BRIDSH I CZECH AND SLOVAK REUIE/J The life and times of a Czech-born broadcaster who became an English knight by Angela Spindler-Brown John Tusa, Making a Noise, Getting it Right, Getting it Wrong in Life, Broadcasting and the Arts 'TUSA Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2018 ISBN 978 1 47 460708 7
or many in London John Tusa, and partly financed by the Foreign Office. Newsnight presenter and manag He insists that any service, especially the ing director BBC World Service BBC can only be changed if one loves between 1980-1993, has been a what it does and wants to strengthen it and FCzech with perfect,faultless English, both improve it. spoken and written, and impeccable man And the World Service did go from ners. But his autobiography Making a strength to strength under his manage Noise says very little about his Czech her ment. He says that he "was the first man itage for there isn't much to tell. aging director who could say that he knew He came to London as a three-year-old what was being broadcast in Britain's boy, escaping with his mother from the name in languages other than English." Nazis as Czechoslovakia was being occu He demanded that the foreign language pied in 1939. His father, director of Bata broadcasts say exactly the same as the shoe enterprises, set up their English original news in English. home in a detached house in east Essex However unexpected issues were and Czechoslovakia was left behind. encountered when precise translations English became the language to be from English were to be made in the 37 used: "Officially we didn't speak Czech at languages the BBC broadcast to the C,n,n� It Right, Gettin); It Wrong home. At least not to one another," Tusa world. "We learned a great deal too about L,k-. the Arts and Broadcasting notes. He never learned to speak Czech the nature of the mother language English, and spent only three years in the country much about the perils of translation," Tusa of his birth. writes. appointed BBC chairman, is portrayed by Tusa as But his Czech background stood him in "We soon understood that looking for one who set out to break the BBC, who didn't feel good stead: during his national service literal translation was impossible and fool any empathy and worse, hated the unique British when he professed knowledge about the ish. Accurate rendering of meaning was national institution. political situation in the Communist East the desired goal. More important, the lan Tusa presented him as an autocratic, snobbish and and jousting in the Cold War, and later on guage under scrutiny proved to be English destructive force. He quotes that Hussey went so far as a broadcaster in the BBC. He only itself. Our vernacular colleagues wrote in his autobiography to accuse Tusa of setting up a briefly mentions that his Czech family politely of its shiftiness, its plethora of private company into which his salary should be paid suffered in the Communist-run country on weasel words, its deliberate impression, like John Birt, a controversial BBC boss at the time. a few occasions in his book. mere hints of meaning masquerading as Tusa defends himself and says this never hap In Making a Noise Sir John, who was statements of fact. pened. "I had never set up a private company for tax knighted in 2003 while running the BBC "Our Hungarian colleague observed ation purposes. Why Hussey wrote what he did will World Service, describes the journey of a that the task of turning English into never be known. I knew he disliked me but had not boy from a middle class Czech emigre Hungarian raised 'the difficulty of render realised how much! family to a middle class British environ ing opacity convincingly and of providing "I can only describe what he wrote as a vendetta ment. He travelled the well-trodden way: a plausible equivalent of waffle." carried to his grave." prep school, public school student, army "I tried to sum up the often scholarly Tusa was a director general the service never had officer, Oxbridge undergraduate, BBC views of our colleagues like this: The and he left the corporation at the end of 1992. trainee and journalist. English language emerges as misty as its After leaving the BBC he was president of It is his work at the BBC which he landscape, the emanation of a people who Wolfson College, Cambridge, and softened the con describes in great detail, with passion and had created a language perfectly adapted crete at The Barbican, as he describes in the chapter love. He brought serious yet popular pro to suit their own refusal to say what they about his directorship of this London Art Centre. He grammes dealing with history to British mean." also headed the London University of Arts. television when producing Timewatch Tusa does not always spell out what In the concluding part of his autobiography, enti programmes for BBC TV. His description other languages - yes, Czech among them tled Envoi - he has a list of regrets. of how the BBC current affairs pro - would express much more clearly. But It clearly reveals that it was TV journalism which gramme, Newsnight, which is still run he is very open, without weasel words, was his only real and loved vocation. He regrets not ning, came into being. even using an exclamation mark when he making various TV programmes, one of them - Later on in the 1990s, Tusa modernised describes the struggle within the BBC dur never presenting the New Year's Day concert from the BBC World Service which was then ing his time. Vienna. But first among his regrets is the Czech lan based at Bush House in central London Marmaduke Hussey, Thatcher's guage: regretting that he never learned to speak it. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
8 August/September 2018