The presenter says he originally landed his plum job because I was the only Italian-speaking cheap television
The presenter says he originally landed his plum job because “I was the only Italian-speaking, cheap television producer who was willing to move to Rome at three weeks’ notice”. So he left Sky for Channel 4 and barring one five-month period off the air, has been the face of Football Italia ever since.Happy to interview players in Italian, he gets access to Serie A stars such as Patrick Vieira and Clarence Seedorf. One of the things I really miss when I’m on my foreign adventures is Radio 4.”He turns back to the Radio Times “Right, this is the list for the firing squad,” he says. Excess Baggage, the network’s travel show presented by Sandi Toksvig, is first for the blindfold and the last cigarette: “It’s a travel programme in which the participants never travel further than the distance between the lift at Broadcasting House and studio B15.”Next in line is the personal- finance show Money Box, which Kershaw finds “deeply boring”: “It’s a programme for those penny-pinching, Daily Express-reading, curtain-twitchers.” He makes even less effort to conceal his distaste for Jenni Murray’s Woman’s Hour, a radio institution for 59 years. As the light came up I had my eyes peeled as I slumped in the back of my Ambassador taxi And lo – the excremental vision.
“It is an enduring mystery why the Municipality so ordains it that multitudes of visitors and strangers should be introduced to the country to find that the gateway to India is a public shithouse many miles long,” wrote Cameron. Such were the straitened circumstances of the Sunday Post in 1930s Glasgow that he even drew the illustrations for his features.Three years into journalism I found myself for the first time in Bombay for The Independent’s Saturday magazine. An Indian Summer begins with a description of the journey from the airport into Bombay at dawn marvelling at the ritual of collective roadside defecation. I think most hacks deep down yearn to be foreign correspondents (until they actually do the job) Cameron was the most distinguished of his age. He’d seen and covered it all: the American exhibition of its nuclear power at Bikini Atoll in 1946; the Korean war; what befell North Vietnam at the hands of the US; the Arab-Israeli conflict; post-colonial Africa.
I’d come across him first not through his journalism but his book about India, An Indian Summer, which, for my money, remains the best short introduction to the country.
Cameron was a beautiful writer – measured, engaged and authentic. Beginning at 16 his years spent toiling away as a sub before he became a reporter taught him the value of precision and economy. “James’s talent is indicative of where we want to take Bravo,” he says.. James Cameron is an odd choice for a mentor because I never met him.