As Vin Ray introduced BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson to an audience at the Frontline Club on Tuesday 15 January, he joked that the evening would be a cross between ‘This Is Your Life’ and ‘Desert Island Discs’.

The first clip that Simpson chose to illustrate his influences was from the 1956 film adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which made a strong impression on him as a boy.

“The really frightening thing seemed to me at the age of 14–15 was that the state could destroy the memory of what had happened, that it could change history and make it impossible for anybody else to check it out. And this of course happened in both the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao.”

Before Simpson became the foreign correspondent we all recognise and to cover those states threatening individuals’ memory and voice, he started his career with the BBC in 1966 as a trainee sub-editor, mostly subbing the weather forecasts. He spoke with a passionate loathing about his months of servitude, and the ‘slave driving’ masters in charge.

“I was absolutely crap at it and I hated it. . . . I escaped from there after 15 months and it was like digging a tunnel out of Stalag Luft 7.”

And what an escape.

On his first day as a reporter, Simpson was punched by then prime minister, Harold Wilson, for asking him if he was going to call a general election, but soon found himself covering the apartheid in South Africa and learning lessons in objectivity from Sir Hugh Greene, director-general of the BBC.

“He said that of course objectivity is the central quality about reporting, but that’s not the same thing as balancing two opposites and regarding them as having equal validity . . . we are not unbiased as between apartheid and it’s effects. I’ve never forgotten that . . . If governments shoot their citizens down, if governments stamp on their faces, as it were, with a boot, if they lock up large numbers of people for merely saying the things they say, then I think you have a duty to tell people about that.”

In South Africa, he also learnt from fellow reporters Charles Wheeler and Brian Barron, and back in the UK from the ever-beautiful Martha Gellhorn.

“She was able to turn what she saw into words in a way that not many of us are able to do. And always there, somehow or other, there’s a fire burning, just as there is, or was, with Charles Wheeler—the sense that the world is a wicked place and it’s her function to tell people about it, to describe it to people. . . . I do feel that my career has been spent in the shallows—she was in the deep.”

As his career has escalated, Simpson has become a generalists, a big name flown in to cover major events all over the world. Yet he is still capable of pulling off the biggest exclusive he, and possibly the BBC, has ever had. In 2001, Simpson led the first foreign cameras into Kabul after the fall of the Taliban in what Martin Bell and Jeremy Bowen described as the best bit of TV news they had ever seen.

Asked whether he had his expectations shattered along his career by the personalities he had met, Simpson admitted that he had found Gaddafi to be “a weirdo airhead who no one ever brought to heel”, Saddam to be “mensch, a tough man with a real sense of humour” and Mugabe to be “highly intelligent”. “But,” he added, “the ‘arsehole quality’ always comes through.”

Ray put a final question to him about fatherhood:

“I don’t want to get killed and I want [my young son] to remember me, but I’ve done this for decades and I don’t want to give up doing it. I feel that if he has any liking or respect for me, it will be partly because of what I do for a living and I don’t want to stop doing it.”

Watch the highlights below and the full event here.

In a career that has spanned nearly half a century, the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson has borne witness to change and upheaval in all corners of the globe. He will be joining us in conversation with Vin Ray, to look back on an unmatched lifelong career covering world events at the BBC.

He joined the BBC at 25 and in the 1970s was appointed political editor, but he soon realised his calling lay as a foreign correspondent. One of his first assignments was reporting on the civil war in Angola, from which he went on to cover many of the defining moments of the late 20th and early 21st century.

He has written several books, including five volumes of autobiography, and he has twice won the title of Royal Television Society’s Journalist of the Year, along with countless other major television awards.

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Last night’s talk was a whistle stop tour through the history of the Frontline News Television agency, with its two surviving founding members, Vaughan Smith and Peter Jouvenal, in conversation with long-time cohort, BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson.

From FNTV’s origins over a Christmas dinner amid the chaos of the Romanian revolution in December 1989, to its eventual suspension in 2003, this outfit for freelance video reporters has spanned from the journalistic sublime to the ridiculous. The madcap ideas of flying into warzones by microlight or launching an extreme tourism business were balanced by such successes as getting the first images of Afghans fighting the Russians with Stinger missiles, proving that the Americans were supplying the mujahideen with modern equipment.

The spirit of FNTV was captured in the first image we saw of Rory Peck and Peter standing next to a shattered helicopter before a backdrop of the Afghan mountains. When asked if that was the helicopter that flew them in, Peter replied deadpan: “No, we actually walked across the border from Tajikistan.”

Such determination and innovation characterised the agency, which adapted to compete in an industry that often treated freelances as outsiders.

“We were the first group to start using these small cameras. We responded to the available technology, like the computer editing system and satellites. We were early adopters because that’s where the opportunity was to get into the news industry.” — Vaughan Smith

This resourcefulness resulted in one of FNTV’s central successes when Vaughan impersonated a British officer to circumvent the ‘grotesque news management’ of the reporter-embedding system during the Gulf War in 1991. This masquerade produced the only footage of rockets heading for Iraq, and in John Simpson’s words: “The best piece of combat footage I’ve ever seen.”

Peter’s recount of filming the civil war in Liberia touched on the humour of being chased down a street by gangs fresh from looting bridal and lighting shops – wearing full wedding gowns and lampshades on their heads – and the horror of witnessing the murder of a mother and child and the ethics of reporting in conflict.

“I tend to film things that sometimes are not very palatable, but I see it as my job to record these events…. It’s very important to stay neutral. My job it to witness it and film it…. It’s a very difficult position to be in and quite dangerous. The Afghans always kill for a purpose which you can figure out and avoid those situations, but in the case of Liberia, they would kill for no reason.” — Peter Jouvenal

Of course it’s a dangerous job. Vaughan maintains that he’s been shot more times than he’s been credited by the BBC, and not all of the FNTV cameramen survived – founding members Rory Peck and Nick della Casa both died in conflict – and absent friends were remembered last night.

“It’s not a safe job, but then, as Tira Shubart said to me, whoever said that journalism should be safe? Safe journalism is the kind of journalism you don’t want to be a part of.” — John Simpson