Indeed, finding a pretty girl for the column was one of the easier ways to get a story There were three criteria. Is she pretty? Is her father a lord? Does she have a double-barrelled name? Then, any tenuous hook – her charity expedition to Namibia/new novel/toff boyfriend – would get her in.It all sounds tremendous fun But as a job, it was most impractical. Bristling with enthusiasm for a career in journalism, I had heard that Peterborough was the way in The column provided me with a wonderful social life. It was as if ITV had decided to recommission Dad’s Army.The career of a diarist is usually short and full of trouble It had been so in my case. They were going to dust off the old cast of characters: vicars, majors, performing animals, dotty spinsters, hapless policemen, dons and busybody club secretaries.

However, since the mid-1990s, the Peterborough column had admitted Hollywood celebrities and soap stars The revival would be different. Not on The Daily Telegraph but on the Daily Mail.
The Telegraph had rebranded its diary London Spy, and two former Peterborough editors decided it would be a great wheeze to pinch it for the Mail. After an absence of nine years, I was back doing shifts on the Peterborough column. I was investigating whether Harrow school had had its CCF machine gun requisitioned for the Gulf. A world I had completely forgotten about had suddenly sprung back into life. The UN was in turmoil over the imminent Iraq war, Londoners were braced for a possible chemical attack, and I was thumbing through the Public Schools Yearbook, reading about bursars, Hilary Term and Divinity. It was a curious time.

I interviewed him again two years later, by which time I could finally speak fluent French – and we had a great laugh about it.. None of my responses made any sense, and I kept ignoring his answers and making him repeat himself – as, for example, when he told me an anecdote about meeting his wife on a film-set, and talked about her for 20 minutes, which I followed with: “And are you married?” After that, he started slipping in bits of nonsense, such as: “I am a donkey”, just to see if I would notice, which I discovered scattered throughout the recording.Afterward, I worked hard to learn French properly. So I prepared seriously, carefully translating all my questions and rehearsing phrases to respond with, such as: “Ah, vraiment?” and “Oui, c’est tr?int?ssant.”When it came to the interview, I understood only odd words here and there and could not follow any of his answers at all, but I dutifully recorded everything, oohing and aahing in what I thought were all the right places.I then spent two whole days translating my recordings – and found he had realised about half-way through the interview that I had no idea what he was talking about. It was worth it, but the embellishment was to make life quite hard for me.I had been working there for a while, just about getting by in French, when an interview with G?rd Depardieu came up, which I naturally jumped at He insisted on doing the interview in French. In my interview, the editor said, “And of course you speak fluent French.”
“Absolutely,” I replied, though I had only passable O-level French. One of my first jobs in magazines was in Paris, on a glossy, English-language magazine called Boulevard.

That was what broadcasting used to do before terrorism unhinged it. The test of excellence is not “We got it first!” but “We got it right!”.’Through Gates of Fire’, by Martin Bell, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £16.99. Their nature, too often, is to be feverish, frenzied, frantic, frail, false and fallible.This is not a plea for censorship but for a return to first principles. The broadcasters should report what they know rather than what they guess They should deliver bad news with less gusto and relish They should leave the flag-waving to others.