Diary – 12 June 2004

I spent Sunday in the BBC TV studio in Arromanches through six hours of live coverage of the D-Day commemoration. It would never do to tell them this, but I would have done it for nothing. It is 30 years since I took part in a big outside broadcast. The cliché is true: it brings out the best in the Beeb. No one else can do anything like it. Even when vulgarity has overtaken some other bits of the Corporation, the Events department has inherited from the Richard Dimbleby era an instinctive sense of national responsibility and an infinite capacity for taking pains. I was moved by how jolly and committed the huge crew was, even the riggers dolled up in jackets and ties. The new chairman gave me a cigar — two cigars. Indeed, he distributed Cuban stogies with a generosity which I never extended to anybody who worked for me.