The veteran broadcaster reflects on the uplifting stories that became a beloved part of News at Ten. Plus, enjoy 20% off tickets to see him live.
Join Sir Trevor McDonald for Witness to History, a captivating live tour celebrating a lifetime of reporting the world's biggest stories. This is a rare opportunity to hear from one of Britain's most respected broadcasters.
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When I was presenting ITN’s News at Ten, it always gave me huge pleasure to read the programme’s last segment, the "And finally" story. And these were the stories that generated the most comments from our audience, too.
The editors came up with the idea because they felt it was important after 26 or 27 minutes of doom and gloom to have something lighter to finish the show before our audience headed to bed. We’d have reported on wars, political corruption and natural disasters, but the thinking was that we needed to highlight a good news story, too. And the strongest response we got was inevitably to the most bizarre ‘And finally’ stories, so we put a great deal of effort into finding those.
There was the story of George Shield from Leicestershire, who built a motorised shed to take a friend to his wedding. Or Albert Rayner, from Wakefield, who became the world’s fastest skipper at 70, spinning his skipping rope at 200mph, attributing his success to his regular diet of Yorkshire puddings. Meanwhile, Ian Ashpole from Ross-on-Wye appeared in the slot on three occasions in the 1990s, by first bungee jumping from a hot-air balloon, then tightrope walking between two hot-air balloons, and lastly suspending himself from 450 helium-filled party balloons.
It was often animals that made the funniest “And finally” reports – the brewery in Spain that accidentally got local mice drunk; the hamster from Solihull that was given a special bus pass after his schoolboy owner was charged full fare for him; a skateboarding bulldog in California, and so on.
My own favourite was that of a woman who called the fire brigade to rescue a cat stuck up a tree. Afterwards, she invited the fire fighters in for tea to say thank you. But then, on leaving, they ran over the cat. Obviously, the story had a tragic side, but it was so quirky it made the perfect “And finally.”
There’s a great deal of truth to the old adage “If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry” and when times are really tough we need humour more than ever. During my childhood in Trinidad, the tradition was for adults to escape to the rum shops to tell each other funny stories. My father was a great joke teller. We lived in poor circumstances, and he had four kids to support, so finding things to laugh at was a way of escaping the grinding reality of daily life.
When I was reporting from the civil war in Beirut in the 1980s, we journalists gathered in the evenings and told silly stories. Things were so serious and bleak that making each other laugh was a vital release from what we were witnessing.
It won’t surprise you to learn that I watch the news almost obsessively. But I also absolutely adore comedies – Frasier, Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses are my favourites. Indeed, I’ve watched the latter two so many times that I’m sure I could recite the scripts.
John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, a hotelier with a total disregard for his guests, is hilarious. And David Jason in the role of Del Boy Trotter is nothing less than genius. The pretentiousness of Del is what makes him so funny, including in my all-time favourite episode, Tea for Three. This sees Del try to impress Trigger’s niece by claiming that he used to be a paratrooper. Del’s brother Rodney decides to trick him into a hang-gliding lesson and a terrified Del is launched off a hill and ends up gliding out to sea. I defy anyone to watch that and not laugh and, in so doing, forget everything else.
Of course, we need to stay informed about what’s happening around us, but when the world feels more terrifying than ever – from events in Iran to unemployment and climate change – comedy offers escapism, and it’s a vital form of comfort and support.
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