Nearly 45 years on, the climax of the Iranian Embassy siege in London on 5 May 1980 still excites TV producers and authors. Paramount+ is streaming Operation Nimrod, a documentary narrated by Tom Hardy and produced by Scottish indie Two Rivers. Ben Macintyre’s book The Siege, published last year, is being adapted for TV. And, by my count, this will be the fifth drama or documentary on the subject.

The storming of the embassy by the SAS became one of the TV events of the 80s because all three channels (there were only three then!) covered it live. Nothing like it had ever been shown before.

The hostages were freed, and the kidnappers killed. Everyone who watched seems to recall the switch to live coverage from a John Wayne movie on BBC One, the World Snooker Championships on BBC Two or Coronation Street on ITV.

But in preparing for my bit part in the Paramount+ documentary (I was duty editor in the ITN newsroom that bank holiday Monday night), I found a curious absence of cold, hard, written facts. Even Macintyre’s masterly account told of TV coverage that had ITN outside broadcast director David Goldsmith and me baffled.

"Put me to air…this is incredible!"

Reminiscing last year in the Bafta lounge about David’s 1981 award for actuality coverage, we wondered if we’d both suffered false memory syndrome for four and a half decades.

“Put me to air, put me to air, this is incredible,”  David had shouted down the line from the OB scanner as the live-linked camera that he and engineer Peter Heaps had secretly installed at the back of the building showed two men in black starting the attack by abseiling down from the embassy roof to a balcony. “You need to come to us now,” I told the ITV network transmission controller at Thames Television. “Coronation Street is just ending,” he replied. “We’ll come straight to you.”

Soon we were live on ITV. In the control room I had one eye on our output and one on the monitors showing the two BBC channels. They were still showing John Wayne and the snooker. But now, in 2024, it seemed that somehow the opposite had become the accepted version. Apparently, it was ITN that had delayed showing the longest newsflash in British television history, not the BBC.

I set to work in the TV archives to seek the truth. Progress was slow. The corporate offices of ITN and ITV had no files from that period, the video archives of ITN and the BBC had clips of the best sequences but no continuous recordings with timecode. All I had was my own VHS recording showing the end titles of Coronation Street with the familiar music interrupted by a continuity announcer handing over to ITN. The first sound viewers heard was of explosions as Jeremy Hands and then Anthony Carthew provided commentary.

My research breakthrough came when I remembered the BBC Written Archive Centre, a large bungalow on the outskirts of Reading that “looks after the working papers of the BBC”.The staff were carrying out an extensive audit of their collections and were cautious about taking on new enquiries, but they were kind enough to help tidy up this small part of TV history.

They discovered a list of the timings of the BBC News transmissions on the relevant day. Then I nudged them towards what were known at the BBC as “Television Weekly Programme Reviews”. I had discovered from past research projects that these minutes of BBC bosses discussing each other’s programmes often provide fascinating insights into life at the top of BBC TV.

What the archive researchers found was a debrief and post-mortem, two days after the event, on not just the BBC’s coverage but ITN’s too. The contents put to rest any doubts about our memories. ITN on ITV was first with live coverage.

The BBC had a particular interest in the story because two of its news staff were in the embassy, applying for visas to visit Iran, when the gunmen burst in. Chris Cramer and Sim Harris became two of the 26 hostages.

Cramer was told he would be killed if he moved. On the second day, he appeared to be seriously ill, and Harris persuaded the gunmen to release him. Cramer staggered out to safety and was able to brief the authorities on the dispositions inside. Harris became an important intermediary in negotiations between police and kidnappers.

There was praise for Kate Adie, who flung herself under a car

The first of the minutes of the 7 May meeting record that “warm congratulations were due, not only to the BBC hostages… to all BBC staff involved”. Great skill had been shown by all concerned. The executives would talk about the coverage itself after they’d done their normal business. They noted that weekly network ratings were “back on course”, heard how the showjumping on Sportsnight was “rather disappointing” and that there had been a “very good dance routine” on the variety show Lena, starring Lena Zavaroni. The substantial discussion about the embassy siege began with “general praise for the way the BBC had responded to an enthralling event, which had been nearly as exciting for the dedicated Television News staff to cover as it had been dangerous.”  But soon an executive with no responsibility for the coverage brought a rather large elephant into the room.

Graeme McDonald was Head of Drama Series and Serials at BBC Television; he would later become controller of BBC Two, the first appointed from a drama background. McDonald was  “surprised at how much later the BBC had come up with its coverage”, even allowing for “the fact that ITV had had the good fortune” to go over at “a natural programme break at the end of Coronation Street”. He said that “ITN seemed to have had some camera coverage that had been nearer and better placed”.

The Controller of BBC Two, Brian Wenham, explained that he was on duty that bank holiday, “coordinating both networks to deal with the emergency”. He did not dispute McDonald’s version of events. “Coverage of the storming had been shown simultaneously on both BBC One and BBC Two by halting the film and leaving the snooker for the time being at 7.31”.

Wenham didn’t make any excuses, but it looks as if the logistics of creating a simultaneous newsflash on two separate networks was what caused BBC viewers to see live pictures about six minutes later than ITV.

Discussing the actual coverage, there was praise for the BBC’s Kate Adie, who “flung herself under a car” and immediately called out: “Get me a mike”. Head of Features, Desmond Wilcox, welcomed the fact it “was taken for granted a woman reporter would cope as well as she had done”.

But to Head of Current Affairs, John Gau, “the tragedy remained that at the end of ITN’s coverage, the viewer had a slightly better idea of what happened than at the end of the BBC’s.” 

Stewart Purvis is a former Editor-in-Chief of ITN. Special Forces: Most Daring Missions, episode one, Operation Nimrod is on Paramount+. The Siege by Ben Macintyre will have an amended account of the TV coverage in its paperback edition.