IT IS one of those stories that journalists must repeat over endless nightcaps, in the dingiest bars, on the most far-away assignments.
In March 1959, the Western media are battling with one another to get the first pictures of the Dalai Lama, recently escaped from the clutches of Chinese troops. Having survived what the papers describe as “a desperate game of hide-and-seek” through the Himalayas, the 24-year-old man-god arrives in a remote Indian monastery. The two main news organisations — United Press and Associated Press — charter planes, and set off. UP gets there first, and broadcasts images of “The D.L.” — as he has become known — to the world.
Charles Wheeler provided the punchline, in In Pursuit of the Dalai Lama (Radio 4, Sunday). It was Sir Charles who was sitting with the disconsolate AP photographer at a Calcutta bar, when a telegram arrived from the photographer’s office: “UP has bearded Dalai Lama. . . Yours is unbearded. Please clarify.”
Unlike today, when “The D.L.” is one of the best-known faces on the planet, nobody knew back in 1959 what he looked like. AP had got its man, and UP was shamed.
It is perhaps fitting that the last programme that Sir Charles was involved in before his death two weeks ago should involve a group of journalist friends in fond reminiscence. The reunion told us a good deal more about the methods and morals of journalism in the 1950s than it did about the story itself. And anyone who would like to imagine that journalism back then was a more heroic activity than today should consider the reporters who propped up the bar in Delhi, filing entirely fictitious stories.
You would not have seen Tintin behaving like that. Not only because Tintin was a thoroughly conscientious and upstanding character, who left it to Captain Haddock and Snowy to get tipsy; but also because only in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (the very first Tintin book) is the plucky reporter ever spotted writing a news story — still less filing one.
A good deal of Tintin trivia came courtesy of Tintin’s Guide to Journalism (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), presented by a self-confessed Tintin disciple, Mark Lawson, and a host of respectable, male, middle-aged journalists who admit to having joined the profession because of Hergé’s creation.
Tintin displays many of those ideals that still beat in the journalistic breast: to pursue and fight for truth; to approach life in a spirit of boyish enthusiasm; and to be as competent in combat as in shorthand. But he also has some disagreeable qualities: he becomes the centre of his own stories; he displays a somewhat contemptuous attitude to foreign cultures; and — let’s be honest — he is a bit of a prig.
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Hergé, a nom de plume that — we hear — derives from the initials of the author’s real name — Georges Rémy — backwards (and pronounced in French). While his colonialist attitude has been much decried, his eye for detail has been quietly admired — at least by those Tintinologists who bother to check up on details of Second World War armament specifications in the books. Needless to say, this is principally a male pursuit.
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