‘I didn’t want to be the token black man at ITN’

Sir Trevor McDonald has revealed how he went to cover The Troubles in Northern Ireland as he did not want to be seen as “the token black man” in the newsroom.

The veteran broadcaster said he wanted to be sent to Belfast “to make sure that I was doing what everybody else was doing”.

In a candid interview with Monty Python star John Cleese, the 84-year-old former newsreader reflected on his career at ITN disclosing his determination to be treated equally and some of his defining moments as a journalist.

“I wanted to go to Northern Ireland, I must confess here, partly for personal reasons”, he said, “I was employed by ITN and I had absolutely no reason why they gave me this job, and I wanted to make sure that I was doing what everybody else was doing, in other words, to put it very bluntly, I didn’t want to be the token black man at ITN.

“I wanted to do what everybody else was doing.”

But he admitted his inexperience when he was first sent to Northern Ireland and the steep learning curve he encountered.

“I’d never heard a bomb go off before I went to Belfast, I could hardly spell Kalashnikov, I didn’t know what that word meant”, he said, “And here was I thrown into this situation.”

He described how he had encountered “a kind of aggression to the politics” there with a “very strong kind of religious base”.

“I stumbled into an argument about mixed communities and mixed races and mixed areas and I hadn’t got hold of exactly what was happening”, he said, “I said, I don’t understand what your problem was about mixed areas or mixed communities you know, and I said, ‘I have a mixed marriage, for example’ and they said ‘is your wife Catholic?’ I said, ‘no, she’s white’.”

Sir Trevor, who became the main presenter of ITV’s flagship News at Ten in 1992 and eventually retired from the role in 2008, also spoke about meeting key figures from the world stage.

Recalling an interview with the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, he said he had been fearful ahead of the meeting because he had a “pretty awful reputation”.

“Somebody told me, in fact, that there was one meeting at which some minister began to voice a disagreement about something with him”, he said, “Saddam Hussein took the minister out, shot him, continued, and continued the meeting as though nothing had happened.

“And, and so I was terrified about doing this.”

However, it passed without incident and offered a rare opportunity to see the Iraqi leader “being made to answer questions”.

On his meeting with Nelson Mandela, he said he found him to be “one of the most extraordinary people” he had ever met.

“I couldn’t understand how someone who had spent 27 years behind bars could emerge and, so, conspicuously un-bitter about anything that had happened to him”, he said.

Cleese, who hosts interview show The Dinosaur Hour for GB News despite his own outspoken attacks on the TV channel, also spoke to journalist and broadcaster Matthew Syed about race relations in the UK.

Mr Syed described going to see Viv Anderson, the first black man to play in the England football team, and hearing the N-word used liberally and monkey chants during the match. He also told of his experiences of racism at school.

But he said he believed things had improved since then.

“Thousands, millions of white people have wanted to do the right thing and have marched and have campaigned and I think we’ve got to a place now where if anybody said, as they used to say to me, you know, with brown skin that you’re in, slightly inferior, you have a genetic congenital defect, relatively to white, no one says that now,” he said.

Cleesehe was “very proud that you’re able to think that we’ve made these strides in England, Britain” adding he only wanted “things to get a bit better because we’re never going to be perfect”.