Steve Hewlett became a household name over the past few months for talking about his cancer intimately and frankly to Eddie Mair on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme and for his diaries, which appeared in the Observer. At first I found it hard to reconcile how Steve was talking with the way he’d approached his life and work on Radio 4’s The Media Show, where I was his producer from 2009 to 2013.
It was an extraordinary time in media history, with stories of phone hacking and a BBC director general resigning. Steve Hewlett had always wanted to find the story, not be the story, and he was wary of “human interest”. But here he was on PM talking of himself with the same clarity and fascination as if he were a breaking story, with the scoop on his own condition. Suddenly it made sense. He was an utterly fearless interviewer and now he was turning that fearlessness on himself.
Steve made his name in investigative journalism on television and had been presenting The Media Show for a year when I first met him. We went for a pint and compared notes on what was going well and what might be changed. I had to get up to Steve’s speed on what he already knew, and find new subjects he didn’t know about, to test him, keep pushing him and show how wide the remit of this new programme could be.
Over the next few years, his scoops ranged from phone hacking and press regulation to who knew what, and when, about Jimmy Savile. On air he was dauntingly impartial, as hard on his friends, contacts and colleagues as on anyone else. It was gruelling at times, but Steve had the stamina of an ox.
The Media Show wasn’t Panorama, where he’d famously handled Martin Bashir’s interview with Princess Diana, and Steve was doubtful at first of radio and the impact it had, compared to television.
He was still developing his voice as a presenter of a live programme, rather than an expert answering someone else’s questions on his favourite subjects. But he hit his stride as we broke stories, and he enjoyed it even more when this rolled into appearances on Radio 4’s Today programme, which turned virtually into a residency during the phone-hacking scandals, the News of the World debacle and the Leveson inquiry.
I remember getting a call from Steve almost incoherent with excitement when he had just been phoned by someone at the News of the World, from the meeting where its closure was being announced. Steve made it to a studio to take part in the PM programme within the hour, exhilarated to be the one in the know, first with the inside story.
He was a great teacher. He impressed on me the importance of knowing the industry’s regulations, to see who was bending the rules, and of working out who had a strategy and who was being merely tactical. I often catch myself saying “causation or correlation?” and realise that’s a mantra from Steve, picked up when he snorted at a piece of research that claimed to show watching TV was bad for children, without demonstrating the link.
Steve pushed me and our assistant producer hard, but he always pushed himself harder. Especially in the first years of The Media Show, when it was live at lunchtime, I would arrive before 7.30am to find him already working on something in his office.
Often the door would stay closed for a confidential call. Later, as he came to trust me, it would be left open. Sometimes his tone would be intense, hushed, focused, and I’d not know who it was until after he hung up.
Sometimes it was altogether warmer, lighter and tinged with laughter, and I knew he was talking to one of his teenage sons, a holiday moment on a busy programme day. This would prompt him to tell stories about the other areas of his life, his weekends of refereeing rugby in Harpenden and his adventures in student politics, what he was doing at their age.
It was a glimpse of the side of him listeners eventually got to know much better in recent months. When I asked, he said it felt so natural to talk openly to Eddie Mair about his cancer, he couldn’t understand why anyone thought it was remarkable. Anyone who heard Steve, or read his diaries in the Observer, came to appreciate just how remarkable he was.
The Steve Hewlett I knew: a tough journalist, a fearless chronicler of the illness that killed him
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