clearly watching children's television, I think it was Tiswas, and you coming on and like enjoying and being fun in that moment, but that kind of thing that never happened really before, had it, that somebody had been so much on the news and then suddenly a celebrity in another area.
Trevor McDonald: I, it, it was all, it was extraordinary to me too.
Craig Oliver: It was interesting because Lenny Henry, clearly loved you and we spoke to Clive Myrie earlier in the series and he said that it was just so great seeing somebody like you not, not making a big deal of it, but actually just being there and to them you were a role model.
Trevor McDonald: Yeah, well, I, you know…on the role model thing, I think the only role I wanted to fulfill was my own to try and build a career and, and, and pay the mortgage. But then did, you know, creep into your consciousness that people are noticing you, you know, more than you ever thought. And, um, I, I was, you know, always quite surprised and, and, and thrilled by that.
Craig Oliver: Could you go out on the streets and walk down the road and without people coming up to you?
Trevor McDonald: It, it, it's something you, you had to learn to cope with. I couldn't always understand it. And it's not an easy, um, re, reaction to have. Um, but what I discovered was that, um, nobody came up to you and said, you're the worst broadcaster I've ever seen. They always found nice things to say
Craig Oliver: They were always nice.
Trevor McDonald: It amused members of my, and surprised members, of my family. I remember one day walking down the street with my son, who was then four, five, or, or something. And, somebody on a bicycle came off the main road, went onto the pavement and slapped me on the back and said, ‘Hello, Trev,’ and my son said, how does that man know us? Which I thought was very interesting.
Craig Oliver: That's very sweet. I mean, knowing you and, and like, we saw each other pretty much every day when I was like a producer, I was a junior producer on the show. But I'd see you every day and knowing you and watching you, you, you never let it get to your head, but you, there was also, I think that you managed to create a kind of sort of invisible sort of force field. Do you know what I mean? That you were, there was a sort of source of self protection mechanism of like you, you sort of felt comfortable with us. There was your team around you, there was a sense of like, you know, how do I be nice to these people, but not let it too close.
Trevor McDonald: It's coping, called coping, you know, and um, I don't think I ever found it terribly, terribly easy. It, it, it's a strange life but I never forgot where I came from.

Craig Oliver: Without name dropping, you're always very good at like, hearing you talk about having met some of the most famous people of our times, you know, like presidents and prime ministers, Saddam Hussein, Nelson Mandela, Diana. That experience of meeting somebody who is stratospherically important or, um, famous. Just reflect on that before we go into the individual that sense of going there and seeing them.
Trevor McDonald: It was always fascinating for me and, and terrifying in a way, because The greater the person or the bigger the person in political diplomatic circles, the better you felt you had to do. And the only way I knew how to do that was to prepare assiduously before I did it. And you know, I would have sleepless nights before interviewing Mandela or Saddam Hussein. I mean, literally, and I would be on edge and if may confess, at one stage I even got to the chemist to give me pills to calm me down.Because I was so, you know…
Craig Oliver: And so the Saddam one is, is, is fascinating, isn't it? Because he was, you know, really, the world was watching. What's this despot doing?
Trevor McDonald: And nobody in, in Britain had interviewed him before.
Craig Oliver: Nobody had interviewed him. I mean, extraordinary, exclusive to get. But you're basically going and talking to a dictator, psychopath. What was all that like?
Trevor McDonald: I mean, totally frightening. Do you know, everything surrounding him, you know, this was not an interview like anything else I've, I've ever done. We were picked up one morning in the car. and, and, and driven off. And I remember saying to the producer, I said, where, where are we going? And they wouldn't answer. And there was a major sitting in the front seat of the car with, with the driver who is a private. And, and, um, I realized not only did we not know where we were going, the driver had no idea where we were going.
And he would come to one of those large roundabouts in Baghdad and perceptibly slow down. As if to say, but he was too afraid to question the major, his superior. So he would just slow down and then, you know, look across at the major, who would then tap on the dashboard and say, on the dashboard and say, ‘second on the left’. And we ended up at a Presidential guest house. And out came a very, you know, affable, you know, looking guy and said, welcome, he said, ‘I just wanted to make sure that you guys are very happy being here. And I wanted to know’, and this is about four o'clock in the afternoon. And he said, ‘I wanted to know, what would you like for breakfast?’
And I said, you know how we have the habit of, trying to correct people whose English we think is not up, up to standard. And I said, ‘You mean dinner?’ He said, ‘No, I mean breakfast’. So I said, ‘Ah, that means we're staying here the night.’ No other indication…
Craig Oliver: Did you, you didn't know? So you didn't even know the time of the interview?
Trevor McDonald: No, the, the everybody was extremely pleasant and hospitable. The Iraqis are some of the nicest people I know. And when, once you mentioned the word Saddam Hussein, like, when might we, meet, the conversation stopped. Just the mention of his name seemed to cow people into frightful
Craig Oliver: And when he walked in, you know, you're looking at this guy and he's like, responsible for the deaths of many, many people and you know, torture and extraordinarily brutal despotic things. But I also imagine looking at a human being, I mean, as far as I can work out, he obviously dyed his hair and was not a particularly big guy. I mean, that weird difference between the power and you're just a human being.
Trevor McDonald: Yes. but, but you couldn't, you, you couldn't be unaware however he was dressed and looked of what this man represented and, what he did. And, you know, I was aware of all that. And, and as it just contributed to the, the, for me, you know, how frightened I was, you know, aware I was about who this person was. And, because of that, I think I did something which I will always find I should never do again. I thought for a long time about how do you begin the questioning. And I said to him, ‘Mr. President, is it a….he'd invaded Kuwait, of course, by then and I said, is it a very Arab thing to do, to invade a neighboring nation and rape its people?’ He was rather taken aback by it.
Craig Oliver: I imagine it still, it slightly shocked him.
Trevor McDonald: And sometime later, the Iraqi cultural ambassador here, who had done a lot to help me arrange this interview, was being kicked out of Britain, because he'd said something which the Foreign Office thought was not fit for a diplomat to say. And, before he left, I went to see him the night before, because he was given 48 hours to get out of the country or something, and I went to see him. And as we were leaving, he said to me, ‘Trevor, there's something I've always wanted to say to you. You were terribly rude to my President.’ Except he didn't say terribly.
Craig Oliver: As a journalist, you kind of want to be impartial and almost stand back and be removed, but you went to South Africa when Nelson Mandela was released and I can't see how that was anything other than an extraordinarily emotionally invested experience for you.
Trevor McDonald: I couldn't be totally, totally impartial about seeing this man released. I was delighted. Um, I'm a black man. South Africa had a system where black people were not politically represented, this man was going to be released and he was going to be the champion of, of something I really believe in, of all the races in South Africa. I, I was, I was thrilled and I, I probably couldn't disguise it.
Craig Oliver: And it's also his ability, despite the appalling racism and the appalling behavior of apartheid South Africa, to rise above it. And it's interesting, you were talking about Northern Ireland, where people just shooting each other and blowing each other up. That could have been South Africa, couldn't it, afterwards, but he was big enough and wise enough to see above and beyond that.
Trevor McDonald: It was the bit which really surprised me. The questions were not surprising. ‘How are you, Mr. Mandela, going to try to deal with people who for years have been hell bent on oppressing people like you?In a systemic way, it's in the politics. You know, you're not. part of this, of this country in any political sense.’
And he said, and I will never forget this, and I remember it, you know, uh, I'll remember it forever. He said, ‘If you're prepared to sit down and talk seriously, all these differences can be smoothed out.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no,’ I said, Mr. Mandela, some can be, but not, not the fundamental ones’. He said. ‘If you're prepared to talk seriously, everything is possible.’ And I was so shocked by that.
Here was a man who had spent 25 unconscionably long years in, in prison. And yet he was prepared to express this vision of racial unity among all the peoples of South Africa, although the system had done nothing else, but to be, you know, but to divide the country for more than 40 years. I couldn't understand how somebody who'd been so oppressed himself, who could have such an open mind about possibilities.
Craig Oliver: But it's the genius of his insight, isn't it? that, that's what the, there is real genius there and that to rise above it. And I suppose this is a podcast where we try and talk about what we learn from things, but trying to apply that to your life as well. It's like, how do we, on a much smaller individual level, get get above and beyond things. Is it something that you thought? Actually, this is a bigger thing that can be…
Trevor McDonald: Yes, I think he was right. I mean, and I, um, perhaps a little too, too much in a generalized way, feel that in the end, that is the way all, however big these problems are, how all of these problems would be solved. You have to sit down, and talk seriously, and you have to be, as he said, you have to be prepared to compromise. Much later after I saw Mandela, I went back to do a documentary there, and I met one of people who worked as a secretary in his office, and she said to me, he came in and was very enthusiastic about everything, and he said, ‘You know, we'll do this and get this done’, and they said to him, ‘Have you received any assurances from the National party, the white government, that they will accept any of this.?’ And he said, ‘No’. And they said, ‘Have you got assurance about one man, one vote?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And they said, ‘Well, how is all this possible?’ So he did actually believe in the process of talking and, and talking seriously and compromising.
Craig Oliver: And letting go, like being able to, to, to like release your grip on something that's deeply painful or, you know, problematic, or you feel totally wronged by that ability to do that. And that's something that people find particularly hard isn't in their day day lives.
Trevor McDonald: Even day-to-day lives.
Craig Oliver: Yeah, it's really isn't it? Like if you've like had a very difficult childhood or you've you know, somebody's behaved badly to you that process of going I'm going to let go of this not because I'm letting them off the hook But because I'm also letting myself off the hook.
Trevor McDonald: At the end of the day we went back into our hotel rooms and listened to this interview. A group of us said, ‘I mean, do you think he really meant that? Because, you know, he's just not accustomed to talking on television’...
Craig Oliver: Because it's mind blowing,
Trevor McDonald: You know, but did he really mean? And, uh, and he actually did it's, I was told to, uh, this is just anecdotal. He came into his office, the president's office, and there were not surprisingly a lot of white assistants in the office, um, white South Africans. And he went, he deliberately went round and said to them, I want you all to stay because I will need the help of everybody. If this experience is going to work. Extraordinary.
Craig Oliver: And that's an important part of it as well, isn't it? Because we rightly see Mandela as this extraordinary human being, a titanic figure in not just recent history, but in all history. But I suppose he needed the other side, you know, and it's a bit like Gorbachev needed Thatcher and Reagan, you know, that it wasn't going to happen unless they found the people on the other side who were going to let go. Interesting. Interesting. I mean, look, I've got another name on the list here on super famous people. We, we, we ran into each other and ended up having lunch and you, you were mentioning Diana, who's like this figure that just, still dominates even many, many years after her death. I mean, just talk about your experiences.
Trevor McDonald: I absolutely adored her. She was, easy to talk to person. I remember once she came to lunch at ITN and Nicholas Owen, one of our colleagues was there and somebody talked about the fact that he was a train- spotter. And Diana had never heard of train spotters. And she said, ‘What do you mean you just go around looking trains?’ The way she put it, I thought, this is really absurd. And she was, you know, but she was, you know, very simple. And she had a good heart and she looked a million pounds. And, um,
Craig Oliver: Did you feel her charisma and, you know, when did she walked in? Did she have that star energy?
Trevor McDonald: She had great, great charisma. And I'm, you know, it, it, hooked us all in. I was always pleased to be in her company. And I thought she had a good heart about what she wanted to do.
Craig Oliver: And that day when she died, that was. I mean, just extraordinary, suddenly, the nation just really had a profound character change. And it was what really was one of the most extraordinary times, wasn't it?
Trevor McDonald: I stayed in a hotel near ITN for a week, after she died. Um, because, you know, it was all consuming the news coverage of her. And, I remember the bank of flowers at Kensington.
Craig Oliver: Which was just like waist deep, wasn't it?
Trevor McDonald: And people.
Craig Oliver: Looking back, what was so interesting about the story was that obviously somebody too young dying in extraordinary circumstances and a real loss. But it was also a moment where we thought we were one country and we discovered we were really another.
Trevor McDonald: Yeah, yeah. It was, it was because were people were standing in front of the palace with tears in their eyes.
Craig Oliver: But it was a sense, I remember, and I was, you know, pretty young then, but covering it. And there was this sense that there was the old guard who are like, what the hell are you doing? We have a stiff upper lip. We have a stiff upper lip and these people are just hysterical lunatics. What's gone wrong with our country?
And the other side saying, we've had enough of your kind of like emotional rigidity. We are gonna show how we feel. And it was that moment, but it felt that actually as a country we, there was a real shift. That may be it happened a few years before, but we actually only saw it then.
Trevor McDonald: But it was demonstrably so then. Um, and, um, you know, and it, it moved everybody. Um, you know, the queen who had never done this before came out the gates, of Buckingham palace. And in the front of the palace, and she's, I'd never seen her there before, to look at the flowers and so on, which were laid there. It, you know, and as you say, some people thought this is overblown, and we've gone too far.
Craig Oliver: But I'm interested in that about you because there's part of you that is, a traditionalist and that you know, you're not wearing a tie today, but you know that you would I would often if I see you in. And the end there's something about you which is in the best possible sense old school and I don't mean that in any way pejoratively, but there's also another part of you which is about, one of the reasons I think you were so successful as a presenter, is the warmth and emotion that's there that's not very far beneath the surface in you and you radiate that and people could feel on you that you were, uh, you know, like when I see you, you're very tactile and that, you know, you, you know, there's, there's an emotional side. And I'm just interested in that tension between the two.
Trevor McDonald: You know it's, it's, it's my West Indian side against my British side…
Craig Oliver: No, no, but I, I love it and was, and you, it's, it feels like there's a bond and affection there and, and you show that
Trevor McDonald: And, and I can't help it. It's the way I feel about things. I always remember I had really serious problems keeping my emotions in check when I went to things where children had been affected. I covered, um, some droughts in Southern Africa and somebody explained to me that there were mothers. Who were struggling to feed their kids, um, you know off the breast because they themselves had been so affected by the drought. And I, you know, I thought that was just awful
Craig Oliver: Hard to deal with. And we talk a lot more of foreign correspondents now. There's a lot of discussion about post traumatic stress disorder and some of the things that you were exposed to. Whereas back then, I imagine that that was Just But did you ever have moments where you thought, God, this has really affected me?
Trevor McDonald: Yes, I, I….
Craig Oliver: And it obviously affected you emotionally, but I mean, actually had an impact on you that lasts longer.
Trevor McDonald: I felt that way, profoundly about in, about in South Africa. Uh, we went to see how, um, how, you know, a system was created which could degrade quite deliberately, in policy terms, the lives of a whole, well, the majority of the population. I could never get over that. And, and no matter how many, how many times it was explained to me. South African ministers, by the way, were always available to try and explain why this was going on. And I met De Klerkwhen he was a Home Affairs Minister and so on, many years before he was, um, President. And they were always ready to explain. I could never, never understand how they could treat people like that.
Craig Oliver: It’s fascinating with him, isn't it? Because he had, you know, he'd made his way and was a very significant figure in the regime. But in the end it was him that said ‘I'm doing the deal.’
Trevor McDonald: Yeah.I mean, which again shows that, you know, change is possible. And, um, and, and I've also, yeah, I've also believed that strongly.
Craig Oliver: When you left it and it was like genuinely a national moment.
And it was like, I remember actually years afterwards becoming an editor and all this kind of stuff. And we used to do these surveys of, newsreaders and even though you didn't read the news, you were always the top of people remembering you. That moment where you, you didn't retire and just stop, but when you left, what was that like?
Trevor McDonald: It, it was, I mean, the, the time had come and, um, I felt maybe I could do other things. Um. But it was a great wrench to leave. Um, you know, they thought that, you know, the time had come for a change and so on. Then I couldn't argue.
Craig Oliver: And being there, I only did it for a few years on, you know, the ITV news at 10 with you, but, you know, most nights of the week being there late that it, it's, it's, it's actually quite a toll, isn't it?
Trevor McDonald: I remember once I was having my house decorated, and um, I asked a painter to look out for somebody who was going to deliver some wine to my house. And the delivery man came to the house and he said, he looked at it and he said, Gosh, this is rather nice. He said, all this for half an hour's work a night. I was in there most days at 1130 in the morning to try and be part of how we were going to do what we were going to do. And I felt was the only way you could be part of it.
To get the interview with Saddam Hussein for about a month every morning before I went to work into ITN, I went to the Iraqi cultural office in Tottenham Court Road to talk to the cultural ambassador there to try to promote this idea of the interview. So I always thought you, you had to work hard at it. I would be give him a car to go home at night after the news. Um, the time difference between London and America and Washington is five hours.
I would get on the phone and talk to my contacts in America in the car on the way home. I felt a great sense of pride and honor and, uh, you know, that I must repay by being given this, this, this job. And I worked very, very hard at it.
Craig Oliver: I want to talk a bit about what you chose to do afterwards, and there's been loads of documentaries, but I suppose that one of the ones that really stuck out was, you mentioned it earlier about going to death row, um, what made you think I'd like to go to death row and discover what's going on here?
Trevor McDonald: I'd never been to a prison in Britain. And I say that because I had a friend who was in prison. And he wrote to me asking me to visit him. And to this day, I'm ashamed of the fact I never did. I have a fear of prisons, but somehow I was persuaded to do this in, in, in America. And I must say it was a fascinating experience,
Craig Oliver: I can imagine. And what's interesting is, about I only ever went into prisons when I was in government because actually it's quite tough if you're a journalist in the UK. In America, if you can get the interview, they'll, they, they're just totally open, aren't they? They'll, they'll let you in. So describe that moment walking into death row.
Trevor McDonald: Well, I mean, this a high security, prison. And, um, you know, you were not in any doubt about that from the moment you approached the prison. They took your, your phones away and they ran a machine which blew Stuff through your hair and so on…
Craig Oliver: Which is to say you didn't have anything in?
Trevor McDonald: And you know, they, you patch it down at an airport and so on. When I got to know them better and I thought I could be, could joke about it, I said, you know, well, there's no need to blow anything through my hair. Nothing can be hidden in my hair!
Craig Oliver: I was going to say, I mean, you're not bald, but it's pretty short.
Trevor McDonald: I said nothing can really, you know, and they said, oh, I'm afraidwe must, it was very, very strange and people were locked firmly behind doors. The worst prisoners were only allowed exercise on their own, again, in large steel cages and um, was a totally, you know…
Craig Oliver: So there's a guy called William Clyde Gibson, who murdered three women in cold blood. And I went back and reviewed the documentary before coming to see you. And he said, um, in it, that he was almost he was like he was almost taunting you by saying all of the explanations that people come up with, I'm gonna just say a rubbish. So he said ‘I had a normal childhood’, he was like very clear that there wasn't something that happened his childhood and then he said, ‘I could kill a person and go out to dinner’ and he was almost desperate to sort of really emphasize the casualness and banality of what he was doing. And then you said to him, ‘Do you have any humanity?’ and he sort of just shrugs and says ‘No.’
Trevor McDonald: Yeah.
Craig Oliver: So you're coming face to face, with I think evil is a really difficult word because actually, you know, it's it's more complicated than that. We could spend hours talking about that But you're coming face to face with the truth an extreme somebody who is right at the extremes of human behavior, and you're sitting across from him. What was your reaction?
Trevor McDonald: I remember that so well. I remember that so, so, so well. I was stunned by what, by what he'd said. And worried about what my reply would be. And I think I ended up saying something like. You know, I don't believe in the death penalty, but when I hear people like you express what you did in such terms, then I could understand why some people feel quite differently to the way that I do about, about the death penalty. It was the one thing which I had got totally wrong in my perception about what I would find in, in prison. I met almost nobody who said we didn't do it. They all admitted to doing it and that, that, that was terribly strange. They were quite open about, you know, what they had done to get there.
One evening we sat the cell of a person on death row. And he'd killed, I think, three women. And, um, and, the lady who was the press officer in the prison, as he was describing in fairly graphic detail what he did, she started shaking and, you know, and she said, ‘I'd never heard him’ later on, ‘I'd never heard him say that before’. And I had : the habit of whatever, however unpleasant these people were, uh, they were doing us a favor in allowing us to make television programs. I never lost that, that thing, you know, that, you know, we were still being terribly fortunate to be able to do what we were doing with these people. So at the end of it, I would say to the guard, I said, ‘Can I just go back,’ after we'd taken the shot of my leaving the cell and so on, ‘May I just go back and say to him, thank you so much for talking to me.’
And he said, No, no, we're out of here. And even they were shocked by, by what he had, you know, said.
Craig Oliver: There's probably part of him that almost wanted to show off a bit as well.
Trevor McDonald: Yes, there was that, that element. I mean, they'd been sitting there and nobody's talked to them
Craig Oliver: And suddenly they've got attention.
Trevor McDonald: Exactly. And some people, in an astonishing way reconciled themselves to what their end would be, in an extraordinary way. So much so that there was one guy who, when we went back to the prison on a second visit, was let off death row for some medical reasons. And, I talked to him and he was terribly dissatisfied about what his his current position was. He was in this prison, not going to be killed anymore on the execution table. And he said to me, ‘How am I going to spend the rest of my life?’ And I, I didn't know what to say to him about, um, you know, the fact that he's escaped the death penalty. That, that, that's all I thought of. But that's why we wanted to do the interview.
Craig Oliver: We're coming towards the end and I've just got a couple more questions. You're 84 now, is it 84? Incredibly spry, totally on do you feel like being in your ninth decade and looking back it all?
Trevor McDonald: I worry about, about getting older, but I realize there's not very much you can do about it. I also think I'm terribly fortunate to be you know, still around and reasonably healthy and could still play the odd game of tennis.
My most serious concerns are about my children and grandchildren and I have a son who's just got married and I would love to be around to see if he has any kids. My other thought is that people coming into this life now and into this political world are going to have a very difficult time negotiating their way. I find things have changed. I think in many ways, some aspects of life are much more challenging than I think they were.
Craig Oliver: The question that we ask at the end of all of this is that if you had one piece of wisdom, one thing you feel you've learned, that's a good thing to pass on, what would it be? What would yours be?
Trevor McDonald: One thing I've learned is that in every country, everywhere, you can find good people. Do you know, I used to break it down to, to something apparently terribly mundane. You drive into someplace, come out of the airport and are taken in by a taxi. Very occasionally, you get words of wisdom from the taxi driver, and I have never lost the sense that the job that we do, and we boast about doing it either well or not, has always been made eminently more possible by the goodness of the people we meet.
Craig Oliver: Yeah.
Trevor McDonald: And frequently, they're strangers. Who've never seen you or people like you, and they're still helpful once upon a time in Beirut when, um, it was very difficult to, to get our material, our videos out, you had to drive the tapes to Damascus to, to in Syria to get these out. And I, um. I was, I was complaining about it. I did one drive and I thought two or three would probably kill me. So is there any other way of getting these tapes to Damascus, to television? And I complained to the hotel concierge and he said to me, ‘Oh, it's terribly simple.’ He said, ‘Give any one of those taxi drivers a hundred dollars and he'd take your tape there.’
And I did this. I was so anxious to, to get out of doing it myself. And then as I sat waiting for the confirming call from London that my material had got to Damascus, I suddenly thought, I didn't take the number of this taxi, I didn't ask him his name, and yet I would sit in the bar and wait for a call, and it would eventually come, and somebody in London would say, we can see your pictures. And I thought, what wonderful man to have done that. And if it went wrong, I could have no possible excuse. And yet I had relied on the goodness of a Lebanese taxi driver to kind of save my job. Amazing.
Craig Oliver: What I hear in what you're saying is like, it's, it's an open, positive, optimistic view of people and that… give them a chance and recognize the humanity in others. And it sort of links back to a lot of what you were saying about Nelson Mandela was on the grandest of all possible scales he recognized the humanity in others. And it seems to me that that's really what you're saying is that, that actually be positive, be open, be engaged and look for the goodness in others.
Trevor McDonald: You, you put it perfectly well. The humanity of people, the goodness of others. I, it's the, the lesson I have taken most prominently from life and from the life I have lived.
Craig Oliver: Trevor, I was very lucky to run into you again the other day, and this interview came out of running into you.
And what struck me when I went away from having run into you, and then subsequently having lunch with some other friends as well, was how affectionate I felt for you, and how much I'd sort of learned from you, and how lucky I was to have had you as somebody who was in my life early on. So, you've been incredibly generous with your time, and thank you.
Trevor McDonald: Well, I, I've always, I, I found the, the, the, the collegiate nature of what we do one of the most, you know, the loveliest things about it and that that lunch was a very good example. It's, it was wonderful and it's, it always is to meet and, and, and, and to share because I think to the, there's a really important side of journalism. We tell people about events and try to explain them, to explain to them how they should go about electing others to serve our country or to serve our interests. That job is desperately important I think it's more important now than it ever was.
Craig Oliver: And it's a massive election year, so it's very good point to leave it. So Trevor, thank you very much.
Trevor McDonald: Thank you very much for asking me.