Dragon Fire

BBC Wood Norton, Evesham, UK

On instructions from the Prime Minister, John Stopping by-passed the Home Office and called directly to Robin Sutcliffe in the broadcasting bunker at Wood Norton. He identified himself with a pre-arranged code. ‘When can you begin broadcasts from Wood Norton?’ said Stopping.

It was the morning peak time. Although the Taiwan conflict was high on the agenda, the bulletins were focusing on the sudden resignation of the Foreign Minister, Christopher Baker. He had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly in Pall Mall only a few hours earlier. He had been alone and carrying a briefcase of classified documents, which luckily had been kept safe and unopened by the police. India was ranking third in the running order. Shortly before going on air at 0600, the government in Delhi had shut down satellite broadcasts out of the country. Full censorship had been imposed. Journalists were banned from the front line in Arunachal Pradesh and the issues of conflict between China and India were considered obscure, given what else was around.

‘We can switch any time at ninety seconds’ notice,’ said Sutcliffe. ‘We are running simultaneous dummy programmes.’

‘We would like you to wait until the 0730 news headlines are out the way and then switch. Say it is because of technical problems.’

‘Why is it?’

‘I am afraid I can’t divulge. You can run your programmes as normal, but we might have to take over editorial control at any time under the terms of the charter.’

Many listeners, tuned into 5 Live, were unaware of the change because those channels kept operating. The Today Programme presenters had less of a problem in explaining the sudden change of broadcast venue than the two presenters fronting Breakfast News. They were replaced by a lone and less famous presenter with a bland corporate backdrop. The programmes schedules were maintained on the computer line, with the new presenters reading the same scripts as had been prepared in London. Sutcliffe decided that the packages at Television Centre should be used in preference to the lower-quality material which had been cobbled together at Wood Norton.

What remained a secret was that the BBC’s programmes were going out from a nuclear bunker because British territory had been threatened with a strike from Russia.

Faced with a news blackout in Delhi, the BBC’s Asia Correspondent, Martin Cartwright, had got straight on a plane to Bombay. On landing, he and his cameraman, Darren Scott, had taken a tortuous taxi journey to the financial district in the Fort area. If he could not report from the war zone or the seat of government, he planned to spin a story from India’s economic centre, transmitting it illegally on a satellite telephone. Bombay was as restless, dirty and unmanageable as he had ever seen it, oblivious to the global conflict going on around. Cartwright and Scott had hardly slept in forty-eight hours, frustrated at the restrictions put on their reporting, made worse with their story being hi-jacked by the conflict over Taiwan. Cartwright was even more furious because Sutcliffe had overruled his plan to fly straight back to Taiwan. He was told it was already being covered by a more junior correspondent.

It was Scott who eventually came up with the idea of just the two of them taking off to Bombay with a video-capable portable sat phone and the miniature SX edit pack. Scott said he could get Cartwright up for a two-way into the morning radio bulletins. They could then check into the Taj Hotel and have plenty of time to cut a piece of the Nine O’Clock News. If any pictures did come from Delhi or Arunachal Pradesh, they could drop them into the piece in London. As Cartwright and Scott inched through the streets in their taxi, beggars everywhere tapping on the windows, Scott checked out locations for pre-recorded two-ways in visions, which they could feed through the sat phone. He decided that the esplanade looking onto the Sea of Arabia outside the Taj Hotel would be as good as anywhere. The bustle of street-sleepers, traders and grubby children as a backdrop would show up India for what it really was. Cartwright liked it because he could contrast it with Shanghai. He would ask rhetorically why China’s economic centre had built a beautiful waterside promenade where people went out to enjoy themselves, roller-blading, kite flying, taking pictures, buying ice-cream, living a life, yet the same in Bombay was a wretched place of poverty, where not even a drop of wealth had seeped through to the streets. He noted down the thought.

The waterfront was also a good spot for radio, giving a clear line to the Indian Ocean satellite, and close enough to the banking district and Stock Exchange for Cartwright to say he was reporting from the area. It was also near to Horniman Circle where the Town Hall had been the target of a Pakistani bomb just two days earlier. The area was still cordoned off, yet the stock exchange had only dipped by a few percentage points because of the war. Disappointedly, Cartwright decided his story would have to be about Indian resilience ploughing on in an atmosphere of business as usual. This was hardly a community living in panic.

Scott got through to Traffic, the BBC’s communications centre, and was patched through to the radio studio in Wood Norton. The programme editor came on the line, asking if Cartwright could begin in fifteen seconds. They wanted an Indian reaction to the resignation of Christopher Baker. Cartwright was halfway through his objection that Baker was definitely not the story, when he heard the presenter’s voice in the earpiece.

After that, the line went dead, but the tape was played over and over again; the explosion, the roaring air and then the silence were terribly and clearly audible — no more than five seconds of radio, painting a picture of sound for the first nuclear catastrophe of the twenty-first century.