MY JERICHO
This meeting was held on January 22, 2020
John is a TV great. Fifty plus years in the BBC, Forty wars, plenty of near death experiences. Now he has ended up living in the Woodstock Road in Oxford and doing a MY JERICHO in St Barnabas Church on Wednesday January 22nd.
That proved an idlyllic, if a trifle draughty, setting on a winter’s evening. Father Christopher gave an introduction to his Church and its’ ’ Oxford Movement history. The one hundred plus paying audience appreciated that as they did the sterling help given by his angels at the door and behind the tea bar.
Simpson was simply stunning. He is a storyteller on screen and a raconteur in reality. My role as ‘interviewer’ was simply to offer the odd prompt. Some of the stories have been told before in his many books but all of them bore repetition.
Firstly, Oxford to which he has moved from Chelsea, via a sojourn in Ireland. He had fitted into the city like a hand to a glove. His favourite activity sitting in cafes,including Jericho, ones writing his second novel. Being on TV for half a century does not make for anonymity though if incorrectly. He is often mistaken for the 93 year old Sir David Attenborough! Both are national treasures…
Simpson had taken to Oxford College life though avoiding the BBC ‘Head of Houses’ if possible. His fourteen-year-old son had been a pupil at New College School and was now at Teddys ‘though it costs so much!’ That day ‘the kid’ was off with a sickness and the great reporter had to rush home to give him dinner.
On the BBC, he was forthcoming if honest about some of the faults. Fresh from writing a defence piece in the Daily Mail the day before to a tight deadline, he accepted that this might now be the beginning of the end for the licence fee. The streamers like Netflix and Amazon had seen to that. Despite ‘my friend’ Tony Hall having ‘resigned’ earlier in the week, Simpson thought the centenary of the Corporation in 2022 would be a moment for the nation(s) to come together and appreciate their national broadcaster. The BBC would survive.
Having praised his employer, he went on to criticise the lack of ambition, the bureaucracy and some of the sheer crassness of the Corporation. “The BBC today is timidity personified’ in his words. The last Director of News James Harding had continually tried to sack him on grounds of age. Simpson simply refused to attend the guillotine meetings and found himself filming elsewhere that day! A fox but a wily old one!.
The BBC had though allowed him to travel the world, visit front-lines galore, have bombs rain down on him-on at least two occasions with disastrous consequences and have up to ten near death experiences.. The killings of his translator Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed. in Iraq in April 2003 due to US ‘Friendly fire’ had haunted him then and now. Kamaran’s picture is still on Simpson’s desk. Ironically,though, one of John’s closest shaves with mortality came from a brief encounter with food poisoning after eating a kedgeree dish in a North Oxford restaurant in 2016
The Great Traveler’s unfulfilled ambition after that half decade was to revisit the Jamiroquai Indian tribe deep in the Amazon rainforest. In 1992 he had discovered them untouched by the twentieth century. Now he wanted to check on their accommodation to the modern world. But, the BBC was hesitating on green lighting the project on insurance and ‘old man’ grounds. That film though will me made-woe betide any younger BBC Editor who stands in the way of Simpson! The only person to whom he deferred to in the seventy five fascinating minutes was fellow broadcaster Andrew Neil.‘Nobody could stop him calling out Boris Johnson!’ (during the General Election)as he put it.
All in all, this was the biggest and best My Jericho session to date. ‘My’ and the ‘My’ series has succeeded in the initial aim of bringing some real people from our neighbourhood to talk plus some big names from outside Jericho to share. The series has and will also from time to time tackle ‘controversial’ subjects like the Walton Street closure and Jericho Wharf project. It would be remiss not to. MY JERICHO will continue and get stronger.Come along and find out.Each and every Wednesday at 5.30 in the Community Centre café or out on a visit.
Report by: John Mair
My Jericho offers a series of independent events organized by Jericho resident John Mair. Many are at at St Barnabas. Others are streamed on YouTube.
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You can book on the My Jericho website
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