N.Z.-born B.B.C. investigator shows his scars

Press, 1 December 1978, Page 13

N.Z.-born B.B.C. investigator shows his scars

By

PHILIP NORMAN,

“Sunday Times,” London

It was not the most tactful question, Roger Cook, a 34-year-old New Zealander, admits. “I asked this former heavy-weight wrestler what his qualifications were for operating a finance company.” The former wrestler’s response was to pick up Cook and his 8.8. C. tape recorder, and hurl both down a flight of stairs. The recorder was still running and the sequence was later broadcast just as it happened, on Radio 4’s Checkpoint programme. Cook, the programme’s reporter and presenter, inhabits a war zone of business chicanery in which wounds are frequently inflicted on him, sometimes from quite unexpected quarters. There

was, for example, his visit to a suspect mortgage broker in Enfield: the broker called over his shoulder. “I’m busy — write to me.” then he and two associates started to batter Cook with the office door.

His recorder destroyed, Cook preserved the tape by rewinding it round a pencil as he crawled, bleeding, down the corridor. This item, too, duly appeared on Checkpoint. In ail, Cook can list 11 separate attacks on him during Checkpoint investigations. He has been knocked down, punched, kicked, trampled on. and run over by a car. Once, while t searching East End protection methods, he was “thoroughly and profes-

sionally worked over” by three men in the Mile End Road. Several of his ribs have been broken; his lower vertebrae, he claims modestly, are “a collection of impacted bits of bone.” At present, he exhibits a right wrist with a large scar carved through it. His hand needed six .‘“itches after being shut in a car door by yet an- . n not keen to talk to Checkpoint. 'v.i, just anotner guy selling houses that hadn’t been? built yet on land he didn’t own,” Cook says nonchalantly. “The usual kind of thing.”

His programme, broadcast on Wednesdays at 7.20 p.m., is seldom other than enthralling. In a recent edition. Cook visited a man engaged in sending emigrants to Paraguay, to dream homes which proved on closer inspection to be uninhabited scrub land. Cook’s questions had to be shouted to the reticent e.,i. repreneur. who had locked himself in the basement.

't otiier times, inquiries will be made through fastened car windows, or breathlessly, cantering beside some monosyllabic fugitive.

Cook is determinedly flippant, with a hefty physique which cannot return violence but is unusually serviceable .in absorbing it. He came to Britain from New Zealand 11 years ago to make documentary films, and was immediately struck by misfortune. His car caught fire, destroying all his equipment: as he and some policemen stood discussing the matter, an articulated lorry ploughed through them. Cook had his back broken, and still suffers partial deafness.

His first radio work was for the 8.8.C.’s World at One, where Checkpoint began as a subordinate item, denied a slot of its .own until, Cook says with grim satisfaction. “it

forced its way into the schedules.” He now does a second monthly programme. Time For Action, and appears regularly on 8.8. C. TV’s Nationwide. For a long time he resisted television: it was better for his face not to be wellknown.

<ie admits to a taste for Checkpoint’s more ludicrous items. One woman wrote from Nottingham that her home was being eaten by bees. Bees, indeed. were devouring the mortar: the broadcast was minctuated by a noise of falling masonry.

An insurance official was then heard saying- that cover extended only to “animal impact.” If a rhinoceros had charged the woman’s house, she

would have a strong claim. “So—” Cook said, i

no tremor in his voice. "What you’re saying is that she’d have been better off with a rhinoceros.” “Yes,” the official agreed. “But only if it charged the house. Not if it chipped at the mortar with the end of its horn. If the bees had charged the house instead of eating the ■mortar, there might have been a claim.” His three programme commitments involve a team of 10. yet Cook remains fundamentally a lone wolf with only bis B 8.C.issue Uher recorder for company. Entering particularly dangerous territory, he will take a driver with him for a witness — not that witnesses are any deterrent to violence. “When I was thrown

head-first into a rock garden, there were about six people standing watching nom the other side of the road.” Subt'er attempts have been made to discourage him. A holiday firn: offered package tours in rerpetuitv if Cook would not mention the customer of theirs whose rented villa stood on the Majorcan Police firing-range. His car is a perennial target, its slashed tyres or runied bodywork forming the Epilogue to many a Checkpoint item. On one more sinister occasion, just in time, Cook discovered that t: e brakes had been cut. He receives death threats. (“Well — only two”), and the police intermittently guard his North

London house. "The police tell me 'keep irregular hours.' I don't have to try to do that." n the 8.8. C. applauds his solitary campaign. Cook is not strongly awaie oi the fact. “I've had one nice memo. I get notes after a programme saying 'You sounded agitated.’ I was agitated because I was talking to a man with a panel-beater's hammer in his hand.” The 8.8. C. does not insure him. He cannot afford to insure himself. “The best I can get is four times as high as a reporter in a war zone Just mv little Renault costs me £6OO with a £lOOO excess clause. My house is insured normally. That’s only been attacked once.”