Nick Robinson: "My greatest achievement is still being here"
The 62-year-old presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on his cancer diagnosis, politicians and learning about his heritage.
The 62-year-old presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on his cancer diagnosis, politicians and learning about his heritage.
I suppose I was rather precocious, in part because I was the youngest by several years – my siblings had gone to university by the time I was a young teenager, and I was encouraged by my dad to get stuck into debates and arguments about what was happening in the world.
Undoubtedly, my best friend Will Redhead’s dad Brian, who for many years was co-presenter of Today. Will was my best mate from the age of eight, so I used to go to his home several times a week and Brian was often there. He was just incredibly interested in people. The idea that there was a job in which you could ask questions and talk about what was happening in the world would never have occurred to me if I’d not known Brian.
My grandparents also taught me that even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is interested in you. They were German-Jewish refugees who had to flee the Nazis in 1933, and later flee the Communists in China. So their life was shaped by political ideas.
Apart from the kids, I would say still being here!
I wasn’t brought up in a religious household – I used to joke that by the time I was 14, I’d been to synagogue more times than my mother. Growing up in south Manchester, quite a lot of my mates were Jewish, and I went to their bar mitzvahs.
But I’ve certainly found that the older I’ve got, the more interested in my grandparents’ lives I’ve become. I’m currently researching their family story and feel frustrated that I didn’t ask them more questions when they were alive. From the outside, they were pretty successful: they moved to the Far East after leaving Germany, and my grandfather was a doctor who told stories of treating film stars such as Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne in Tokyo.
Today, I see more of the horror behind it all – the way they had to uproot an entire life, leave everything behind and never go back.
My late teens were atypical in that, at 18, I was in a terrible car accident in which Will and another friend were killed. I was in the back seat and escaped with burns. Ever since then, I’ve lived with the awareness that at any moment it can be over. At the time, it imbued me with this urgent sense of getting on with things: got to get out of this burns unit, got to go to university.
It also taught me that there was nothing to be gained from going back over things. At the time, there was a lot of ‘whatiffery’ from people: what if we’d been earlier, or later, or not tried to overtake? But very early on, I realised that there was nothing to be gained from asking those questions.
Today is on BBC Radio 4 from Monday to Friday from 6am to 9am and Saturday from 7am to 9am.
[Hero image credit: Andrew Crowley]
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