Sean Langan Mark Lawson Talks To...

'Sean Langan was a London-based journalist

'writing about safe subjects. Culture, finance.

'But dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent or war reporter.

'In 1998, he persuaded the BBC to send him to Kashmir

'to make a film about some missing journalists.

'Subsequently, Langan took his distinctive style -

'a light tone in heavy situations, to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,

'for films including Tea with the Taleban,

'Fighting the Taleban and Afghan Ladies' Driving School.

'But in 2008, his dream life of war reporting turned nightmarish.

'While trying to make a film for Channel 4

'about terrorist training camps on the Afghan/Pakistan border,

'Langan was kidnapped and held for 12 weeks with Sami,

'his local translator, under constant threat of death.

'His incarceration and eventual release

'became the subject of The Kidnap Diaries,

'a BBC4 drama in which Douglas Henshall plays Langan.'

You belong to a small group of people, including David Frost, Sarah Palin, Her Majesty the Queen,

who've been portrayed by an actor during their own lifetimes.

On the scale from flattering to unnerving, how does it rank?

Er...well, the fact that he's better looking than me is a good start. Um...

-Did you have casting approval?

-No.

The only casting approval I had was when, er...the baddie,

one of my captors, Mr C,

the actor going up for that, turned out he was a parent

of one of the children at my children's school.

We thought that might be deeply psychologically disturbing

if the man who interrogated their father

turned out to be a father of one of their school friends.

So he didn't get the job because he was too close. But, no, I didn't.

But I must say, it was very eerie seeing him doing the pieces to camera

at the beginning of the drama where he's smoking a cigarette.

And it did feel slightly eerie watching someone

who captured something of me quite well, I thought.

It's taken months to negotiate this access,

and now it's finally happening.

We cross the border into Pakistan tomorrow, into the tribal lands.

And that will be the point of no return.

After that, I'll be in the hands of the Taleban.

When you watch that film,

does it start blurring with your memories and your nightmares,

or is it just always watching somebody else doing it?

The amazing thing is...It's three years ago now since I was released.

And I went to see the screening of the drama last week

and it's like Pavlov's Dog.

There's certain buttons which you just have to press.

Er...and I...I start crying again.

It's an immediate reaction every time.

Um...it connects me back to the real event.

There are many affecting references to your sons in the film.

At what point, if ever, would you want them to watch this film?

Well, it's every child's nightmare to be locked in a dark cupboard.

So when that happens to your father, I can imagine that's...

So... I tell you why I find it quite emotional.

To answer your question quickly,

I don't think I'm going to let them see it now.

I don't want them to know...

Even though they're not so young now, they're nine and eight...

-That's still pretty young, though.

-It's quite young.

There's a scene in the drama where during my interrogation, they wanted to know the names of my children.

I'm not a tough guy. I was telling them anything.

I said, I've got nothing to hide. I've met Buddhist soldiers,

I've met government officials, I've met Taleban.

And I was willing to die not to give them the names.

So that's in the drama and I don't think my children need to see that.

My children don't belong here.

If you refuse to answer the question,

he'll be first to shoot him!

This is no place for my children.

This is out of my hands!

He means it, Sean. Tell him!

All right.

You want to know the names of my children.

My five-year-old son is called Luke.

And my three-year-old son is called Gabriel.

Luke and Gabriel.

That was a turning point. I started crying.

It was the only time I cried in front of the Taleban.

I was...Tears of rage.

And this is when I knew my life was in the hands of a sociopath.

The Taleban commander was embarrassed that I'd brought up this holy name

and he'd brought it into this dirty business.

The other thing that struck me that no drama could ever get,

particularly one that was filmed quickly because of British budgets,

is the physical impact on you.

Also, the passage of time. There's no way of doing that onscreen.

What it must have been like to be there for three months.

Time is very different. And, you know...

So one week...I remember reading back some of my diaries.

One week in captivity felt like a lifetime.

Er...time became an odd thing.

And ironically, my cellmate suffered quite badly.

Had a nervous breakdown because, I think, time broke him.

And I broke time down into routine.

So I wouldn't have to count off the hours,

the days, the weeks, the months.

And at the same time, time was our saviour.

Because it allowed me to bond with the family.

And to get them on our side

and to turn them slightly against the Taleban.

So I had an odd relationship with time.

And this question of time, because some captives and hostages

have not known what the time was. Or what the year was, in the long ones.

But you had a watch and your radio.

You knew, which could be a good or a bad thing,

-you knew where you were in the day.

-It was odd.

I kept a diary, but I wasn't too interested about the days passing.

Because it really is...

The Taleban would come and go.

It was like the Sword of Damocles hanging over your head,

and Waiting for Godot.

Those were the two...experiences I remember came to mind.

Because the Taleban commander would come in and say,

"Right, we've accused you of being spies.

"We're going to take a decision.

"But don't worry, if one of you gets killed, you're both killed.

"So don't feel..." No-one's going to be left out.

Er...and he'd say, "I'm back in a week."

And so, waiting for someone...

When you know a decision's being made on whether to kill you

or let you live, that waiting is difficult.

And then, of course, he's late.

And this guy was always late.

And he always had a ridiculous excuse.

And...so I realised that I just had to stop caring.

And at one point, this was one of the hardest parts, actually,

was when we heard negotiations had begun.

They didn't...One of the troubling things were... Normally in a kidnap,

the Taleban would start negotiating straightaway. They didn't for two months.

And that's when we thought, there's something odd going on.

Because if they wanted money, they would've done it straightaway.

But when we heard we were going to be released, I felt like this wall,

it was like a tsunami of emotion threatening to overwhelm me.

And then, of course, we weren't released,

and it was almost crushing.

You felt like you were going to drown in this thing.

So I had to batten down the hatches emotionally.

And you just feel like you don't worry about time,

you're careful with your emotions and you just get through it.

This is one of the remarkable things about this story,

that in a way, it's something like the Anne Frank story

in that you see both the worst and the best of human behaviour.

So your captors, who clearly were planning to kill you, is the worst,

but the best is that for some reason,

which is luck or fate or whatever, or your charm,

the family who were supposed to be guarding you

became your protectors.

Exactly. I mean, the context is this is the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Incredibly conservative, rural,

mountainous region of these Pashtuns

the Afghan/Pakistani Pashtuns.

Very sympathetic to the Taleban,

unsympathetic to non-believers, like myself,

who they were told I was a spy,

so in their eyes, I was beneath contempt.

And yet these people, within a few weeks, er...

turned around and offered me what's called panah, tribal protection.

Which is something they take very seriously. They'll die for it.

And in my eyes, it was a miracle

that the one family the Taleban trusted in that valley

to look after this foreigner,

and foreigners are quite valuable.

And it's a cutthroat world. You don't trust everyone up there.

So the one family they trusted

were the one family strong enough to stand up against them.

Er...so that was quite a miraculous experience, I thought.

And Stockholm Syndrome, which is this popular theory

that captives bond at some level with their captors,

but it was complicated in your case with the family, but with the, um...

You never found yourself sympathising with the Taleban?

It was never a case of Stockholm Syndrome.

I was charmed, rather like you would be with the devil, by the devil.

But I remember a few months after my release, I got a call.

And only an Afghan could do this.

As a foreign correspondent,

I'd often get calls from people with foreign accents.

I wouldn't know who they were, so I'd buy time by saying, "How are you?"

One day, this person said, "How are you? How is your family?

"How is your mother?"

And then I realised it was the Taleban, my kidnapper,

asking after my family a few months after.

And I felt a physical revulsion.

And I was genuinely surprised

he hadn't been bombed by the Americans with a Hellfire missile.

I'm sure they knew where he was.

So, no, I never really bonded with him.

We're not going to do lunch.

And you say as a non-believer, and then you say miraculous,

and as you know, many previous hostages,

particularly for cultural reasons, Americans have come out saying,

"The Lord was with me and the Lord has saved me."

Did you find yourself praying or thinking?

I remember in Iraq, an American soldier saying, "You'll never find an atheist in a foxhole."

No. The irony for me was slightly different

because I was kidnapped by so-called religious extremists.

And I say so-called because the hypocrisy was so blatant,

one day, the family actually came in and said, "Would you like anything?

"Would you like some hashish? Some opium?"

But nothing prohibited by the Koran.

I found it odd that I couldn't have a Beaujolais or a glass of wine,

but I could get some smack or some very strong dope.

And the Taleban, you know, break every Islamic rule in the book.

So that put me off, in a way,

rather strict, man-made religions.

But I did have an incredibly intense spiritual experience,

which I think is quite common.

You have to know you're going to die.

What happens is I suffered... Suffering's the wrong word.

I experienced, I guess,

I don't know if this is a layman's term, drowning man syndrome.

I saw my entire life flash before me from the age of five.

And it's...Just as life is about to be extinguished, it burns brightest.

So you become hypersensitive to life's beauty and fragility.

And it was actually a really intense, enjoyable experience.

And it felt like life's last gift

is a kind of insight and wisdom.

And then ironically, death beckons you to the door

and literally cuts your throat.

And that was my biggest fear, that I'd have my throat cut in the dark.

Um...but, in fact, I had a spiritual, I don't know a conversion,

but it was a quite overwhelming experience.

And I remember I must've kind of guessed I was about to be...

I was locked in a dark room for three months.

But I had a little hole at the back of the...

which was literally like that, at the back of the room.

And there was an apricot tree just at the back and I could watch that.

And I used to focus on the apricot tree and then look through

and see the field and the women working in the fields

and it was just all pastoral idyll.

Um...but that and occasionally seeing the stars at night,

er...was an intense spiritual experience.

And when you have this experience, you described your life

flashing before your eyes and the intensity of it,

do you see the bad things you did, as well, or just the good things?

It's interesting you ask. Um...

So on the one hand, it's an incredibly, er...

One thing I experienced, again, apparently, is very common,

there I was, cut off and isolated from the outside world,

apart from a radio. Yet I've never felt so connected to my loved ones.

You know, a really intense connection.

But as well as looking back over my life and my childhood,

pleasant memories, I kind of...It was...

It's not so much that I was looking in the mirror,

taking a good look at myself for the first time in my life,

but it felt like I was conducting a geographical survey of my soul.

And I could plot the breakdown of my marriage.

But not vaguely. It was like, that Tuesday six years ago

when my wife had said, "Come back at 1.00," and I didn't come back.

And then that decision...And it was like seeing a road map.

And it was a bit like a sort of, er...

a Scrooge-like experience

where you're visited by the ghost of Christmas past.

And I could see all my mistakes.

The irony was I could see how to put them right.

And I kept on having, so did my cellmate,

Sami, my Afghan fixer/translator, a friend of mine.

We worked together for 10 years.

We both felt that we were having the same experience,

but we were sure death, that was just a trick death does.

Showing you that. Showing how, this is how you can put your life right and...

Which, of course, he didn't do.

And you had the, um...emotional complication that your, um...

certainly in the film, which presented your main emotional attachment,

apart from your two sons, was to an ex-wife, which seems complicated.

-But was that the case? Was she the one you were thinking of?

-No.

Um...well, yes, but, no, she wasn't.

That was one aspect of looking back over my life and regrets.

Very much my children were an odd thing.

I struggled to survive for the sake of the children.

So they were an incredible source of strength, but at the same time

I had to limit myself to once a week to look at their photo.

If I looked at it too long, I would cry again.

I felt, rightly, a selfish father.

Only a selfish father plays Russian roulette with himself

by doing the sort of thing I was doing.

But with my wife, my ex-wife, I wasn't sure how she would feel.

We were divorced, so I was careful not to.

I was thinking as much about friends and family.

You've referred to your cellmate, as it were.

He had a nervous breakdown,

but you, at least in the conventional sense, didn't.

We often talk about the resilience of the human spirit,

but how did you do that?

Were you consciously fighting

and thinking, "I am not going to crack"?

To my slight shame,

I couldn't help feeling perhaps I was a stronger character.

And the truth is, what really happened,

what was on my side was my Western naivety.

As a Westerner, a pampered Westerner, I find it quite

difficult to imagine a fellow human being can cut my throat...

..at the drop of a hat.

My Afghan friend, Sami, who lost his entire family, had a very different,

perhaps more accurate, understanding of what humans are capable of doing.

Also, as an Afghan, he had very good first-hand experience.

Two of our friends, Afghan journalists,

were kidnapped with a Western journalist, an Italian,

and the Italian was released

and they were beheaded - one was beheaded and one was shot.

Only the year before we were kidnapped.

Those are good friends of ours, so, Sami, it was much harder for him,

because he thought, "The Westerner gets released

"and they kill the Afghan."

The Taleban, being good Muslims, they let the non-believer go

and kill the believer.

So it was a lot harder for him.

He had a very bad nervous breakdown

and he kind of went mad.

And so that helped me survived, because it's like

when one of your friends is really drunk, you sober up, however

bad you are, so I was forced into the role of being the sergeant-major,

the PE instructor,

and that made my life easier and I couldn't afford to break down.

Because I had a friend there who was, you know, in a very bad way.

I've had enough of this bullshit. I want to be tried now.

I want this over and done with.

Please, Sean! Keep your voice down!

Right. I'll stop shouting

if you promise me you'll fight back.

And start washing, start eating, take some exercise, promise me!

Sami, promise me, on your holy book or I'll shout

until I get us both killed, because I don't care any more.

Please...

One of the most horrifying things for me in the film

is your captors keep doing this thing which is like

a psychopathic version of Chris Tarrant making you think

you've got the question wrong when you've got it right,

which is that they tell you they are going to kill you,

and then it's like, "Ha, ha!

"We're not really! Don't worry, it was countermanded by someone else!"

But that is what went on, is it?

Yeah, I think it was the commander, Mr C.

Now, Mr C was my not-too-subtle codeword for the charm of the devil.

And he came in, in this pompous way, one day at the end,

with the Shura, the ruling council of the Taleban,

this court with their findings,

and he read it out and he said, "The court finds you innocent."

And I literally went, "Pfffft!". Good news.

And then he said, "But they've voted to kill you."

I was like, "Oh!".

And then he paused again, and went, "But we overturned that vote."

And by that point after three cliffhangers and "only joking!"

I was completely...

And then he turns to Sami and says...

As for you, Mr Fix-it, not so good.

Guilty as charged.

But...

..the Shura voted to let you live!

You get to fix another day!

So, you're both going home.

And then we were taken out in a car, we were in the mountains

and I was going to be driven back, and I thought

this was just a ruse and they wanted to get me out of the house,

because the family had offered me protection.

They said the Taleban can kidnap you, ransom you,

do their business, but they can't kill you.

We will fight them.

So I thought, this court hearing was a sham, now I'm in a car,

and the driver stops the car and I'm sitting in the back.

And he gets out, and he's at my head height

and then suddenly everything goes in slow motion

because he lifts his salwar kameez, this long shirt

and baggy trousers, and he lifts it up, and he's got a gun

and he takes out.

This is now head height and I'm thinking,

"God, I've been three months in captivity,

I've just been released, and now they're going to shoot me."

And then he squats down and has a pee.

He couldn't squat with the gun in there.

And I just thought, it was literally, like, and he must have seen me.

He had this gun right by my head.

And he looked at me and everything was fine, and when I nearly lost it,

after having these ups and downs,

I was then moved to a second safe house which was like

some horror story because it was full of Taleban wounded

and some psychologically-damaged people,

but it was like a freak house.

And I was made to watch, on a loop,

constant videos of like snuff movies of Taleban prisoners being beheaded.

I was made to watch about two hours of this stuff

with lots of people around me, including children.

There was a three-year-old on my lap, and I remember turning to the father

after about the 20th head gets lopped off,

saying, "Do you think this is child appropriate?"

He said, "Yeah, it's good! Jihad, Jihad!"

And they were looking to see how I was...

Suddenly with all this jihad, beheadings and shootings,

suddenly I see a man getting off a train in a jacket.

And it looks like Paddington station, and I'm like,

"Wow, this is an odd Jihad video."

And it was Rowan Atkinson.

And by mistake, there was a JPEG clip of a Mr Bean video.

And they went, "Ooh! Sorry! Wrong clip."

And it went back to the beheading.

But I found that so disturbing because I had steeled myself

and thought, another beheading, another beheading,

and then, "God! That's Mr Bean!"

Suddenly I found the next beheading really traumatising

because I'd lowered my guard.

So there was lots of this playing with my emotions,

and I think it was to control,

and I also think they wanted to mess us up

because they didn't want us to tell anything and be able to be

in a fit state, psychologically, to talk when we got out there.

And on that question, because post-traumatic stress disorder

is a well-recognised condition, you presumably had it.

I now get why it is called "post-", because it doesn't happen

when you come out.

When I came out, physically I was kind of mess up,

but then it was a little bit like this drama Homeland,

which my ex-wife drew my attention to.

It was a few months later when I suddenly had people telling me

you've not left your apartment, your flat, for three weeks.

It's odd. I adapted to captivity very well.

In fact, when I was debriefed,

I ticked all the boxes of doing exactly the right things.

You know, keeping my photos of my children private,

holding on to something, exercising.

I had a conversation with the Taleban saying,

"Can I be shot in the back of the head?"

"I have a problem having my throat cut." And they said, "OK."

And I said, "Can that guy shoot me, because he's quite nice."

And then he started crying.

So I had that kind of level-headed,

but then I come out and I can't even talk to the bank manager.

Any confrontation is too much.

So it was like a reversal.

I think what it is, after trauma like that,

the brain then starts processing it.

And, and you come through it at the other end, hopefully.

It's often said about great foreign correspondents,

war correspondents,

people say they have a death wish or they're indifferent to death.

So why, knowing that, did you go and try and make that film?

I don't really know what the word death-wish means,

because one thing that really marks out a lot of the people I've met,

friends of mine, and people I've read about,

the great foreign correspondents, war journalists, is a zest for life

like you've rarely experienced and a real hunger for life.

And I think here's the thing about death, in a way,

they don't disregard death, they really calculate it.

Somebody once said spies are very moral people

because they have to think about morality the whole time.

And in a way, in the West,

we turn our backs on death to the point where we let

our governments kill with impunity,

but also we're not discussing it.

And death, as I found in my kidnap,

without being too over-the-top about it, it cast a shadow over life

but it casts it in a brilliant light as well.

Without the shadow of death, what meaning is there to life?

So in a way, when people accuse these mad war correspondents of having

a death wish, I think they would argue the opposite.

That you have never lived

until you have experienced what they have, and I can see that.

The most astonishing thing watching the film

and hearing you talk now is that this experience

which we hope most people won't have,

but there is an idea summed up in a famous Damien Hirst artwork,

the floating shark which is called

The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind of Someone living.

Many, many times you must have thought you were going to die,

but was there always something saying,

somehow, I'm going to get out this?

That's interesting, because my first-ever documentary,

which I made 10 years to the same week that I got kidnapped,

the 10th anniversary, was about a kidnap case of five tourists,

backpackers in Kashmir.

That was my first film for the BBC.

And 10 years after that, I get kidnapped.

But, in the interim, I'd made documentaries

and I think my USP at Channel 4 - that horrible phrase -

I only found this out after I was released

was "dead man walking."

I was a bit like my documentaries.

I'd like to think they were breaking new ground

and revealing journalistically sound stories about the war

in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there was an element,

I think, in the commissioning that the audience,

a bit like Formula One, let's see this guy...

We know he's not going to die, because the programme's there,

but let's see how close...

My brother said I was like Mr Magoo,

that cartoon character who is so shortsighted, and in my case, dumb.

He goes so close to the edge.

I heard last night when I got into the hotel

that the last remaining Western journalist in Kabul left yesterday.

They all got a flight, because threats have been delivered

to foreign journalists that if they stay in Kabul, they'll be killed.

It's the day I arrive!

I'm like Mr Magoo.

Just walk straight into it without knowing what is happening. Anyway.

As Mr Magoo, I'll pull my glasses back on and face my fate.

I've been shot at, I've been put up against walls by firing squads,

but it never felt real.

It always felt that I was almost in a Tintin cartoon.

Actually, my documentary

when it was sold to Belgium, went out as Tintin Goes to Afghanistan.

In any other country they'd be taking the piss,

but I guess in Belgium that's a compliment.

So it never felt real until, for the first time in my life,

because I never thought I'd get shot, that in this kidnap it felt unreal,

like all the times before in war zones.

And then suddenly, it hit me in a physical way.

And when death is upon you, it is a physical, palpable thing.

I remember sitting in my bed and it felt like someone had whacked me

here, and that was, for the first time in my life, that I got it.

I can imagine death. And it was an overpowering physical sensation.

As I imagine it is when the doctor says you've got cancer.

It knocks the wind out of you. So, yes.

I was the shark. Was I the shark? I don't know. I was the sheep!

-I think death is the shark. You're the...

-OK, formaldehyde.

That's nice(!)

I was the fatted calf. The calf split in two.

There's...

So far you've compared me to Damien Hirst's calf or formaldehyde,

the Queen, I've forgotten the other ones.

-Sarah Palin, they're all there.

-I've never been compared to Sarah Palin.

Talking about some of these incidents,

there's one in the drama in which one of your captors

is struggling with his mobile phone, and you say, "Can I hold the rifle?"

-You want me to hold that for you?

-Thank you.

It is hard not to laugh at some of these stories, because they

have a dark, farcical aspect,

but did you ever find them funny at the time?

You know, surprisingly, I lost my sense of humour

when I lost some weight, but in fact it came back,

like so many things, when it comes back, it comes back with a vengeance.

There was another time where I was telling the family

that part of my bonding was that they'd never seen beyond this valley

and then I'm this outsider who's travelled the world

and I would tell them about London and about the London Eye

and the Tube going underground, and it was like I was telling them

about "There Be Dragons" and monsters.

They were wide-eyed.

But then I was telling them about how a man had been to the moon.

And the mullah said, "No, that's American propaganda."

And I backed down.

So, yes, with the family there were moments of levity

but that was not surreal.

With the Taleban it was like, "How mad are you?"

And then with the family, we were playing a game,

and this is how dim I am.

There was a board game which I got really into,

which we started playing at night.

And I thought, you know what, when I come back to London, this is such a good game.

It was called Ladoo. I'm going to market it in Britain.

I'll get out of TV documentaries.

And then I found out that Ladoo is actually Ludo.

It's quite a well known game. I didn't put the two and two together.

So I was playing Ludo quite a lot,

and we'd be chatting quite a lot and could hear these CIA drones overhead

and we would laugh and think

that they think I'm being interrogated,

but actually I'm having a cup of tea and playing Ludo.

Previous times in my life when I had some miraculous escapes.

One of them was in the previous documentary, Meeting The Taleban,

with Sami, we were put up against a wall by firing squad.

And here's the thing about laughs. This is gallows humour.

Bizarrely it was funny and it saved my life.

We were up against the wall, and there's six men with guns,

about as close as you are to me,

and Sami was doing the holy Islamic prayer before death

and suddenly, and I'm not English - my dad's Irish and my mother's Portuguese -

and I came over very English

that what's worse than being killed is committing a slight faux pas.

Like on the Tube when you step on someone's foot and you say sorry.

So I was tapping Sami on the shoulder,

but I didn't want to interrupt his prayer and be rude,

so I was kind of tapping. And he said, "What?!"

I said "I'm sorry to interrupt your prayer, but is this a firing squad?"

And he looked at me like...

"No, it's a pizza delivery."

And we started laughing.

And the Taleban commander saw this and clicked his fingers

and the guys put their weapons down.

And he said, "What are you doing laughing?"

Most people don't laugh just before they shot.

And Sami - which saved our life - said, "This stupid foreign journalist

has just asked the stupidest question in the world."

The Taleban commander went, "Oh, foreign JOURNALISTS?"

"We were just told you were foreigners.

We thought you were soldiers. Do you want to do an interview?"

And I had to go from firing squad, up against a wall,

to sitting down, and the interview was so bad, unlike yours, Mark...

Thank you.

I couldn't get a word out edgeways, so we just had enough footage

of the interview for a pre-title sequence,

because I was speaking gobbledegook.

So, yeah,

that was both funny and intense.

A little bit about childhood. Toby Young, journalist, broadcaster,

pioneer of the free school movement, with whom you were at school.

-Yeah.

-He has described you as the class clown, the class joker.

Is that how you remember it?

A bit rich coming from Toby Young, isn't it? Yeah, he was right.

It was a bit of a joker, and as he said, that is how

I get on with people whether they happen to be Al-Qaeda, Taleban,

suicide bombers or Toby Young.

Toby Young also claims that he used a trick

to get you into the television business, which is that when

you applied for a job in regional television, he claims that he rang

the interviewer shortly afterwards and said,

"I'm from BBC Watchdog

and I'm thinking of giving a job to Sean Langan."

I wonder what you made of him.

And after that you were offered a job in regional TV.

Is this in fact true?

If Toby Young said it...

Then it probably isn't!

No, it was true. I worked for Anglia TV.

I was a researcher and I lasted about a week or two.

But I think he did do that, and it worked.

But at the same time, I remember going for a job interview

with Janet Street-Porter, for "yoof" TV.

And Toby took me out the night, before drinking tequila shots.

And at 4:00am - and the interview was at 9:00am - at 4:00am, I said I had to go.

And he said, "No, you'll get five hours' sleep. Don't worry."

Cut to seven in the morning, he says,

"We should have another tequila and go in."

I went in, and Janet Street-Porter was an intimidating character.

She said, "You smell of tequila."

The interview was downhill after that.

So you didn't get that job?

I didn't get that job. But Toby helped me get into journalism.

He also introduced me to my wife, who then became my ex-wife.

So he has been a big part of life.

There's a tendency, which is understandable

to write off everything you did in TV before 1998

when you went to Kashmir for the BBC.

Series such as of Ride On in 1994 with Muriel Gray.

Do you pretty much dismiss all of that stuff?

I wasn't really a TV... I was a print journalist.

I really always thought myself...

And British print journalists used the term "hack" with endearment.

Not to the outside world.

As a journalist I was offered to do this.

It was their answer to Top Gear,

and I was hopeless on it because I couldn't read other people's...

I can't be a TV presenter. I can't speak and talk at the same time.

I'm not that smart.

So I was doing this story in Kashmir and the BBC said, "Can you film it?"

I still thought of myself as a hack with a camera,

but halfway through that I found, literally, my calling... Vocation.

I woke up one morning, which is a very rare thing,

and felt consciously happy, because I had a clear purpose in life,

a clear goal to find kidnappers.

My goals were to actually find the kidnappers of these hostages,

these British hostages.

But also, the purpose, making a film that would reveal social injustice.

GUNSHOTS

Wait!

Someone should have told me there was tear gas.

MEN LAUGH

Ran right through tear gas for the first time.

This cloud's exploding.

Your persona in your documentaries is this slightly haphazard,

bumbling figure, but that clearly is entirely natural.

This Inspector Clouseau moment in which you...

I thought you were going to say it's a construct,

that really, beneath that, I'm a really sharp... No, you're right.

In my first documentary, I was so clueless.

But in fact, that was what saved my life.

With hindsight I realised, when I'm meeting Mujahideen...

There's this bit in Kashmir where the Mujahideen are coming

out of the trees behind me about to abduct me,

and I'm on camera doing a piece to camera like a child saying,

("They're behind me. They're coming behind me.")

Like, "Look at this".

I thought they were a bunch of renegades just came in.

But, erm...

They're Mujahideen.

Hezbollah Mujahideen showed up.

Here I am. I finally met them.

One coming up behind me.

Hope they're OK with me.

We're foreigners. Afghanis.

MEN ARGUE

I didn't know what was happening, cos I couldn't understand them.

They're surrounding me, saying to some of the locals saying,

"What are you doing with a foreigner?"

"We told you not to bring foreigners here. We're going to kill him."

But I don't understand that, and in the edit suite,

we're watching it later, and I hear my voice saying,

"Is there a problem?"

My translator says, "No. Everything's fine."

Then they say, "We're going to cut",

these Mujahideen say, "We're going to cut his head off."

Then I say, "Is there anything I can do to help? "Is it a visa problem?"

My first encounter.

They were hardcore.

Let's go.

They seemed to be mentioning the BBC in angry tones.

I wasn't sure if they were wanting to shoot at me or shoot for me.

The camera...

The BBC saw that documentary and thought, "He's clueless."

"We'll send him to Afghanistan to make tea with the Taleban."

So I made the first film during the Taleban regime.

And in that, you see me...

..not doing the Jeremy Paxman or the foreign news...

Not doing the hard news journalist story.

I'm talking about their wives, children, having a laugh.

And with hindsight I realised two things.

One, they trusted me, because clearly I was not a threat. I was no spy.

There was critic once who said I had an interesting interview technique.

I didn't have one.

It was actually a good defence mechanism,

because they could pick up that this guy is clearly not a spy.

"He's clearly not a journalist."

"If he is...we've got nothing to worry about."

Come and have tea with us. >

Cos we have to... There's a curfew.

I think we have to get back.

Should we have one cup of tea? One cup tea, I would love one cup.

-One cup.

-How about interviews?

-Yes. We'll have one cup of tea and a chat.

Another tea with the Taleban.

One minute they banned filming,

but now they're my friend. They want to be in the film now.

But when I started to get to know too much, actually, it became trouble.

I remember later on, the Taleban became very suspicious of me

during this present insurgency that I spent too much time

with soldiers and I knew too much about weapons or...

And the questions I started asking were the serious news questions like,

"What's your strategy?" not "Who's your wife?",

and actually, that probably didn't help during my kidnap

that there was some suspicions that I wasn't a journalist.

You talk about just you with the camera and video diaries,

and it's incredibly popular now, partly because it's cheap,

but presumably that was one of the motivations at the time.

-You were a cheap programme maker.

-Yeah. Well, recently...

Video diaries were started by the BBC and it revolutionised TV.

It started because of small cameras and they gave it

to members of the public to film their lives.

They didn't want media people to do video diaries,

cos we tended to edit ourselves,

but because I'm such a bad journalist,

I was like a member of the public with a camera.

My films actually weren't cheap.

They were, the original ones, because I...

Most in-depth documentaries spend two weeks abroad, and I spent...

Meeting the Taleban and Fighting the Taleban, six months.

I lost about a year making a film. So, in fact, my expenses make up...

I can't say the word 'expenses' without smiling, cos once,

Channel 4 picked up one receipt for a French restaurant in Kabul,

and on this receipt was a bottle of Sancerre, foie gras and some pork.

And on the back I'd written, "Interview with Islamic contact."

He says, that doesn't look real."

You're going to be very useful to historians,

because those two huge involvements of the British and Americans in Iraq

and Afghanistan, the significance of the Taleban and their rise...

You've told all those stories. But was that systematic?

Were you thinking, "This is going to be my territory?"

It's odd how chance, luck plays such a part.

My first documentary happened to be about five Western tourists

kidnapped by Islamic extremists.

So when you make that, the BBC then said,

"Well, you do Islamic extremists."

"Why don't you go and make a film about the Taleban?"

And that came out a few months before 9/11.

So when 9/11 happened,

I actually went to Argentina cos I thought I'd already done quite a lot.

But in Iraq I made this documentary called Mission Accomplished

about the insurgency, and it was just after the fall of the statue

of Saddam when most news corporations had spent lots of money

covering the invasion, and actually the real war was yet to begin.

I remember sitting there, filming with insurgents,

people fighting the Americans,

and seeing this was a war and it wasn't being reported.

One of the things that stayed with me covering this story was,

it was like having a toy shop to yourself.

At that point, I couldn't understand how this media machine,

with our 24-hour rolling news...

Its blind spot was massive.

CHATTERING

Here.

'Baghdad felt like a city under occupation.

'Out here in the fields surrounding Fallujah,

'it felt more like a war zone.'

When I came back, I then showed the footage to the BBC,

and to their credit, they said, "This is good",

and it then was turned into a film shown in cinemas in America.

I was lucky.

I discovered a blueprint which works for me for making good films,

which is, you stay and place long enough, you find a story

you're in love with, and you stay there till you've finished it.

You're going to get good moments.

'We were set to go when someone saw wires protruding from the ground,

'an IED which could be set off at any moment by remote control.'

'I took cover behind a humvee

and waited for the Americans to blow the bomb.'

EXPLOSION

That stuff just landed behind me.

The persona has always been the outsider.

I'm thinking particularly of Fighting The Taleban,

where it was crucial that you were an outsider.

The Ministry of Defence didn't want you anywhere near the British Army.

I mean that's why it became the film it did.

That was back in 2006

when there hadn't been any footage on TV of the actual war.

So the Labour government was still peddling the line

about peacekeeping, "we're winning".

All the journalists then knew in 2006 there was a war going on there

and we were getting our arses kicked.

So the MoD didn't want journalists to see this.

I approached one of the British generals and said,

"I've been filming with the Taleban.

"It's going to look like there's an insurgency

"and no counter-insurgency."

The British soldiers, really good, the military were fantastic, there was no...

There's often questions about embedding -

"Are you controlled?" There was no control.

And it just so happened that we pull in to this town called Garmsir

and the intelligence had been 50 Taleban and there was about 500.

And I'm with 17 British soldiers who then got pinned down,

it was like Zulu Dawn, for about eight days.

And it really was, that week was a microcosm of all that's gone wrong

in Britain's involvement.

They ran out of ammo, ran out of medical kit.

There was mass casualties every day,

I had to burn my clothes at the end of it cos the blood smells

like metal, iron, it's like iron filings, I discovered that's blood.

'The soldiers gathered all the ammunition they could.

'They're getting out all their anti-tank missiles

'cos there's still a lot of Taleban

'we are expecting a lot of incoming tonight.

'They're just seeing how much munitions they've got.

'This is our second night here in Garmsir.

'And there's a dying Taleban prisoner behind us

'who they're giving medical aid to.'

Tony Blair's grandiloquous foreign policy was laid bare

when I saw a couple of unarmed Land Rovers, and if only one of them

had been taken out, we would have lost this so-called strategic town.

And yet at the same time was the incredible bravery

and professionalism of these soldiers, we really bonded.

So I was up there getting shot at every day with them.

Then they opened up and it was really like a band of brothers.

It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

'What we have to be careful of now is that

-'they've infiltrated along the eastern flank of the canal.

-Right.

-'Careful of ambushes to the right.

-OK.

-Keep your head down.

'Dougie was right, we were ambushed.

'Movement to the rear!

'Just when we needed it most, the 50-calibre gun jammed.

'Not for the first time that week.'

So, yeah, the fighting got so intense I came to understand

the meaning of "bite the dirt"

because I threw myself into this ditch,

pinned down by the Taleban, you know.

'Today is the fifth anniversary of 9/11.

'11th September, and five years after we were supposed to have

'deposed the Taleban...

'and defeated Al-Qaeda.

'Here I am sitting in a trench

'and the Taleban are counter-attacking.

'British forces are in the most intense fighting

'they've been in since the end of Korea.

'And that includes the Falklands and Iraq.

'And I think it's best to keep moving.'

It's not like the movies like Black Hawk Down. Those films slow...

You never see bullets or missiles flying through the air,

but in fact, they were so close my camera caught its flame

and I'm ducking and then bullets now...

When they are very close, you hear, it's like fire crackers.

(BEEP)

'Bullets flying all around us.'

Bullets are flying past your head and at that point I'm burying myself

in the sand and it's so intense,

I'm like, "I wish I hadn't come here."

Were you frightened then?

Er, what I found really frightening is what I do,

which I was doing a lot of, is going undercover on my own.

It's called "low profile",

you don't have security guards, you don't have an armoured car.

When I'd go and meet the Taleban,

you're naked and incredibly vulnerable,

because that was my defense - to say "I've got no guns, no sat phone".

And it looks, perhaps, an odd thing to do,

but for ten years it worked successfully.

'Are we safe from the air with this many?

'Are they not frightened of the bombs from the sky?

'I'm very frightened we're going to get hit.

'By my American friends.

Coming back round to where we started

which is the kidnap and release.

One of the odd aspects of this,

which other hostages have had to go through recently,

is that when you got out because Channel 4 had negotiated

and by assumption paid to get you out,

there would be phone-ins with people saying,

"No, we should have left him there because it gives comfort to terrorists."

And MPs were saying this as well.

I wonder psychologically what that's like?

You know, it's really odd, the Daily Mail...

And here's the thing, my ex-wife was an editor on the Daily Mail.

Er, and I was a Guardian journalist,

that's why that marriage was not going to last! Er...

But there was, on the Comments page...

The Daily Mail interviewed me and the comments were...

All I said in this article was how I missed my children,

I'm crying, blah-blah-blah. They're like, "Serves him right."

And of course they're right, but, you know,

I was thinking what kind of person is there on a Friday afternoon,

reading about someone who nearly died

and missed his children and feels the need to say, "Nah, serves you right".

Then there was the "outraged MP", David Davis, who actually,

as we kind of know, he was called up by a newspaper

and asked to give an outraged quote and he did.

But there is a serious debate which is you shouldn't negotiate

with terrorists and you shouldn't pay.

Now I would say from personal experience when your life,

when you know what these people are like,

it became an incredibly important thing for me

that I didn't want on my conscience,

that my liberty was bought at the price of other people's death,

women and children.

So in fact Channel 4 have always denied paying any ransom.

And so I don't know what happened. I was always against...

-They've denied publicly.

-You must have asked them though.

I tell you what, Channel 4 have been brilliant,

they paid £15,000 for my dental care, putting my teeth back together,

they put me on a sort of gardening leave, I was given money.

But you know when I was coming back with the goods, er, I could do

no wrong - they put me up for two BAFTAs, a RTS, and I won in Canada.

Then I get kidnapped and I'm kind of,

"We don't want to deal with you, you're trouble."

So they didn't tell me, I did ask, but they didn't tell me.

One of the things that struck me watching the film is that

in the film at one point, the drama, you say, to your sons actually,

"Once I've been on this trip, I'm going to write a book about it all."

And your website for a number of years has said

"I'm pretending to write a book."

Even in a depressed publishing market

I would guess that you could have got about a quarter of a million

when you first came out for the diaries or a memoir.

I think that figure is probably fair.

So I was interested in why you never did it.

I wasn't ready. That's the post- traumatic stress disorder.

I was offered a lot of money.

And now, of course, I'm ready to write it.

This drama was actually my coming out party, as it were. My coming out after post-traumatic stress disorder.

So, it was quite traumatic, sort of, helping the BBC make this film,

and sort of co-writing it and getting involved.

But it broke... it really did.

It made me confront things.

So now I am writing a book but it is post-financial collapse,

two years after the story, so I didn't get £250,000 but I am now writing it.

The other big question underlying all this is we all know great and brave journalists

who have died in the pursuit of the story and, in the end, it always comes up. Is it worth it?

Did you reflect on that when you were... You must have reflected on that?

This is another of those things where my memories would buoy me up or occasionally drag me down.

Some things help you stay afloat.

So, looking at the photograph of my children for two minutes would help me stay afloat.

Look at it for five minutes, I'd be distraught thinking what a bastard I was to leave them

because I was going to write a letter.

In fact, I did write this letter, which is quite typical of foreign journalist to do, to "Dear, Son".

You know, you don't know me. I'm your dad, I was your dad. I just want to tell you I love you.

I got halfway through this letter, which I intended to hide in one of my orifices.

I was going to leave a letter to my son, Luke,

saying how I loved him.

Of course, I realised, aged 21, if he reads this he'll think, you fraud

because I didn't die getting knocked over by a bus,

I didn't even get killed like Marie Colvin in a bombardment.

I crossed from Afghanistan

into what President Barack Obama described as the most dangerous place in the world.

I went into AlQaeda/Taliban's secret haven and, more to the point,

a place that was so politically sensitive because Pakistan had denied its existence.

It was a suicide mission, not a documentary.

They were never going to let a journalist walk out of there to say, by the way, I've revealed this.

I knew they knew I was in there so it was playing Russian roulette.

So, after years of endangering my life

and having children, I suddenly thought,

I'm going to burn my passport, I could happily never leave Europe again.

Are you happy to go on making films?

I've knocked on the head...

I'm not no longer going to be under cover with terrorists, hanging out with terrorists a lot of the time.

I don't want to say never again with war zones.

How do you get through it?

Partly because I'm reconnecting to how I felt in there.

How I felt in there was, life is a gift and it really is.

Covering the Soviet Union as a young foreign correspondent, the collapse,

I remember a lovely quote about freedom.

Liberty is like oxygen, you only really appreciate it when it's taken away from you.

And having liberty taken away, having my children taken away,

I became acutely sensitive to how wonderful that all is.

So, I'm trying to reconnect with how I felt in there as a way of recovering.

I did some of the things I dreamt of. I took my children to Disneyland. Er...

Just spending quality time with them and I think I've slightly improved.

I've processed in a rather negative way. I self medicated when I came out.

I drank a lot, went out a lot.

Er... and that doesn't work.

It's a great privilege to know, to have insight into your life.

Not that I put it into practice when I came out, by the way. That's one of the ironies.

I was going to become a cross between Jesus Christ and Mother Teresa when I came out.

Within a week, I'm drinking strawberry daiquiris in some bar talking rubbish!

Er...

But I remember thinking, it was a great lesson in life.

The greatest lesson you can have going through that but if anyone wanted to give me that lesson again,

I would kill them.

-Sean Langan, thank you.

-Thank you, Mark.

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