Remembering the day the wall fell

Twenty years, just about a generation, since Europe changed beyond all recognition.

I was there in November 1989, anchoring Channel 4 News. Our then diplomatic correspondent, Nik Gowing, was on the other side of the wall.

We had some new-fangled kit which meant that for the first time you could bounce a signal from a thing that looked like a trumpet on the end of a stick and pick it up 100 yards away.

Something went wrong in the transmission, and Nic Gowing hit the airwaves upside down and had to be dropped.

Those were merely technicalities. The practicality was altogether more euphoric – so spontaneous, so unexpected.

On the morning the wall came down, I was walking up the Unter den Linden that leads to the Brandenburg Gate from the eastern side, and I turned to my cameraman and said: “Do you realise, within 10 years these two countries (East and West Germany) will be one?” Six weeks later, they were!

The breakdown of the wall delivered the Europe Mrs Thatcher, who was then prime minister, dreamt of. Not a deeper union but a wider one, bringing in a whole slew of eastern European states. Today that EU is the very one her successors seem to fear.

I feel blessed to have been at the wall.