Fact #93193
When:
Short story:
BBC tv journalist Michael Buerk reports on the terrible famine that has hit Ethiopia, Africa. The dispatch subsequently airs on 425 stations around the world, and will lead Bob Geldof to organise the Live Aid event and the Band Aid single Do They Know It's Christmas?
Full article:
Michael Buerk: I was based in Johannesburg at the time and was the BBC's correspondent in Africa. The rains that should have come in around August to Ethiopia had failed again for the sixth season running and it tipped over from being a crisis to a catastrophe. People suddenly realised they were going to die and this huge mass migration started. It tipped very quickly.
We flew and then drove up there and the roads were just littered with dying people. It was extraordinary, it was just on such a huge scale. At Korem there were 40,000-45,000 people, and in Makele there were another 80,000-90,000. They tended to congregate along the spinal road that led north from Addis where they thought relief would get to them.
It's difficult to express the inadequacy I felt. You take refuge in the technicalities of filming, finding sequences, working out the logistics and so on. There were two films, two pieces that finally aired. I knew they wanted about three minutes, but I cut eight and thought, fuck 'em. In those days as a foreign correspondent, communications being what they were, I tended to work on the basis that they got what they were given. I knew it was a very powerful film.
Television audiences weren't as fragmented then, so the Nine O'Clock News had an audience of around 10 million, the lunchtime news and the Six O'Clock around five and a half million each. You were reaching well over half the population, even pop singers.
Midge Ure (Ultravox vocalist and Band Aid trustee) : I was in Newcastle for The Tube, a rock programme hosted by Paula Yates [then Bob Geldof's girlfriend] and Jools Holland, when Michael Buerk's news footage was shown. They kept showing it over and over so I knew what it was all about when I met up with Bob and he told me he wanted to do something to help. We came to the obvious conclusion that the only thing we were capable of doing was putting a record together.
(Source : not known)
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We flew and then drove up there and the roads were just littered with dying people. It was extraordinary, it was just on such a huge scale. At Korem there were 40,000-45,000 people, and in Makele there were another 80,000-90,000. They tended to congregate along the spinal road that led north from Addis where they thought relief would get to them.
It's difficult to express the inadequacy I felt. You take refuge in the technicalities of filming, finding sequences, working out the logistics and so on. There were two films, two pieces that finally aired. I knew they wanted about three minutes, but I cut eight and thought, fuck 'em. In those days as a foreign correspondent, communications being what they were, I tended to work on the basis that they got what they were given. I knew it was a very powerful film.
Television audiences weren't as fragmented then, so the Nine O'Clock News had an audience of around 10 million, the lunchtime news and the Six O'Clock around five and a half million each. You were reaching well over half the population, even pop singers.
Midge Ure (Ultravox vocalist and Band Aid trustee) : I was in Newcastle for The Tube, a rock programme hosted by Paula Yates [then Bob Geldof's girlfriend] and Jools Holland, when Michael Buerk's news footage was shown. They kept showing it over and over so I knew what it was all about when I met up with Bob and he told me he wanted to do something to help. We came to the obvious conclusion that the only thing we were capable of doing was putting a record together.
(Source : not known)