My best fun, through ten years reporting European politics for CNN, was bumping around the Continent with sparky young producers and the cream of international cameramen.
Among the shooters was Woj, a pony-tailed Pole with a sardonic sense of humour and so unpronounceable a surname that when we were late joining a flight an airport announcer demanded: ‘Mr R. Oakley and Mr… Mr… Mr Oakley’s companion must go immediately to Gate 23.’ Todd was the only person I ever met who drank Coca-Cola with breakfast. Scotty had his hair parted by a sniper’s bullet in Iraq and lived to tell the tale. Darren was a film director manqué who framed each piece to camera with the meticulous attention of a Dutch miniaturist painter. He filmed my French election interview with the hunters’ party leader when a pigeon whanged an overhead beam and appropriately dropped dead at our feet. The night before, Air France had lost our baggage and given us its Gallicly insouciant emergency overnight package: a toothbrush, a T-shirt and a condom.
I forget which one told me of the colleague ordered to scramble to a plane waiting for him to take aerial shots of a mountain fire. He belted to the airfield, saw a two-seater trundling jerkily out of a hangar and flung his gear in the back seat. As they lurched unsteadily into the air, he told the pilot: ‘Get as close as you can to that smoke over there.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I need the best shots I can get.’ ‘Oh, so you’re not my flying instructor!’
But the cameraman who most understood why I frequently took red-eye flights back from European capitals on Saturdays to get to a British racecourse was one Andrew Bobbin, because Andrew, a former first-grade Australian rugby-league player, insisted he was going to be a racehorse trainer.
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