The Sunday Times Magazine • 15a barrister by joining the BBC as a trainee
local radio reporter in 1987. His parents,
Lynne and Norris, who had moved to
Bolton from Jamaica in the early 1960s,
were unimpressed. As he tells it, they
hadn’t come all the way to this wet island
for their son to become a “bum”.
The gamble paid off, of course, and Myrie
has reported from 90 or so countries, won
myriad journalism awards, bagged the
Mastermind presenter job last summer
and earns a lawyerly salary upwards of
£200,000. We meet on my birthday; what
was Myrie up to aged 34? “I was just trying
to eke out a living. I don’t think I’d gone
abroad yet,” he says, before remembering
that, actually, he’d already completed his
stint as Tokyo correspondent (“loved it”)
and was the BBC’s man in Los Angeles. Life
then, in the late 1990s, was spent reporting
on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky
affair one minute and interviewing Kim
Basinger (“absolutely lovely”) the next.
“In Dagenham you make car engines,
in LA you make movies. I’m seeing Meryl
Streep in the supermarket. In Tower
Records, Rod Stewart’s just flickingher father’s Chernobyl home for alcohol
and cigarettes, and possibly taken him
captive. “She was just sobbing and
sobbing. There were lots of individual
examples like that.”
Myrie typically spoke to camera from
the hotel’s roof or, when that was too
dangerous, the basement. By the time
we meet a number of foreign and local
journalists have already been killed in
Ukraine. Myrie praises the BBC’s
security advisers as “top notch”. “All the
broadcasting organisations talk to each
other. ‘What does it feel like where you
are? How dangerous is it getting?’ ” he says.
“We all have extraction plans. It would be
crazy to go into that kind of situation and
not have some way of getting out.”
The BBC reporters on the ground, such
as Quentin Sommerville and Lyse Doucet,
have individual security personnel, local
fixers and drivers who “know the areas,
know the routes and know how to get out”.
It is these measures that enable Myrie to do
the job: “You’re not wandering in blind to a
particular situation and, as a result, it’s more
manageable to deal with psychologically.”For journalists, becoming the story is
never the goal, so Myrie is taken aback
when I suggest the acclaim he received
for anchoring the live bulletins perhaps
overshadowed some of his colleagues
who were working from more dangerous
locations within Ukraine. “Ohhh, I really
hope not,” he says, aghast. “Because I’m not
seeking to do that, obviously, so it sits very
uncomfortably with me.”
The joke at the BBC goes that Myrie
has become an overnight success after
30-plus years of grafting. After Bolton Sixth
Form College and studying law at Sussex
University, he narrowly dodged becoming1 Myrie on assignment for the BBC in Liberia
during the country’s first civil war, 1995
2 Boarding an army landing craft with other
reporters near the border with Iraq, 2003
3 On the front line in Iraq as Kurdish and
allied troops battle Islamic State, 2014
4 Delivering a BBC bulletin from Kabul, 2001
5 A broadcast from a bunker in Kyiv last
month as Russian forces shelled the city
6 Crisis in Bangladesh in 2017 as Rohingya
refugees flee brutal oppression in Myanmar165243PREVIOUS PAGES: TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. THESE PAGES: PIXEL8000, BBC, NEWSGROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD