Michael Crick's in reception
- 23 Mar 07, 01:15 PM
It's a matter of dispute as to who produced Michael Crick's first ever piece for Newsnight back in 1992. Newsnight's 's partner Lucy thinks she did, whereas I think it was me. Certainly I remember producing a very early film with Michael - a profile about a little-known US presidential hopeful called Bill Clinton.
The film centred on the time Clinton had spent as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and involved a run-in with the official photographers at the college Clinton had attended. They wouldn't let us film a contemporary year photograph being taken, so we improvised by climbing a wall and shooting over it, giving me an early metaphor of Michael's approach to journalism.
In one of those odd coincidences that Michael so enjoys and seems to attract, his last film for Newsnight before taking up his new post involved a run-in with the same photographic company. They had just withdrawn an embarrassing photo of David Cameron posing as a member of Oxford's notorious Bullingdon club. Again Michael improvised by commissioning an artist to paint a reproduction of the photograph, thus getting round the copyright rules.
And during the course of making that film he remembered a college chaplain had once showed him another photograph of a young Tony Blair making a rude gesture, but wouldn't allow him to film it. Might he have changed his mind more than a decade on? This time .
As Michael told me on that very first assignment, his aim is to find out everything there is to know about a subject, and then find out some more.
Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight
