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Martin Bell - the untold facts

TURNING on the radio news, I heard a riveting dispatch from Zaire.  The minute-long report was delivered in an unrelenting monotone.  It was so hypnotic that I can barely remember a single fact - save that Hutu refugees were yet again "melting away into the rainforest".  The effect was like a bagpipe without a chanter; all drone and no melody.

Urgent emotion is the message - facts can come later.  Pioneer of the news-bark is my former colleague Martin Bell of BBC TV - he of the white suits, the lucky green socks, and the clipped delivery.  Like Socrates in the dock for corrupting the youth of Athens, he may be innocent of the primary charge - but he has an awful lot to answer for in today's brutalist style of news broadcasting.

In his time, he has been a TV news reporter without peer; his words simple and clear, shaped and trimmed like a Japanese minimalist poem.  Some of the lines touch immortality - such as the epitaph on the fall of Vukovar: "To the vanquished destruction and death,/ to the victors a pile of rubble."

The effect of the short, sharp sentences - frequently beginning with the word "and" - is one of breathless spontaneity.  And they are what they seem.  Bell would often ad lib his lines to the pictures as they were played on the edit machine.  During the Gulf war, he was interrupted in the editing tent by a newly-arrived colleague.  "Hello Joe," was the characteristically cursory greeting and then, without missing a beat, he flicked open the microphone to round off that evening's dispatch: "And when will Schwarzkopf's Desert Shield become a Desert Sword?  Martin Bell, BBC News, Saudi Arabia."

Though he may have few peers in his art, Bell has many imitators.  And that is the problem - he has too many imitators.  Hardly can two or three BBC "newspersons" be gathered together than out come tedious imitations: "The night was dark.  The road was long."

The war in Bosnia has had a particular impact on the style and the man - and the imitators.  In 1992, he was wounded in Sarajevo.  This galvanised the emotional commitment to the story.  For many of his followers, caring comes before sharing an understanding of it.

Caring means urgency, and the staccato delivery of a Kalashnikov with a speech impediment: "Who cares, wins.  Who doesn't, sins.  War's a TV game.  I'm not to blame."  Martin Bell, Nine O' Clock News. Good night.


(This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph in November 1996, six months before Martin Bell stood as a candidate in the 1997 general election)

Index: The Little Book of Bell

Daily Telegraph article: "The empty sound of Martin Bell"