Above: Adie was front and centre of the BBC’s live coverage of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege in London; Right: Adie collecting the Richard Dimbleby Award from BAFTA in 1990
for her secret report from inside a Chinese hospital, and in the same year she won the Richard Dimbleby Award, a BAFTA special award and gift of the Academy that recognises the best presenter of factual, features and news. Adie describes her job as that of an “an eyewitness reporter”. She is adamant that a journalist should never become the story: “It is utterly irrelevant what the reporter thinks. You’re putting out information for people to make up their own mind.” On the battlefield, says Adie, fear is a constant but necessary companion: “If there’s one sort of colleague you never want to stand next to, it is one who never feels danger. I’ve met immensely brave people and they all know what fear is.” Adie was part of a press pack that was famed for its camaraderie, helping journalists cope with the atrocities they had witnessed. “We made sure, even in the worst conditions, that we sat down at the end of the day, had hot food and, as they say in the business, ‘a small dry sherry’, to find out how everybody’s day had gone. We didn’t allow people to dwell on things and internalise,” she says.
ÒIÕD DONE THREE YEARS OFF AND ON IN NORTHERN IRELAND. WE KNEW WHAT A BOMB SOUNDED LIKE.Ó
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