Cumbria through a lens

However impartial he tried to be, some things stuck stubbornly to the lens. Nothing has washed away the memories of an infamous night. Not even tears.

Ian blinks these back when recalling the minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 rained down on Lockerbie. December 21, 1988. He was part of the first TV crew to show the world what had happened there.

“You couldn’t be at Lockerbie without it changing you,” he says. “I think even if you were the most cynical, hard-bitten journalist it would have to have had an effect on you.”

Ian still has flashbacks and nightmares about things he remembers vividly and things which lie buried somewhere inside.

“There are some things that are there graphically. Some things my brain has wiped. It’s a graduated filter. It goes between one and the other.

“On the night the focus on doing the job shut everything else out. It’s as if you’re looking through a very long-focus lens which allows you to see only that which your attention is on. Everything else is out of focus.

“That night I only captured in my visual memory the things that were required for camera. We couldn’t have shot bodies lying on streets. The material that we had shot went straight on air around the world with no previewing. It would have been catastrophic had we filmed bodies in the street.

“I knew I had a responsibility to the people of Lockerbie to behave in the manner which they would expect of their local TV station. It was incumbent on us to treat them well and understand what they had gone through. Although it might have had an effect on me, it was nothing to how it had affected their lives.”

He admits, though, that the memory lingers. “I think it’s always there. I can’t watch air accident investigation programmes. They don’t have the sanitising effect that television usually has on life, because I was there. I walked – rather stupidly – through the flames. I breathed in the smoke. I came back wearing the detritus that was burned off the aircraft.”

For Ian the most painful residue was left in the days afterwards. Flowers were laid outside the makeshift mortuary in Lockerbie Town Hall. Flight 103 had started in Frankfurt. During a stopover at Heathrow passengers changed aircraft. One bouquet was sent by a couple who had travelled only from Frankfurt to Heathrow. They made a friend on the flight. Their card said simply ‘To the little girl in the red dress.’

All this feels mercifully far from Ian’s life today. He lives in the countryside near Carlisle with his wife Sheila and daughter Joanne. Now 64, Ian appears little changed from the man last seen on our screens in the late 1980s, before he moved into production. His courtesy and charm will also be familiar to Border viewers.

Ian grew up in Edinburgh and began his career in radio before arriving at Border in 1979. As a Lookaround reporter he was one of the station’s most popular faces.

Lockerbie inevitably demands attention. But Ian’s career was a huge range of light and shade. Don’t Look at the Camera’s anecdotes include a fire engine reversing into a Border TV vehicle, a cameraman trailing muddy footprints across the Isle of Man Chief Minister’s carpet, and a visit to Carlisle by Princess Anne.

She officially opened the Sands Centre – unexpectedly quickly. The princess unveiled the plaque before any TV crew was ready. Ian recreated this in close-up for the cameras, hoping viewers would not notice Princess Anne’s surprisingly hairy arm.

He says: “Working in TV, it’s difficult not to have the stories. It’s part of what that life throws at you. People are just interesting. I’ve always enjoyed discovering what makes them tick.

“I got access to people and places that I otherwise never could have done. It was a privilege for me to spend time in the company of those people. Many of them were just so special in what they achieved.”

He travelled to America to interview Edward Teller – known as the father of the hydrogen bomb – about the 1957 Windscale fire. This helped give Border’s managing director Jim Graham the idea of a science and technology series to keep the station relevant in the eyes of the network: Border was ITV’s smallest station. Ian writes: ‘We were minnows and we recognised we could be eaten up at any moment.’

He made three series of Innovators , exploring issues far beyond Border’s geographical boundary. “We had stepped out of the idea of being a regional company. We looked at the human brain, the search for cures for cancer, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.”

Interviewees included Gordon Moore; co-founder of Intel Corporation and inventor of the microprocessor. Innovators won numerous awards and was sold to every continent except Antarctica. Ian says the number of people who worked on an episode was never more than five.

“It was a highly stressful job. I did the driving. In one week in America I drove 4,750 miles, as well as filming. There wasn’t much time left for sleep.

“I interviewed 70 people for a six-part series. I had to keep everything in my head. Six extraordinarily complex subjects that were perennially swirling around in my brain. For one series I had to keep them in there for close on a year. That, I confess, nearly finished me. But it was just what you did. It didn’t occur to me at the time that it was anything that had a damaging effect on me.

“I don’t know how we did it. If I watch some of the programmes now I genuinely say ‘Did I really make that?’”

Ian continued to push himself, making 44 half-hour programmes in 15 months for a Friday night slot. “It nearly killed me. I remember being told at the end of that period that if I carried on like that it wouldn’t be good for me. I laughed and ignored it.

“There was always that desire to do more. Whether we had to go through hell in making it was unimportant. What made it to screen was all that mattered. The viewer is what it’s all about.

“I think the job became more difficult towards the end. I think age makes it more difficult to deal with pressures in the same way.”

At home one Saturday afternoon in 2005 Ian felt unwell. Not long before, he had been making a series about the ambulance service. They were called out to help a heart attack victim. As Ian was racing around with his equipment a paramedic advised him to calm down or he might have a heart attack. That Saturday afternoon he did. “I had three of them. Which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.”

Ian left Border on health grounds in 2007. “If I’d stayed I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you now.”

Since then he has run independent production company Creative Imagineers. His book and conversation reveal continued affection for his stressful and stimulating former life.

“Eric Wallace used to say, in a light-hearted way, ‘Everything to excess.’ It’s not a bad way to experience life. When you do that sort of job there isn’t a lot of space for life outside that. Sheila and Joanne were kind enough to put up with it.

“When you’re writing it down you realise it really isn’t run of the mill and ordinary. But it was something we just did. If you get the opportunity to do these things in life you’ve got to take them. Interviewing people like Edward Teller, it provided a feeling of touching history.”

Some memorable experiences come at a cost. So memorable that they can’t be forgotten, however hard you try. If Ian had known what he would find at Lockerbie, and if he could have avoided it with no repercussions, would he still have gone?

“Yes,” he says without hesitation. “The effect it has on us is not important. What’s important is that the story is reported, that our audience gets to hear these events.”

Don’t Look at the Camera is available at Bookends in Carlisle and Keswick and from online retailers.