There are many reasons I miss going to Mass. The unsociable hole left behind by its absence for one. A Mass can bring together people who otherwise wouldn’t run into each other. Ours, after all, is a broad Church. And sometimes those weekly encounters with strangers can become the foundation for firm friendships, like the one I’ve enjoyed with Dr H.
The good doctor has now moved abroad with his wife and six children, to the youngest of whom I stood Godfather. He sends me occasional snaps of his smiling brood, who look very happy with their relocation to the Southern Hemisphere. Dr H is sanguine too. Freed from the yoke of a long commute to a gruelling job at a London teaching hospital, he can give his children all the attention they need.
Dr H’s life could’ve been very different. He spent over a year as a seminarian. But his true vocation was for fatherhood. I thought of him the other day when conversation turned to the author Frank Cottrell-Boyce, whose wife once planned to be a nun. Having decided to marry, they went on to have seven children.
I miss Dr H. He’s one of those people who can see the best in everyone, without being an ingenue. He has a self-deprecating sense of humour. When he first heard I worked for Sky TV, he assumed I installed satellite dishes, an unlikely assumption given my inability to change a light bulb. It became his favourite running gag.
Ours, after all, is a broad Church.
Well, Dr H’s routine needs some new material. Last week I left Sky, after 24 years with the broadcaster. Nearly a quarter of a century, not as an installation engineer (as Dr H would still have you believe), but as a journalist and presenter.
I said a Hail Mary as my finger hesitated over the ‘send’ button of my resignation email. It was a big step. I was what was known, in newsroom jargon, as a ‘Sky lifer’. And, indeed, the channel had given me much more than just a steady income.
It was at Sky that I met my late wife, Jo, who worked there as the Head of Foreign News.
The job took me to more than 60 countries, including war-torn Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Ukraine. I got to meet figures of historic significance. From Colonel Gadaffi; showing me his personal library. To Prince Philip; showing me how to mix a gin and tonic.
Live television can be a high-wire act, and practitioners do sometimes fall off.
When apparent – and actual – misdemeanours of mine made it into the newspapers, Sky stood by me. They were incredibly supportive too when Jo fell ill with cancer. And, for years, the channel allowed me, if not to plough my own furrow, then at least do stories that interested me.
After my old friend Julie Etchingham left Sky for ITV, I became the go-to-guy for Catholic stories.
I spent weeks in Rome covering the death of Pope John Paul II as well as the conclaves that elected Benedict, then Francis. We even persuaded the Vatican to experiment with ground-breaking broadcast technology, allowing me to anchor a canonisation ceremony in 3D, a sumptuous showcasing of TV technology (but not one which convinced viewers to routinely use 3D glasses).
Live television can be a high-wire act, and practitioners do sometimes fall off.
So, there’s a lot to be grateful about. Too much, right now at least, for me to give voice to any misgivings I may have had about working for Sky. People do (especially on Twitter) form their own judgements about why someone like me would leave Sky to join a rival news channel set up under the chairmanship of former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil. But I will say this much.
I’ve moved to GB News, as this — new — news channel is called, to try and unmuffle some of the voices who currently feel left out of national conversations. And to do so with civility and humility. Not to see every interview as a bloodsport. To be curious, not furious. To acknowledge complexity and the improbability of binary answers to difficult questions. And definitely not, to install any satellite dishes.
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