From larrikin to Adelaide icon in 40 years on frontline of news
It’s hard to sum up John Riddell’s career — from a larrikin who wanted to travel the world to a South Australian icon. As he finishes up at 7News, he remembers the toughest moment of his professional life.
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John Riddell’s only applied for one job in his life – a Messenger cadetship, beating 150 other hopefuls.
Turns out it was his second answer – and his trademark honesty – that impressed.
When asked “why do you want to get into journalism?”, he replied “to travel” and added, after a pause, “the world”.
Given the only travel Riddell was facing at that stage was from his Largs Bay home to the Port Adelaide offices and perhaps a few trips to Elizabeth and Christies Beach, it showed he had much loftier ambitions than a long-term career in community news.
An English teacher at Taperoo High School inspired a young Riddell to fall in love with the written word. (Riddell was supposed to join his cousins at Scotch College, but he worked out he’d have to get up at 5am to catch a train and then a bus to the Mitcham campus, so he settled on the much closer option where all his primary school mates were headed) .
He wrote poetry for the school magazine and “essays that went on for ages”.
His uncle, Don Riddell, a former editor of The Advertiser, would bring back souvenirs for Riddell and his brother from assignments across the globe.
“We used to see him coming back from these trips abroad for The Advertiser when they used to send people overseas for everything,” he recalls.
“He went to the Berlin Wall – not coming down, but going up. I thought ‘this is not a bad job, you travel, you see the world’ and I thought to myself ‘keep that in the back of your mind’.”
And keep that in mind he did, eventually following his uncle’s footsteps, first as a young radio journalist for the Macquarie Radio News network, where he spent much of 1979 reporting daily from the US and Britain.
He was in London when Lord Louis Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA.
“I’m not exaggerating when I say it was only a slightly smaller funeral than (Princess) Diana’s,” Riddell says.
“You’ve got to remember he was a member of the royal family, Prince Charles’ favourite uncle and he was targeted by terrorists.”.
Britain was on high alert as the 21-year-old Riddell prepared to send his full wrap back home from an office in Australia House.
It wasn’t as simple as attaching an audio file to an email in those days, Journalists had to unscrew the mouthpiece of the phone and clip on two wires connected to a little black cassette recorder to transmit.
“I’m sitting down and the door opens and a guy in a three-piece suit comes in and he spots the wires. I said ‘shhhh’ while I was sending the recording through,” he says.
“I didn’t think anything of it, but next minute the door flies open and there’s all the security staff. They thought I was going to blow the place up. So I’ve done the same thing “shhhhh” and pointed at the receiver, not thinking how the big pile of wires going into a little black box, with the phone in bits looked. Given that the method of killing Mountbatten was a bomb, they were all a bit edgy.”
The fact he looked less like a legitimate journo and more like a radical with his white board shorts and yellow singlet – “probably tucked in though”, he jokes – without shoes didn’t help. Fortunately the wrap had just finished sending when they grabbed him and threw him out on the street.
While Riddell’s grown into a highly respected newsman, he certainly had a less-than-auspicious first day in radio.
Day one at 5DN, he arrived late and without breakfast. He stood back for much of the morning watching the 10-strong news team prepare for the hourly 10-minute bulletins. Des Ryan was in charge and he took him to “lunch” at the Wellington Hotel – a mere 10 paces from the newsroom’s back door.
“I was starving, I was 20 and I could eat a meal the size of a table back then,” Riddell recalls. “But it was drink, after drink, after drink. And I said ‘when are we going to have lunch?’. He said ‘you’ve just had it’. I stumbled back to the newsroom and curled up on the ledge with the police scanner and went off to sleep. I woke up to listen to the 6pm news bulletin to which I had contributed nothing. It was a ripping start.”
It got better. Riddell has covered a range of SA stories, from the Ash Wednesday bushfires to the Truro murders, but it was his coverage of the 50th anniversary of the fall of Singapore that touched him the most.
Tears well up in his eyes as he recalls interacting with three Diggers.
“Just to hear their stories, you’d read about it but when you see these people and they’re showing their wives the tiny cells where three blokes lived for years,” he says.
The tears continue as he remembers heading to the Kranji War Cemetery with the three friends, who searched for their mate Billy’s grave.
“He was only 16 or 17 when he was killed and they promised they’d look after him,” Riddell says. “We didn’t film that. Just to see that, and be part of that, it still gets me.”
Covering news has brought him more than professional accolades – it was while covering courts he met his wife, Heather, also doing court rounds for The News.
With a grin, he says he’s confident she spotted him first.
“She lived on the right side of town and two things she said that got the ball rolling nicely was when I asked her ‘what would you like to drink?’. She said ‘I’ll have a beer’ - I thought ‘beauty’,” he recalls.
“And then she said ‘Dad’s got a pub’. My eyes lit up and I said ‘what are you doing Saturday night?’ It’s been great and we’ve got two great kids (Nick and Erin).”
Heather, who retired earlier this year, is looking forward to more leisure – and dinner at a respectable hour.
“I’m looking forward to time for family and new challenges,’’ she says.
One of those will not be Riddell adopting social media – he says he’s no good at that, and he’d probably do or say something stupid. He’s certainly glad it wasn’t around when he was leaving a job in Perth to take up a contract with Nine back in Adelaide.
“I told (Nine Adelaide) ‘I’ll probably have to give (Perth) a few months’ notice’. But then I gave Perth a week and I went to the Gold Coast with some mates and surfed our brains out,” he laughs.
Reflecting on his almost four-decade career, ahead of reading his last news bulletin with his on-screen partner Jane Doyle this Friday, he jokes he’s hosted every show that went to air in his time at Seven, apart from A Touch of Elegance.
Even The Crows Show, not an immediate fit for the die-hard Port supporter.
“I don’t think I ever said no to anything,” Riddell says. “Although I’d have said no to election coverage if I could.”
And while he’s loved being at the forefront of news, he just knew it was time to hang up the mic this year. He didn’t want to end up like good mate and mentor, long-time Nine news presenter, the late, great Kevin Crease. “He died, I won’t say on the job, but in the job,” Riddell says. “He never took long-service leave, he barely had holidays. News was his sole passion ... that was a big lesson to me. It really made me think, what time do you go to get the things done you want to do?”
He’s been overwhelmed with the response to his retirement plans, announced exclusively in the Sunday Mail last month. “All the nice things people were saying, and even in the headline seeing the word icon mentioned, it took me a few minutes to realise it was referring to me,” Riddell admits.