Nigel: Part Two

Friends and family gave Nigel Charters a splendid send-off yesterday - and he was worth it. Pretty much every day of his 75 years was lived to the full, starting off in New Plymouth, New Zealand. Mum Shirley and Dad Roy were the town photographers (Special Rates on Fridays for Those Coming From Out of Town). 

Young Nigel stepped up to the plate for wedding photography, when his dad couldn't be bothered; family life in Ridge Lane in the sixties was, well, Bohemian. His mother was a free spirit, adopting the Baha'i faith; when other kids got cheese sandwiches for school, Nigel had apple, honey and garlic.  There was music and there were parties; Nigel sometimes tried to sing, but, perhaps wisely, became a sort of roadie, stage hand and announcer for emerging bands.  At one church hall, he told the audience The Shaderacks were changing their name to The Revised Edition, a blues band which later morphed into Gutbucket.  

Nigel got an Indian Scout motorbike, and then into trouble for riding it around the school grounds. An uncle was a 35-year-veteran of the press room for the Taranaki Times enabled some work experience for Nigel. He studied journalism at the University of Auckland, then proceeded to work for Radio 4XO Otago, an early commercial station, tweaking the tail of the staid, well-resourced Radio New Zealand offerings.  News bulletins were broadcast five minutes before the hour, with the slogan “First, fast and five minutes sooner”

He occasionally slept under a desk in the office, to be sure of scooping the rivals; he may, or may not, have listened to police radio, to get a beat on breaking stories. He certainly knew the formula for measuring ariels and working out changes to frequencies.  He moved on from his early years with The Beatles and Dylan, to Frank Zappa; he took trips to out to the albatross colony on the peninsula.  

Like many contemporaries, he came to the UK for 'overseas experience'. He parlayed his university theatre work and roadie knowledge into a job as a stage manager with Lancaster-based performance troupe Ludus Dance. NZ friend Stephen Gardiner, a mate from 4XO days, got him into Visnews, and then they both joined LBC/IRN.  

There were those in the BBC who didn't believe LBC could provide an honest challenge to Auntie; from the start, tapes rolled at Broadcasting House on the early weeks of output from Gough Square, to see if they used some 'actuality' generated by the BBC - they never did.  When Bob Holness and Doug Cameron came together to present AM in 1975, ears pricked up in W1 - and the BBC tapped up deputy editor Nigel Charters, to fill the same role at Today. 

Nigel didn’t come to the BBC perfectly formed - and before my commercial chums write in, I mean, he was unusual and noticeable. In those days he featured bigger buttocks than the average male BBC current affairs producer, tighter jeans, and he was, frankly, three times noisier.  The corridor along the Today programme offices was a carpeted run of bowed heads, eye avoidance, shhh you’ll wake The World Tonight - this boisterous bloke said hi at 50 paces, called the programme Toady out loud, and led bigger and bigger groups out of the building in search of what he called “Solids”. 

He had joined peak Today - six on a night shift, six on a day shift, a planning desk of five or six, seven or eight reporters. The monthly rota was a vast sheet of A3, taking two days to compile, walking a tightrope between the people you couldn’t possibly put on a night shift together - and those who rather fancied a night shift together. 

In parenthesis, Nigel was, as they say, a man whose heart was large enough to love many. I was privileged to be at his wedding to Diane, and when they got house with a garden in Stoke Newington, it was grand to be in the garden arguing extensively about the right way to barbecue prawns - lid on or lid off.  Later it was just as grand to see Nigel in Rodenhurst Road with Prue, the very special dogs and the children, me still arguing about barbecuing with or without lids. Over the past five years, it’s been a complete joy to see Nigel and Ana together, in person, or on Zoom sessions across France and Brazil,  arguing about whether it really was a good idea to barbecue a Christmas goose, lid on or off. 

There was more than just Today in the BBC radio days: Nigel went to cover the Reykjavik summit in 1986, and was on hand to help colleagues from other output. Chris Wyld from the Foreign News team remembers doing the Radio 4 Six O Clock News live from Iceland; after the bongs there was meant to be a headline clip of Ronald Reagan. There was a small gap - until Nigel gave the tape machine an almighty kick. All was well. Nigel was well rewarded; he later took delivery of a summit raffle prize delivered in boxes to the Today office: his body weight in Icelandic wool.  

Nigel's experience kept the so-called SCUD-FM on the air; a coalition of producers and presenters was rapidly brought together in 1991 to provide 'continuous coverage' of the Gulf War, 17 hours a day on Radio 4's FM frequencies. Nigel filled occasional longueurs by constructing a cardboard SCUD to hang above the temporary newsdesk.

After Today, there were mysterious times when Nigel kept disappearing; some said he gone to work for various versions of LBC, but I was never sure.  When he came back, there were spells at Newsbeat on Radio 1, and then, working on various building and technical projects for News. The seeds may have been planted with mending motorbikes and working with cameras in his teens, but he loved new technology.  His presence on these projects prevented some daft decisions, and reminded the engineering side, that new tools were meant to serve journalists and journalism, rather than win prizes for complexity. 

Nigel had many titles when he was working for the BBC in White City, most of them no reflection of what he was actually doing.  He himself liked to be called a flak-catcher, a title he first gave himself in the running of the 1997 Election website - Nigel loved pioneering projects, and this was the ground-breaking pre-cursor of BBC News Online. 

Over the years as flak catcher, he became, as time went by, custodian of a “three pronged plan” to rid the brand new multimedia newsroom of rodents; he spent weeks as a counsellor trying to  rebuild relationships between Arabic tv presenters and their make-up teams; and he had to face the flak when leading the weather project which broke up the long-standing BBC relationship with the Met Office. At BBC Parliament, he had to convince MPs with a slightly dinosaur view of life that their proceedings were unlikely to get a second tv channel, and the future was webcasts. 

But his big job was people. Recruiting them, managing them, encouraging them, developing them.  Trying always to treat them with respect and care. Endless transformation projects meant some people had to move on, and Nigel was master of The Bounce, a very technical HR term for convincing managers that experienced staff could be retrained and helped with technology and still do work of great value.  Nigel won the respect of both unions and the HR side for his common sense approach to difficult problems; sadly, like many before him, he was unable to shorten the meetings. 

As well has his myriad management tasks, Nigel took extensive training to become an executive coach, with specialist skills in what they call ‘managing upwards’.  I think it’s safe to say that there’s one than one senior BBC person with direct experience of Nigel’s forthright managing upwards skills, deployed with clarity well before he had any formal training. 

The only big problem with Nigel was that he kept making friends - this entertaining and caring man was loved by so many people across continents that we all wanted a piece of him, and the amazing thing he did was he made all of us feel as if we had one - even if he was sometimes a bit late.