Still Saying Yes

I've got to ask you, and I've got to digress a bit if you'll allow me to, but as someone who formerly worked for the BBC and I'm sure follows current affairs very closely as you do, what did you make of the recent farrago around the censoring of Donald Trump and the lawsuit and just what's happened to the BBC editorially over the last

while? I'm hoping, because I'm one of these people who still has a lot of innocence and faith and trust in people, I think they'll...

they'll get rid of the sort of wussy elements and they'll come back to where they were.

Let me give you another example.

When I first started working for World Service, I was sent up to the north of England to interview...

A shoe factory that now, 1970, 1960s, was the Cold War.

Remember? You probably don't remember.

You were too young when we had nothing to do with Russia or whatever.

Anyway, I was sent up to do an interview with the head of this factory because they had got a huge contract, multi-million brand contract with shock, horror, Russia.

So off I go in my little car.

interview.

And he was very nice.

And he said, would you like some shoes? I said, oh, yes, please.

So I walked back, chose six gorgeous pairs of shoes, drove all the way back to London, had a brilliant producer who, looking back on it, was a kind of mentor.

The word mentor wasn't invented in the 60s.

And I said to her, guess what? I've got six She said, get in your car, drive back and give them back.

That's how there really was no such thing as a free lunch.

Yeah.

Never.

Have you found in your career as a travel writer that you've been offered inducements ever to write a particular kind of story and, oh, we'll fire you first class? I

think my reputation preceded me.

They wouldn't take a chart.

I should have brought my latest book because it's just come out, which is Fodder's Essential Africa Story.

A lot of people in South Africa don't know FODOR, F-O-D-O-R, apostrophe S, one of the biggest travel companies in the world.

Just to give you another example, it gets 4 million visits a month to its website in America.