4 Apr 2012

And finally, Newsround is 40

“Just get in the water Krishnan, quick!” yelled my co-presenter Juliet. “It looks like a Great White” I quivered, dipping my fins gingerly into the cold water. We jumped in and tried to swim towards the vast beast with its huge fin and open jaws. Juliet started to float off into the middle distance.

“Just get in the water Krishnan, quick!” yelled my co-presenter Juliet. “It looks like a Great White” I quivered, dipping my fins gingerly into the cold water. We jumped in and tried to swim towards the vast beast with its huge fin and open jaws. Juliet started to float off into the middle distance.

While I had a reasonable wet suit she was wearing a borrowed dry suit which was far too big and was full of air pockets. Her feet and tummy kept floating to the surface – there was no way she could swim. The beast was bearing down on us – we didn’t have much time. “You’ll have to tow me towards the shark, Krishnan” shouted Juliet “we have to get this piece to camera”. I was cold, scared and not a very good swimmer at the best of times. Now I had to tow a woman I barely knew towards a 5 metre shark that was swimming towards us with its mouth open. We burst into hysterical fits of giggles. So began my years on the national institution that is the BBC’s Newsround.

John Craven was my era – I used to watch him when I got home from school. No, I never wanted to be a TV presenter in those days. I was just waiting for Blue Peter to start. But slowly and surely Newsround taught me a bit about space exploration, pandas, tigers, the environment and, yes, politics and wars. Even when I graduated to watching “grown-up” news I still watched Newsround well into my teens. In those days, before Sky+ and Tivo boxes, there wasn’t much choice at 5pm on a dark, wet winter night in Lancashire.

I started on Newsround in my third year at university when I was twenty years old. I had been presenting and reporting on a few different programmes for the BBC and ITV during my first two years and even though my tutors had been quite firm, telling me I had to stop if I was to pass my degree, the offer of a job on Newsround was too good to turn down. I worked during university holidays and was to go full time after my final exams.

It was a very steep learning curve. Writing scripts for children means you have to really understand the story – arguably better than on “grown-up news”. To explain something simply but with integrity you need to know all the nuances. You need to know how an over-simplification would be misleading. You cannot assume the viewer has any knowledge the way we do on “grown-up” news so your writing needs to get a lot in to a short time. And most important of all you must not talk down to your audience or treat them like a parent would. Being twenty years old was an advantage – I wouldn’t know how to patronise a kid the way an older person might. And you had to understand a bit about what children would be interested in. So yes that meant the famous diet of space and animals, but it also meant understanding how to make difficult issues like famine, war, divorce, poverty and politics things kids would want to watch.

In TV production terms I have never worked on a news or current affairs programme that put as much thought into its output as Newsround. Every stage of the item would be discussed, checked and debated afterwards. The post-mortem discussions of the programme that we would have the next morning were much more ferocious and passionate than anything I’ve experienced since, including Newsnight and Channel 4 News.

In three years I covered war in former Yugoslavia, elections in America, earthquakes in India and I went on the road for a week on tour with a budding boy band you may have heard of called Take That. I interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair and Brian Harvey from East 17 (three names not often in the same sentence). We held what remains the biggest ever British mock election for children in 1992 – the SNP took Scotland and the UK was left with a coalition between the Lib Dems and Labour. Even Peter Snow brought his swingometer for our election graphics.

We were always a bit peeved that ITV News claimed to have invented the “And finally” stories when John Craven had been doing it first. The tradition continued with all of us, and while ITV have ditched the phrase it still lives on Newsround.

My Newsround years still help me today. Lots of Channel 4 News viewers watched me as kids when I was on Newsround – that’s where we established our relationship, when they started listening to the news. My own children are 6 and 4 years old – so a little young for Newsround but just starting to become interested. I encourage them to watch whenever I can. So when John Craven returns to the studio today (April 4th) I will be watching with great pleasure as both a former viewer and former presenter. A little jealous not to be there too, in truth.

As for that first assignment with the basking sharks off the Isle of Man – we did get the piece to camera in the end telling children how harmless the creatures are despite looking so fearsome. And as a bonding exercise for new colleagues I can’t recommend it highly enough. How about it Jon? I’m game if you are.

Follow @krishgm on Twitter.

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