The former newsreader and celebrated BBC foreign correspondent Michael Buerk was a 15-year-old Brummie only just discovering the adult delights of the James Bond books when the Jaguar E-Type was launched in 1961.
“Growing up in Solihull, near the Rover factory, every car was black… You’d look through the window to see if the speedo went over 60mph, in which case it was extremely exotic. Then, in the middle of all this comes the E-Type. I just fell in love with the idea of it.”
Thirty years later, as one of the best-known faces in British television news – famed for his powerful reporting of the dying embers of apartheid in South Africa – Buerk was in a position to realise his E-Type ambitions with the 1962 example he is pictured with here.
“We came back from South Africa and picked up life here,” says the 79-year-old, “and I became a presenter, which was a bit safer. About then, the classic car price bubble burst. So I got this for £25,000, which was a good deal.
“It’s a car for posing in, really… It doesn’t have a bad angle, although I’m struck now by how narrow it seems. Looking at it from the back it’s almost like a toy.”
Cars in the blood
Buerk comes from a family of engineers and has always been keen on sports cars.
“My grandfather ran a gear-making company and my great-grandfather was a leading academic in internal combustion engines. Some of that filtered through to me.”
His ownership CV includes a Morgan Plus 8. “I loved my Morgan, although you needed to have a breather every 20 miles to recover from the hard ride.”
Michael’s first car was a Mini. “I bought it new with the money I inherited when my mother died.
“My Austin-Healey Sprite I adored; it was fantastic, but it fell to pieces. I remember driving it up the M6 when I was about 21 working for the Daily Mail in Manchester, with Christine [his wife] holding the hood down because the clips had broken.”
Early career
Having given up on the RAF because of eyesight issues, Buerk turned to journalism and came up through jobs on local papers in Bromsgrove and South Wales. Kate Adie and Sue Lawley were contemporaries.
His BBC career started on local radio in 1970, two years after he had married Christine, who did such a sterling job holding the Sprite’s flapping soft-top roof.
“Then I got a job with the BBC as a network TV news presenter and we were issued with Ford Escorts. In those days, they had two-way radios, so it felt a bit like being James Bond.”
For a “ghastly year”, Buerk was the BBC industrial correspondent covering the British Leyland factory at Longbridge, to the south of Birmingham. “It was really depressing. I only did it because it paid more.”
As energy correspondent Buerk covered North Sea oil and Opec stories. “I went to some amazing places – Alaska, Venezuela, the Middle East – and we lived in Edinburgh, which was a nice place. The kids were young, and most nights, I got home in time for bed.”
Buerk was the BBC’s South Africa correspondent from 1983-87. His 1984 reporting on the Ethiopian famine inspired the Band Aid charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas?
“I had a VW minibus to drive the family around. It was about that time I nearly got my first E-Type, through very unfortunate circumstances. We were in Cape Town at a squatter camp and George, my cameraman, got the top of his head taken off… Back home he had a Series 1½ E-Type, but I couldn’t think of a tasteful way of putting in an offer…”
Although he semi-retired in 2002, Buerk is still doing the Moral Maze on Radio 4 (now in its 35th year) and was an unlikely I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! contestant.
Forthright views
Schooled in the robust newsrooms of the 1970s and 1980s, he is not shy of letting his refreshingly unwoke views be known and takes himself nothing like as seriously as his heavyweight image suggests.
Through the end of the 1990s and much of the 2000s, his blue E-Type lurked in the garage, loved but little used.
“I’d drive it into TV Centre occasionally when I was doing the news. I was a little worried about it overheating in summer traffic jams, but it was usually OK.”
More recently, an odd noise in the engine developed into a more or less total restoration.
“It was not rusty – it hadn’t been anywhere – but the paint was crazing in places.”
Pothole problems
Buerk slips behind the wheel with ease. “It’s not tricky to drive at all,” he says, “and I like the dash and the driving position, but it was designed in an era when the roads were actually repaired. It’s low-slung, like its owner, and today’s potholes range from the challenging to the terminal.”
He is sanguine about modern driving standards. “They don’t seem to be much different. The same combination of decent coves and absolute a---holes.”
The E-Type still has its original radio. “You have to wait for it to warm up. I keep thinking it will pick up something like Round the Horne.”
Longer term, Buerk is wondering what he is going to do with his Jaguar. “If I get back into a situation where I just get it out for the sake of getting it out, then it gets a bit silly. I don’t just want to keep it as an investment. I’m glad I still have it, but sooner or later, I will have to sell it.”
Realistic approach
Sixty years on, Michael Buerk is as in love with the car’s shape as he had been as an awe-struck schoolboy, but he is also realistic. “Modern cars… are so much better, aren’t they? They don’t break down. The cheapest now have the same build quality as the most expensive cars of yesteryear. Better, actually. My electric Kia is comfortable, fast… and just works.
“Classic cars are an irrational obsession. But modern cars cannot be classic. Not characterful enough. Not flawed enough, perhaps.”
If money were no object, Buerk muses that an electric E-Type such as that used by Prince Harry at his wedding might be the answer.
“The most beautiful car ever made, with a modern drivetrain; but I might need a soundtrack to remind me of the original 3.8-litre, straight-six engine. It’s like the RAF Spitfire. The sound of the classic Merlin engine just sounds visceral. It’s a car, not a sewing machine.”