For weeks on end – and at the time of writing – I remain “on standby” to go to Mosul in Iraq. Being on call is one of the most disruptive and exhilarating aspects of my job as a television journalist. Sometimes, when the phone rings, it is only to say “stand down”, as happened recently when I had been primed to head to Berlin.
However, in TV-land, hazard comes in many guises – and as I recently discovered, disguises too. I do not know what the actor Nigel Harvey looks like “in his civvies”, but in full-fig, he looks like an archetypal Santa Claus. Indeed, he was recently named Britain’s Best Father Christmas, in which capacity he was invited into the Sky News studio.
