| Going underground |
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MacIntyre assures me, with a smile, that the camera is not for him. He does, after all, share the building with such luminaries as Sir David Frost. But he is, remember, the journalist who has built a high profile out of exposing dangerous criminals through investigative TV reporting. He named and shamed Nottingham's most prominent drug dealer, Wayne Hardy, a decade ago, and in 1999 elicited more national news headlines when he went undercover as a football hooligan attached to Chelsea Football Club. The resulting broadcast led to two convictions and MacIntyre still bears the Chelsea tattoo he had inked on his left arm to convince fellow hooligans that he was a genuine Chelsea supporter. His series went on to expose the abuse of elderly people in care homes, the Nigerian con men who convince the vulnerable to grant them temporary access to their bank accounts, and to allege that teenage girls are sexually exploited by modelling agencies. Dressed smartly in a black suit and striped shirt, he doesn't disguise himself when he goes out and doesn't employ a bodyguard or minder, insisting that he is not much of a target. "I think a lot of that [desire for] protection is in your head. For somebody to take me out, they would have to be very professional and paid an awful lot of money. To take out somebody who is an F-list celebrity journalist is a big ask. "I try and live as normal an existence as possible. If you are a war reporter, when you leave the theatre of war you are safe when you're back home. I never really leave my theatre of war because there is always the legacy of various programmes." That legacy has yet to do MacIntyre any serious personal damage - even the programme on arms dealing in which he bought weapons from a bodyguard of Arkan, the notorious Serbian paramilitary leader. MacIntyre recalls being warned by Scotland Yard that kidnappers were on their way to grab him in the United Kingdom. The Irishman roars with laughter as he recalls Five's lawyer announcing: "Can I just assure you that on no account will Channel Five pay any ransom." MacIntyre's biggest risk, he says, is "the threat of being comfortable". It is a trap few could blame the Dublin-born journalist for slipping into. A decade of television exposure means his career as an undercover journalist is effectively over, certainly in the UK. Added to that, there is his blossoming private life. In July this year MacIntyre married TV presenter Ameera McCarthy at Slane Castle in Ireland. She is now expecting the couple's first child - MacIntyre is aglow, having just been shown the three-month scan pictures. In addition he has become stepfather to four-year-old Allegra. The family lives in a rented property in Wimbledon. Wouldn't the new Mrs MacIntyre prefer to see her well-known husband move up through the career gears, perhaps taking on a television grandee post - a commissioner of factual programmes, say - rather than continuing to do frontline work? "I'm not a corporate animal, I'm a street animal. I've got the best job in British journalism. I'm hungry and committed," is the response. "My wife knows she is not going to change me, this is part of what I do." He adds as an afterthought, "If there is ever any revenge to be meted out I would hope the people involved would have the dignity to give it to me and nobody else." He might not be tailing suspects for weeks any more, but his workload shows no signs of slowing. This month Five begins a new series of MacIntyre's Underworld, including an hour-long documentary about the life of notorious one-time loyalist terrorist Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair, now living in exile in Troon, Ayrshire. And he's about to revisit one of his earliest scalps, making a fresh documentary with Wayne Hardy called Best of Enemies. "Yesterday we were shaking hands and having a drink and discussing betrayal," the reporter confides. MacIntyre likens his approach more to Louis Theroux than Jeremy Paxman. "You build up trust and rapport, it doesn't matter if it's a gangster, somebody from Morgan Stanley or somebody from Reading police station. You present the issues, you present them fairly, you edit fairly, and you don't make any moral judgments." MacIntyre says he persuaded Adair to take part in his forthcoming documentary by assuring the former terrorist he would not be "shafted". He is braced for criticism that he has offered too much airtime to a man who is said to have ordered the deaths of at least 40 Catholics during a killing spree that lasted from 1990 to 1994 and marked his ascendancy as head of the West Belfast "C company" of paramilitary group the UFF. But MacIntyre defends his "open access" school of film making. "We would never say 'you're a bad man, Johnny Adair'. There is no point grilling him because you're not going to get anything. In the end you're asking the audience if they know more about this man than they did beforehand. Some people will say maybe we weren't hard enough, maybe other people think we were unfair, lightweight or whatever." He is smiling and affable, until you mention a subject that clearly riles him - television critics who deride him as a TV beefcake who uses investigations and undercover techniques to point out the obvious. At that point, even in the genteel surrounds of a Richmond coffee shop, the Bob Geldof gene kicks in and the expletive count rises. "I have a licence to say this because I live in the f***ing real world. I see the gangsters running their estates, I see the alternative justice system, it's not Islington." He is clearly angered that newspaper critics such as Craig Brown dismissed the Chelsea documentary, and cultural commentator Mark Lawson has joked that "next week Donal MacIntyre reveals the Pope is a Catholic". In full flow, MacIntyre exclaims: "Oh really, if you f***ing know someone is being abused in a care home, what the f*** are you doing about it? It's still f***ing important. An integral part of me, my personality, is being with the underdog, and there is no underdog you could support more than the vulnerable in care homes." MacIntyre is clearly angered by what he regards as trite criticism of undercover filming. "Any undercover film you see, what appears is a distillation of one-tenth of the work you have done and the evidence you have. Huge swathes of this country are ignored by the liberal media." The reporter says he does not go to London first night openings "because I'm out there doing my f***ing job as a journalist. While I will live a middle class life with my wife and daughter, and want the best for my family, still I'm very at home on the margins of society." THAT SENSE OF ANGER OVER WHAT he perceives as injustice seems to have been moulded into the MacIntyre mindset from an early age. One of five children, he recalls his primary school in Dublin as being "worse than the one in Angela's Ashes" with "assaults on six and seven-year-olds on a minute to minute basis". MacIntyre describes one particularly telling incident involving a known sadist of a teacher. "He beat the hell out of my twin brother. When your twin brother, who is your closest living entity until you grow a little older into your teenage years, when you see your six-year-old brother being beaten by some oppressive monster because he's sneezing, or because the ink from his inkwell landed a little bit on his blotting paper, it is such an impotent position to be in as a kid. "I remember one day I ran out - I don't know where I heard the language - saying "f*** off you bastard'. "He heard me. One kid stood up and said 'Donal MacIntyre called you a bastard, sir'. He never did anything to me the next day." At that very moment, we are interrupted by a well-preserved lady in her sixties at the next table. She apologises but says she could not help but overhear the story, adding: "I am so impressed, you are wonderful, so passionate!" MacIntyre's apparent attraction to extreme figures has led some television reviewers to wonder if his journalism represents some kind of therapy. He shoots down the suggestion, adding that there are two psychologists in the family. "I'm just a f***ing journalist. I know a good story, I want to be a storyteller but I do have a campaigning zeal integral to me, it may be part of my Irish make-up but a lot of it is simple journalism. I do have an appetite for the new and the fresh, but it's no more than that." MacIntyre has difficulty imagining any career except journalism. "My brother is a journalist, my father was a writer, and my mother would have written some stuff if she hadn't been so busy bringing up the children. I just wanted always to do that, and do it to the best of my abilities." MacIntyre began his career as a reporter with the Sunday Tribune in 1989, where he worked for two years, before moving to the Irish Press, also in Dublin. He was a freelance reporter for ITV's World in Action from 1993-8 before moving to the BBC the following year, where worked on the MacIntyre Undercover series that made his name. In 2001 he moved to Five, where his job description is presenter and documentary maker. And while his investigative zeal still burns brightly, MacIntyre has lately begun to broaden his range. He has just finished making Edge of Existence, a Five anthropology series which saw him spend time with tribes in Papua New Guinea, with the Bedouin in Oman, sea gypsies in Borneo and llama trekkers in Bolivia. MacIntyre believes TV journalism - particularly the investigative sort - is in rude health despite claims that true exposés are drying up because of the time and cost involved in researching them. "The great thing about British television is it is always looking for new ways of telling the story," he says. "There is nothing that Panorama or World in Action or Dispatches could ever have done that would have been more effective than what Jamie Oliver did with school dinners." For now, his cluttered top storey office will remain busy with projects and the string of commissions he has received from Channel Five's factual commissioner Chris Shaw - the man he dubs his "journalistic sugar daddy". "I'll have my time, I'll disappear and I'll tell war stories to my grandchildren and say once I was hip and then I wasn't." But for a man who has built a career on the edge of danger, family life is clearly bringing new pleasures. "I'm very lucky, I don't think I've ever been happier. The greatest joy is being married to Ameera, and being a father to Allegra. She goes to school and says, 'My daddy puts baddies in jail and is a crocodile hunter [a reference to MacIntyre's latest foray into nature programming]' . "It's just a wonderful thing". • The new series of MacIntyre's Underworld begins on Five on Tuesday, 11pm. The edition about Johnny Adair can be seen on 28 November. Sat 18 Nov 2006 |
DONAL MACINTYRE SITS BEFORE me in his favourite coffee bar in Richmond, west London, stirring a cappuccino. We have just walked around the corner from his production office four flights up in a house overlooking Richmond Green. Only a camera on the door, pointing at callers, suggests anything other than an anonymous business façade.