The Anchor Man

As tho' to breathe were life.

A few months into his latest stint, McDonald breezes into a glass-framed office at ITN's London HQ as punctually as the News At Ten bong. His allotted three score years and 10 may almost be up but he has the air of a man who relishes rising in the morning and finding out what's going on in the back of beyond.

But age, he insists, in that voice resonant of male Welsh vocal choirs and actors of an era before microphones, affects him, in so far as he does not get to the office as early as he used to. "I'll be very honest with you," he says, "when I was doing it as a single anchor, I was in here at 10 in the morning. I'm much older now so I'm not here at 10 in the morning any more."

The impression given is that he is more relaxed these days and somewhat less involved in the programme's nitty-gritty. That said, he remains a news junkie, an avid reader of papers and magazines and a regular browser of the internet. Of late, he has taken flak for two programmes he hosted about the Duke of Edinburgh which, some pundits suggested, were sickeningly sycophantic. "Bio-documentary nonsense presented over a pair of nights by a fawning knight," wrote one dyspeptic reviewer. But McDonald has never been a Paxman or a Humphrys. Rather, his interviewing technique is more in the mould of David Frost, using charm, politeness, deference even, to persuade his subjects to reveal more than they had bargained for.

As a news presenter, he brings many years as a reporter to bear on the job. Unlike some of his colleagues, he says, he believes it's best to have had direct experience of story-telling and getting before sitting behind a desk. "I've always averred that that is not a bad route. At least you achieve a certain small level of credibility - to put it at its mildest - if somebody has seen you around the place. Now there are people who don't believe that is necessary. Well, good luck to them. It's my personal belief that it helped me."

ITN is McDonald's spiritual home, despite the fact he grew up listening to the BBC World Service and was a BBC employee when he first came to Britain from the West Indies towards the end of the 1960s. For him, he says, the BBC was too structured. "I found I couldn't abide by that existence. I felt that I could stay at the BBC and grow old without trying too much. And I don't mean that as a condemnation of the BBC. I felt that some of it was a little too easy. There was an A to B to C. I preferred the rough and tumble of the world. It suited my personality a little bit better."

He was born in Trinidad in 1939 and christened George McDonald. Or so the story goes. His father, who had celebrated his son's safe arrival too well, went to register the birth but in his befuddled state forgot the name chosen for his son by his mother. Faced with impatient battle-axes of civil servants, he was told that "if it's a boy it's George". Girls, meanwhile, were invariably called Jane. That, he thinks, is what his sister Eunice was named.

As for his surname, "that's probably an even better story". Or at least it was until a Scottish genealogist wrote to him and threatened to do some proper research. He, apparently, suggested that in the heyday of Empire, the Stewarts went to Jamaica and the McDonalds "and probably the Campbells" went to Grenada and elsewhere. "My feeling," says McDonald, "has always been that my father's ancestors probably got the name from a plantation run by a Scot who conferred his name on his workers. It's a bit of a cheesy explanation in that I have never taken any kind of deep interest in it. But it's the closest I can come to suggesting how it might have happened."

Such insouciant indifference to his ancestry is echoed by his disregard of the colour of his skin. He thinks, like VS Naipaul, who was also born in the West Indies, that he is probably a cocktail of Indian and African, the former on his father's side, the latter on his mother's. "So in the Caribbean, these two civilisations, as Naipaul explains, met and married each other and we are the products. I really should have done much more work on it. But one lives so much in the present and not in the past."

Was he aware of Naipaul and his brother Shiva when he was growing up? How could he not be? Going for island scholarships, McDonald was reminded a Naipaul had preceded him. "And I met Shiva Naipaul on more than a couple of occasions." Was he of a sweeter nature than his elder brother? "He had to be! I was always in awe of them; they were just too clever."

In the Caribbean when McDonald was growing up, immense pressure was put on children to succeed. CLR James, the Trinidadian cultural and political commentator and cricket enthusiast, described how he and his peers "were pushed through school very much as prize horses are trained up for the Derby or the Oaks". McDonald remembers how his father, an oil worker, would let him know how well a neighbour's children had done. In his autobiography, tellingly titled Fortunate Circumstances, he recalls how his father had dedicated his life to helping him achieve his ambitions. About his father, he wrote: "Fate had assigned him a job for life in the Caribbean, looking after his four children." Thus was instilled in McDonald from an early age the need to achieve, to climb the ladder, to get on, and measure himself against the best.

"In one's later life you never lose that bit of desire always to do well, that's to put it mildly, to excel, that's closer to the truth. Or if not, to be absolutely the best peacock in the whole menagerie." Modestly, he pooh-poohs my attempts to draw deeper comparisons between Naipaul and himself. Naipaul, he says, is a genius. "I feel he's rather unique." In his own case, adds McDonald, the governing factor of his success was luck, and being in the right place at the right time.

In particular, he says, he was fortunate to have people who took an interest in his career. In 1973, after a few years at the BBC, he joined ITN as a reporter. Some nine months later he got a call from Nigel Ryan, ITN's editor, who told him he should be like Sandy Gall, travelling for six months, then anchoring the news for the next six months.

"I thought all my boats had come at once," says McDonald. The brilliant thing about ITN, he says, in comparison to other organisations such as the BBC, is that it has no structure. "You grab the little chances you can, whenever you can. I probably didn't screw too many of them up. But there is a great, great element of luck in it."

Such luck has served McDonald well these past several decades. His autobiography, which is less the story of his life - his mother, for example, goes unmentioned - than of his career, charts his progress and many scoops. In Idi Amin's Uganda, he was being marched off to jail by two heavies when a passer-by, unaware of what was really going on, stopped him and asked for his autograph. Polite to a fault, McDonald nervelessly obliged. In Nicaragua he interviewed General Noriega; in Libya he had an audience with Colonel Gaddafi, who urged him to become a revolutionary. He has met Yasser Arafat and President Zia, Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton.

He has, he says, "golden memories" of the summer of 1970, which he spent in Edinburgh at the Commonwealth Games. In Northern Ireland to cover the Troubles, he was "always shocked by the fact that human life could be treated with such disdain". President Bush is among those willing to testify that McDonald is no pussycat interviewer, as Alastair Campbell records in his diaries. But the moment he most fondly recalls was in February 1990, when Nelson Mandela was freed from Robben Island. McDonald was the first journalist to interview him on his release. Mandela, he says, was "immediately impressive". As a crowd gathered round him, many of them children no doubt anticipating impassioned speechifying, Mandela simply said: "Go back to school. By going back to school you can prepare yourselves for the task ahead."

McDonald relates such anecdotes to the understatement that is his hallmark. In an age of 24-hour news, when stories that in the past would have merited no more than a mention are kept alive as if on an iron lung because there's nothing better around, McDonald represents the timeless values of an earlier generation. It helps, of course, that he knows personally what it is like to be the focus of attention, as the first black TV reporter and the first black man to present the news. He, however, seems oblivious to skin colour, another inheritance from his father who also had no such hang-up.

Instead, what interests him is how journalists report the news, which he believes should be straight. "I love the objective bit," he says fruitily. "I suppose you get on to a bit of a groove about it. I love reading opinions in the paper but I've come to the conclusion that people are very sophisticated about making up their own minds about things.

"You might as well go down the middle. You might as well be straight, balanced, fair-minded, and in every way try to be as accurate as possible. If you don't, there's a crisis in what we do as journalists. What I say about this springs from my fundamental belief that journalism is a very important function of democratic societies.

"Somebody has to hold them politicians to account but you have to do it in a rigidly fair, accurate and well-balanced way. I'm worried about anybody who discredits that tradition by being so blatantly inaccurate that you get fined in court and it brings the entire profession into disrepute."

Time is hurtling by and in a few short hours McDonald will once again be in front of the cameras handing down tablets of stone. These days though, he shares the limelight with the comparatively youthful and glamorous Julia Etchingham, to whom he pays fulsome tribute. It is ITN's way of having its cake and eating it, a reminder - as they say in the US - that increasingly choosing an anchor isn't a journalistic decision but a casting choice. Though it had failed to usurp the BBC's Ten O'Clock News, the resurrected News At Ten has recorded respectable if not spectacular viewing figures.

Not that this surprises McDonald. He foresaw the challenge ahead. "We're not in this to lose," he said when he returned to the fold. "It will be tough, but hey, life's tough." Now, he says: "I'm not going to do it forever." What if, I suggest, his cigar-chomping boss Michael Grade were to say to him that he could have a roving role, as Bill Deedes had in his dotage, travelling here, there and wherever his fancy takes him?

His face lights up, like that of a prisoner who's just been told his sentence has been commuted. "I'm hoping you'll write this up nicely," he says. Would he like me to have a word with Mr Grade on his behalf? "If you would do that for me I'd be very grateful. We don't see him that often down here."