‘I adored Alan Whicker…however there weren’t many black Lancastrians on TV’

It was TV presenter Alan Whicker who first impressed Clive Myrie to pursue a profession in broadcasting. Growing up in Lancashire within the Nineteen Seventies, his creativeness was sparked by the long-running documentary sequence Whicker’s World. “Whicker would travel the globe talking to interesting people. I adored that,” Myrie remembers immediately.

“Along with watching and reading the news, finding out what went on beyond Bolton, it made me want to be a journalist from the age of 11 onwards.”

But the actual fact Whicker was a white, middle-class artificial the teenager’s goals appear all of the extra unbelievable.

“I didn’t see anyone with a Lancastrian accent or who was black doing TV journalism,” he continues. “Then I saw Trevor McDonald on ITV News and thought, ‘Ah! Maybe it is [possible]’.”

After learning regulation at Sussex University, Myrie joined BBC Radio in Bristol, then moved to Independent Radio News in London, the place he interviewed Margaret Thatcher and John Major, coated The Troubles, and met Nelson Mandela. “That was magical,” he remembers.

What wasn’t so magical was when he was appointed the BBC’s Los Angeles correspondent within the Nineties.

In California, he witnessed the strict racial divides of the US – way more marked than within the UK – with black and white individuals barely mingling socially. And the Americans’ lack of know-how about black Britons was, at instances, perplexing.

“My black American colleagues thought it was weird that I had an English accent,” he says. “They had no concept of a black British community. Two good friends of mine, a black cameraman and a black producer, were convinced that I was putting the voice on.”

One of Britain’s fast-rising journalists, he was then appointed the BBC’s Europe correspondent in 2007. By 2009, he was largely concentrating on presenting news.

Since then, this youngster of Jamaican immigrants, who’s now the primary anchor of the BBC News at Six and Ten, has turn out to be a TV stalwart – the person Britain usually turns to for data and reassurance throughout its most necessary occasions.

At the peak of the Covid pandemic, he reported from an intensive care unit at Royal London hospital in full protecting gear. During the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he offered the News at Ten from a Kyiv rooftop, missiles touchdown close by – a lot to the priority of his followers and common viewers who wished him residence safely. When the Queen died final 12 months, he fronted rolling protection for a number of hours into the night, discovering simply the right respectful however journalistic tone.

He offered the Proclamation of Accession of the brand new king at St James’s Palace, too – a significant historic occasion, the place he says he felt the “weight of history on my shoulders”. In 2021, he took over from John Humphrys because the host of Mastermind. When that was introduced, his news colleagues gave him a rousing spherical of applause.

One fellow presenter, the late George Alagiah, instructed him what an exquisite factor it was that the BBC had given an individual of color one in every of its “crown jewels”. Now 59, and dwelling in leafy North London together with his spouse Catherine, a furnishings restorer, Myrie is optimistic race relations within the UK.

But as he explains in his new autobiography, Everything is Everything: A Memoir of Love, Hate and Hope, issues are undoubtedly not good.

“I got the impression, growing up in this country, that the idea was for us all to live happily together, at some point,” he writes.

That level, he thinks, is getting nearer. And, whereas the Prime Minister is of Indian heritage, there’s a black feminine bishop and the Mayor of London is the Muslim son of a bus driver, racial equality remains to be far off.

Americans would possibly say that electing Barack Obama in 2008 was the largest stride in the direction of giving ethnic minorities a strong position in society. But Myrie believes trendy Britain has gone additional than any of the opposite main democracies. “The legacy of slavery means that white and black Americans still have a sense of separateness,” he says. “There’s a feeling of superiority among white people. That doesn’t exist so much in Britain.”

However, as he explains in his memoir, racial concord was a lot rarer when his dad and mom first arrived in England from Jamaica, within the early Sixties. His mom Lynne, a trainer, and pop Norris, a talented shoemaker, had been a part of the Windrush technology of Caribbean immigrants.

They had been a gaggle of people that got here to Britain stuffed with hope and pleasure for Britain’s future, says Myrie. They additionally had contemporary concepts and a robust work ethic. But too many politicians and members of the general public noticed the brand new arrivals as a risk to the UK’s racial character.

They had been incessantly met with hostility and racial discrimination within the office and when searching for housing. The Windrush technology’s potential as a dynamic, optimistic affect on society was wasted, considerably. Lynne’s Jamaican educating {qualifications} weren’t deemed ok, and, with no time to retrain whereas caring for her younger son, she needed to fall again on dress-making.

Norris, in the meantime, labored on constructing websites and in a manufacturing facility to make ends meet. He felt annoyed and sad.

According to Myrie, his dad and mom didn’t, in truth, expertise quite a lot of racism, maybe as a result of they had been too busy attempting to supply for his or her household to offer it a lot consideration. But his mom was as soon as subjected to that ridiculous racist trope of being referred to as “a monkey”.

His Aunty Chris, a trainee nurse, was as soon as instructed by a affected person to take away her “dirty black hands”. Today Myrie suggests his dad and mom escaped lots of abuse as a result of their tactic of “keeping their heads down”.

“They were homebodies,” he provides. “In general, our family kept themselves to themselves.”

Growing up, Myrie lived together with his dad and mom and youthful brother, Garfield, till he was six, when his older sister Judith and his half-brothers Lionel and Peter came visiting from Jamaica, the place that they had been staying with grandparents. Life was powerful for the three new arrivals, because it was for a lot of immigrant West Indian youngsters.

“Coming to England was a huge dislocation,” he remembers. “A new school, a new life, a new industrial landscape.”

Myrie’s siblings knew little about soccer, the Bay City Rollers and even the video games that different youngsters performed. Speaking in Jamaican patois, so startlingly totally different to the Lancashire brogue of Myrie and their schoolmates, made them much more remoted. Lionel and Peter, who had been younger youngsters, would bunk off faculty and row with Norris.

Lynne subequently had two extra youngsters: Sonia and Lorna. Myrie remembers how his mom confused that learning exhausting in school was very important. “With a former teacher as a mother, we had the importance of education drummed into us. But I didn’t mind as I loved the point of education, expanding my mind.I enjoyed history and geography and played a lot of football and rugby. I was in the school orchestra, too.”

Lynne instructed her youngsters that, due to their pores and skin color, they must work twice as exhausting and be twice nearly as good to succeed. Myrie took this message to coronary heart.

In his memoir, he acknowledges that “enormous change” across the affect and remedy of minorities has taken place throughout his lifetime.

But each personally and in society, he’s very conscious there are nonetheless main points to cope with.

In 2016, Lionel and Peter had been victims of the Windrush scandal.

Lionel, a longtime automobile mechanic, was requested to provide proof that he had lived within the UK since 1973. Until he might, he was denied advantages and healthcare, and wasn’t allowed to work. It took a 1971 newspaper photograph of him in a Bolton faculty choir to assist show his case. He has but to obtain compensation.

Peter, a youth employee and mentor, wasn’t allowed a passport when he tried to go to Jamaica to see his daughter, whereas he was affected by prostate most cancers. He died shortly afterwards.

While Myrie feels private anger at these injustices, he’s additionally involved by points akin to the dearth of non-white executives on the BBC and the police remedy of younger black males.

But he feels, because the loss of life of George Floyd within the US, there’s now a way more measured and smart dialogue about race relations and inequality throughout Britain.

However, regardless of being a TV establishment, he nonetheless receives racist messages on social media and by way of letters to the BBC.

“I pity these people being motivated by such a level of hatred that they are willing to write something, go to the post office, put a stamp on it and send it,” he says.

“They’ll say what they dislike about me being a black person. I used to feel very angry, but now I just feel pity.

“On occasion, in the past, I’ve responded and said, ‘I don’t understand where you are coming from.’ They never reply. They never continue the dialogue.”

Myrie stresses simply how pointless racism is.

“If you’ve got red hair, you’ve got red hair. If you’re black, you’re black. That’s it! There’s no logic to racism.”

• Everything Is Everything by Clive Myrie (Hodder, £22) is printed on Thursday. To pre-order, go to expressbookshop.com or name 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25