Channel 4 News at 25: Samira Ahmed
Updated on 02 November 2007
From the best seat in the house for Alistair Campbell to a chance to dig out her Smash Hits collection, Samira Ahmed recalls her most memorable Channel 4 News moments.
The day Alastair Campbell walked into the studio over the Iraq dossiers was an electric moment - after a whole day evading our request for an interview. You could almost physically see the attempt to wrest control of that interview with Jon.
And I had the best seat in the house on that one - five feet away.
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The day Alastair Campbell walked into the studio over the Iraq dossiers was an electric moment. And I had the best seat in the house on that one - five feet away.
A second nomination was a rare and passionate studio debate in the run up the Iraqi invasion on whether to go to war. It pitted two Iraqi women on opposing sides - one a Kurdish separatist fighter, one who'd been tortured by Saddam's regime.
"What's the news line?" Is the constant refrain in the newsroom. Edgar Allan Poe, in the world's first detective story (The Murders in the Rue Morgue) wrote: "The question that should be asked is not what has occurred, but what has occurred that has never occurred before."
Sometimes you need to ask why do the same things keep occuring?
Many news programmes treat the violent murders of young women as random, isolated "tragedies". At Channel 4 News I appreciate the opportunity to make the connections.
The sentencing of John McGrady who murdered 15 year-old Rochelle Holness in Catford in South London is a good example. He had a long history of sexual violence against young girls.
There's a lot of fun tucked away in the corners of the show. When Smash Hits magazine folded, I realised that my youth was starting to become historical artefact.
But it wasn't until he murdered Rochelle and dismembered her body that he finally got locked up for life. Interviewing Rochelle's mother, Jennifer Bennett, was the most difficult experience of my professional life.
The story encompasses the casual racism of the tabloid press in their coverage of a black girl from a poor part of town; the inadequacies of the criminal justice system, that enabled McGrady to repeatedly avoid jail; and even after admitting murder, give away no information to bring closure to Rochelle's traumatised family.
It's a story that I still feel angry about.
There's a lot of fun tucked away in the corners of the show. When Smash Hits magazine folded, I realised that my youth was starting to become historical artefact.
Have given away in the morning editorial meeting that I knew rather too much about the history of early 80s pop, I was commissioned to make this piece. It features my personal collection of singles and back issues (including issue number 1!) strewn across the desk; my favourite single of all time; (complete with sing-a-long lyrics); a 15 year-old Miranda Sawyer; and Charles Shaar Murray's suitably bizarre analogy of teen music mags and the collapse of western civilization.
All in two minutes 37 - the length of a perfect pop single.
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