Cometh the hour cometh the man

Mail Online headline. Amazingly, the two words aren't 'John' and 'Simpson'.

Simpson was in Poland on the night the wall fell. I loved the way in the documentary he tried to make it sound like a noble mission to scramble back just in time to elbow Brian Hanrahan out of the way in order to give us his superior wisdom on the evening news. (Yes, that devastating insight which meant he was hundreds of miles away at the time.)  

His desolation as the live satellite feed juddered to a halt in mid-pontification was priceless.

So JS wrote on an earlier thread. 

The BBC documentary's title pretty much says it all - The Fall of the Berlin Wall with John Simpson - for this was at least as much about John Simpson as it was about the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

The legendary Liberator of Kabul also single-handedly liberated East Germany it seems, despite being in Poland at the time. 

Here's he tells the story....

It begins as our hero realises that the world needs him and him alone, and he races back from Warsaw to save the day, overcoming obstacles the like of which mere mythological figures like Hercules and Perseus could only dream of:

As Brian Hanrahan was standing on top of the Wall and giving that by now legendary piece to camera, I was still in Poland. Although Brian Hanrahan was doing a brilliant job on the ground, as the BBC's chief foreign correspondent, I simply had to get to Berlin. I knew that Brian would do the kind of 'what happened during the day' and I'd be expected to stand there in front of the camera and do a sort of "What does this all mean? "Where are we in the scale of things?" But getting there wasn't going to be easy. I was absolutely panic stricken at being so kind of out of things, even though in terms of miles I probably was only about, I don't know, 300 or 400 miles away. And after, oh, I think about three different hops, I arrived there, and a young and very sweet and charming young man, a BBC guy, was given the job of driving me. He was not a great driver and we had more than one very, very near miss. I was getting more and more tense because I was going to do just simply a live piece to camera on this, the most important day in modern history.

And then the BBC's live feed died...

Our hero was thrown into the deepest despair, losing all hope and thinking of ruining a young BBC staffer's career, but then - at his lowest point - he rallies, the spinach of his own ego pumping up his arm muscles, and - like a true hero - he sees the light and knows that now will do nothing but great good. He mounts the wall and dances with "a beautiful young German blonde girl":

It's very painful for me to watch. This was, as far as I know, the biggest television audience the BBC has ever had for a news programme and I disappear in a fizzle on the screen. It was absolutely crushing. The difference between that and being sentenced to death in court or something seems very, very slight. I was in absolute horror and anger and depression and gloom... ..and I wandered away. I think as I wandered off, I thought, that's it. I ought to jack this game in. I mean, you know, it's no... It's no fun any more. And then I just saw these hundreds, thousands of people so happy. I just thought... ..you know, what happened to me is nothing. I mean, it's a little speck of total irrelevance. This is one of the great, great days of modern... ..modern human existence. And I thought about the young kid that had driven me there and I had been thinking, "The little so and so, you know, "he should have known better." And, you know, "I'll mark his card for him." And I thought, oh, God, how could anybody want to damage somebody's interests on a day like this? Which always made me feel quite good, because he became my boss afterwards. I mean, I've seen a lot of wonderful things in my life, a lot of happy things as well as a lot of bad things. But I don't think I've ever seen anything quite as happy as that...as that night. People were openly weeping. I find it quite hard to talk about it now without... ..without weeping. And then after that, all the rules were off. So later on, I danced on top of the Wall. I mean, if somebody had said to me, you know, name the most wonderful thing that could ever happen to you. I'd never thought I'll dance on the Berlin Wall with a beautiful young German blonde girl. I never would have thought that. 

And that is how John Simpson liberated Eastern Europe.

An action movie should be made of it.