Craven - Headlines and hedgerows: a memoir

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First published 2019

Copyright John Craven, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Jacket photograph Chris Terry

ISBN: 978-1-405-93268-4

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To my family

The microphone was on and I was halfway through reading the news when the door opened and in came my Aunty Ethel with some shopping. Then a member of the audience opened the other door and the two of them began talking about what was in the bags while I struggled to continue the bulletin.

This unlikely scene was happening not, Im glad to say, in a studio, but in a kitchen in suburban Leeds. The newsreader was me in my early teens and the audience was my mum, who had been listening patiently to my early broadcasting efforts. The microphone was a birthday present I had wired from the kitchen table to the radio in the sitting room and my news script was the front page of the evening newspaper.

Pretty soon Mum and Aunty Ethel realized I was far from pleased they had broken into the bulletin so they made a pot of tea and sat down to listen to the rest of my news. Fortunately the interruption did not put me off a career in broadcasting (though it did take me some years to realize that was what I really wanted to do). I have talked into microphones on BBC One almost every week for more than fifty years, and occasionally on BBC Two and ITV as well.

During that time I have been involved with three ground-breaking programmes Newsround, Swap Shop and Countryfile of which I am enormously proud, worked with some great teams who have been friends as well as colleagues, travelled to more than ninety countries and met a vast number of people from prime ministers to pop stars, from inquisitive children to a future saint. I count myself tremendously fortunate to have survived so long in an industry which can be notoriously fickle but which I love unconditionally.

We have all heard that well-known piece of advice first coined by W.C. Fields: Never work with animals or children. Well, I have done both throughout my career (in fact, I couldnt have succeeded without them!) so in my case at least that old adage is totally wrong. I suppose one reason for my longevity is that I have never been very ambitious. I have not sought the headlines, never seriously courted celebrity nor been tempted to take chances on high-profile but potentially risky and short-lived programmes apart from one, and that was Newsround, which was a six-week experiment in 1972. Thankfully it is still going strong so, as it turned out, it was not much of a gamble and a recent poll in Radio Times placed Newsround at number three in a list of the top twenty childrens programmes of all time.

And Countryfile is often in the top twenty of most-watched shows. During my thirty years there I have seen rural issues ranging from social isolation and deprivation to the way our food is produced climb higher and higher up the national agenda, making the programme a vital conduit of information to millions of concerned viewers. The fact that our audience is split pretty evenly between country dwellers and townies proves to me that, united as a nation in this at least, we want to preserve, protect and enjoy our glorious countryside. Every week, we highlight the problems it faces (in my lifetime half our hedgerows have gone and so have two thirds of our small family farms) while at the same time showcasing the life-enhancing experiences it can offer. This dichotomy is what makes working on Countryfile so rewarding.

I have always been content to be a jobbing broadcaster, taking each day as it comes and hoping it will bring good stories and interesting people which is probably why I have never been out of work in half a century. Journalism has taken me from the cobbled streets of my childhood to the country roads that crisscross our rural heartland, and most of that time it has been by way of the worlds greatest broadcasting organization, the BBC.

On my first attempt to film a news story for television the cameraman told me: A movie camera either likes you or not and John, youre lucky. So, being a firm believer in making your own luck, I stuck with broadcasting. But my first love was the printed word and I thought it was time to put down some of my lifelong experiences in this book, while I can still remember!

My watchword has always been: keep it short and keep it simple without being simplistic. Hopefully the latter still applies but the former has gone out of the window. I hope you enjoy wandering with me down a memory lane that I am so glad, so grateful to have trod.

Oxfordshire, 2019

A beaming five-year-old rides on the shoulders of a stranger, a hero returning from fighting tigers in distant lands. For weeks the boy has longed for this moment because the man is the father he could not remember, who left home for life in the jungles when the boy was just a few months old.

When the man had stepped from the train onto the steam-shrouded platform at Leeds City station, the boys mother, aunts and grandmothers had rushed to the stranger and engulfed him with love and tears. Then the man had picked up the boy, embraced him long and hard and placed him on his shoulders.

But how can this little boy understand the reality of the situation; that his hero, emaciated and worn out by illness and ill treatment, barely has the strength to lift him the short distance to the taxi that will carry them home. The jungles were real enough but the tigers had been living only in the boys imagination. What his father has fought, and miraculously survived, is the monstrous inhumanity of an enemy who has held him captive for three and a half years.

That stranger was my dad, Private Willie (it should have been William but his parents panicked at the font, so he was known forever after as Bill) Craven, coming back to his native Yorkshire with no thanks at all to the Imperial Japanese Army. He had heard whispers his ordeal was over on 16 August 1945 my fifth birthday.

In the taxi our little family my mother Marie (pronounced Marry), Dad and I were together again, despite all the odds, for the first time in four years. For most of that time my mother had lived in hope, with me as a reminder of their love, because she had no idea whether he was alive or dead. He had disappeared into a hell-hole thousands of miles from home and her many letters to him went unanswered. Now, that hope had been fulfilled.