An Interview with Roger Finn

Roger Finn reflects on being misquoted by The Sun and the need for continuous clarity in broadcast journalism.

He enjoys spending more time with his three sons, sailing and playing golf three times a year, but Roger Finn still reports the news regularly - in fact this interview was conducted while Roger was waiting for his editor to arrive in the BBC Studio.

‘My career started in Hong Kong with Radio Television Hong Kong, it was actually run by a lot of people seconded by the BBC and so it had the same kind of ethos.’ Roger was trained for 30 minutes to use a video camera before being thrust into the field. He then went on to work with the BBC, creating documentaries, presenting Newsround and finally working with BBC South Today.

Nothing is more important to him than to be precise, ‘on the news you only see it once… the need for clarity is far higher in broadcasting, it forces you to pay attention to every word.’ Silence can also be as poignant as voice-overs, ‘the best journalists know how to respect good pictures, shutting up when it’s time to listen.’

Roger stresses the need for attention to detail, ‘I was featured in the Sun years ago, when I read the article back they quoted me as being “21 year old superstar reporter Roger Finn…”…I was 33 at the time and they blatantly made it up. You will never get things like that wrong on television because the pictures are there to contradict you.’

The Earliest Memories of Ray Jewbell

Ray Jewbell recalls continuous football and the local baker paying him and his friends to clean up the manure left by the baker’s horses - only to use it as fertiliser on his father’s rhubarb.

Ray, now sixty-three, remembers playing football on his street with up to ten friends. ‘We’d get moaned at for playing footie near someone’s garden, so we’d play on the street. Then we’d get moaned at for playing in the road.’ Ray would play football continuously until he had to go indoors for meals. ‘Even after tea we’d come back out and play more.’

What Ray remembers the most is the amount of dogs in the streets when he was young, ‘there’s no dogs on the streets anymore. Back then they used to chase the cyclists down the street and the cyclists would have to kick them away.’

Ray was born in World War Two and his memories of that period of time are among his earliest. ‘I remember the V1 and V2 planes flying back to Britain when I was about two years old, I got out the taxi wearing my little welly boots and they came whooming over.’ Ray’s father made the same bombers that he saw that day, ‘my dad was injured in world war one and he was at home for the second time around.’

When both the baker and the milkman would come by on their horse and carts, Ray would scoop up the manure that the horses left and use it as fertiliser in his dad’s rhubarb garden ‘he [the milkman or baker] used to pay us six-pence and we’d put it [the manure] straight on our garden.’