March 1992 was a great moment to start a television program that aimed to bring the world into Australian living rooms: a year when the world lived in hope.
Foreign Correspondent reporter Mark Corcoran in Kabul, Afghanistan, reporting on the Taliban in 1998 with crew Geoff Clegg and Gep Blake. As we toiled to put together a production team, and tried to master the fearsome logistics involved in producing three stories a week, for 40 weeks of the year, from 11 bureaux on four continents , associate producer Shaun Hoyt and I had little time for such high-flown ruminations.
But we produced substantially more stories from the former Soviet empire and its satellites than we did from America: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Georgia – places that for half a century had been off the map for travelling Australians; struggling Russian farmers trying to cope with a free-market economy; struggling Russian police trying to control gangsterism run rife; a Red Army no longer sure who it should be struggling against or why it was there at all.
I urged our cameramen not to forget the big wide shot as well as the powerful close-ups – though TV sets were smaller, their screens squarer and more constrained, than they are now.