9-11 Reflections from a former Newspup

Around the turn of the 21st Century, I was working in a TV newsroom for a major international press agency. Yeah, baby, I was (kind of) a journalist. I wasn’t; I was a newsroom assistant - a junior producer. It was my job to book guests who could analyse the stories live on air; to make sure that clips from interviews made it to the gallery in time for broadcast, stuff like that. Yes, yes I did run across the newsroom with tapes like in Broadcast News. Yes, I wrote short pieces to camera for the presenters. Yes, precision and timekeeping mattered. Not my strong suits but there’s nothing like knowing that the news is called the News at 10, not the News at … ooh about 9 minutes past… to help you understand how long a minute is. Our channel went out directly from our gallery to the desks of city traders. Our news moved markets. If we made a mistake, the value of the Zloty could drop like a stone until we corrected it. It felt thrillingly important. Honestly, it was one of the best jobs of my life. It was largely reactive, so if nothing was happening in the news, the activity level dropped and we had time to talk nonsense, to sing The Girl from Ipanema in Portuguese and English, to bound across the newsroom in the style of a Shifarka lemur, to bond. On the other hand, when something happened, everyone was switched on and pointing in the same direction. Dynamic. A team. There was very little time for politics of the office variety. If someone pissed you off, you told them, someone apologised, you got on with it. When I left the office in the evening, I didn’t have to think about work at all because it was being handled by a different bureau. It was probably less than a year of my life, but it was a vivid time. While I was working there I stopped smoking, I met my husband, I called the fire brigade because my sausages were perfectly cooked. All the big stuff. Cut to almost 2 years later. The bursting of the dot-com bubble and various other factors meant that I was no longer working in that field when the biggest story of the period broke. When Al-Qaeda committed this most cinematic of atrocities, I had just taken a job for a brand new shopping channel. HSN, the US market leader in proper, old-fashioned shopping telly, were launching a UK service and they recruited a bunch of talent (and David Emanuel, the guy who designed Lady Di’s wedding dress, here very obviously in his comfort zone in the DIY show) to work in a massive purpose-built studio outside London. Only, the American company had reckoned without British efficiency. The purpose-built studio hadn’t been purpose-built yet. Cue a several-month delay. Rather than let us all go, then re-recruit as they would do now, they decided on a period of extensive training in conference hotels and portacabins in the Hertfordshire area. On September 11th 2001 I found myself in a large Edwardian house that had been converted into TV studios some time in the 1950s, with a bunch of young producers and a mixture of hopeful new and veteran presenters. I could do an entire nother substack on the people you meet and where they are in their career curve when you work at a crappy cable channel… but I digress. Anyway, we’re in this TV studio (I think it might have been Rank’s Hillside Studios in Bushey ) The vibe was very much “David Niven or Diana Dors could come sauntering round the corner at any moment”. It had last been decorated in the 1970s, I reckon. There was a panelled drawing room repurposed as a canteen, a once-magnificent staircase, a blousy, slightly-overgrown garden. It was drab in a way that fans of “mid-century chic” can’t even imagine. That 1970s love of brown and orange did not age well. The presenters were in the studio, learning how to talk for 5 minutes about the features, benefits and advantages of this particular kettle, while showing the kettle to camera 2 and speaking into camera 1 while listening to the producers tell them that - unbelievably - ten percent of the stock is now gone and not to forget to show the audience the maximum fill line. I’m in an ancient, nicotine-coloured gallery, I was learning how to behave on “open talkback” (absolutely no swearing in the gallery) and how to feed the presenter prompts like “that maximum fill line is going to keep kids safe by making sure that kettle never boils over.” It’s the least real thing I’ve ever done. Shopping telly wasn’t “real” telly, and we weren’t even “really” doing it. The feed out of the gallery wasn’t going anywhere, except a Umatic tape recording for training purposes. During the lunch break we sat downstairs in a panelled drawing room that was a conference room, tables arranged in a U shape. There was at least one TV set on a trolley, like the ones they wheeled in at school. It was common practice in TV environments at the time, to just have the telly on in the background, I guess to remind us what we were making. LOOK! Telly! I don’t know whether the TV was already on, whether it was already showing the news, or whether someone got a phone call on their Nokia from off site. Anyway, we watched the news. We watched that second plane hit. We watched the plane fly into the Pentagon. We sat, and we watched. We watched the horrors unfold. My muscle memory was still primed to respond to a big news story. I knew what to do. I knew how to hit the phones to find people to talk about it, to sort out satellite lines to New York, Washington and other bureaus, to set up a timeline for an emergency bulletin, to make sure the script had all the VT details in it. I had all these skills, but nowhere to take them. I felt so impotent. We all did, I imagine. But it was particularly strange to have had this life where I had had a real purpose when the shit hit the fan, but when the turd-of-all-time crashed into the entire ventilation system of a building, no ability to use that knowledge. So we watched. I had a similar feeling of impotence 4 years later when - on my way to baby swimming with my three month old firstborn - I encountered 14 vehicles full of SWAT teams off to arrest the perpetrators of the failed bombings of 21st July 2005. That I’d encountered this huge story, that I used to have the ability to *do* something with a big story, but I’d lost that power was jarring. On that day in 2005, all I could do was continue on, to take my baby swimming, to forget the face of the man who told me to “stay where you are. We’re going past you and there are a lot of us.” (I can’t). On September 11th 2001, after an extended lunchbreak, our boss came into the room and rescued us from our horrified inertia with the immortal words: “Come on everyone. Those toasters aren’t going to sell to nobody by themselves.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit louiseleigh.substack.com