Review of Private Diary of BBC News Cameraman

Post by **Hilary Cooke** » 20 Jun 2025, 06:31

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Private Diary of BBC News Cameraman" by Bob Prabhu.]

2 out of 5 stars

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“Private Diary BBC News Cameraman” by Bob Prabhu is a memoir of the author’s life. It tells of his upbringing in Yemen, his emigration to England, and his training and career at the BBC. As a member of the BBC’s news team, his work took him around the world covering stories from general interest to sports, international politics, and war. Mr Prabhu has experienced a lot.

Unfortunately, the transition of his experiences onto the written page has not been as successful as one would expect. There are numerous reasons for this.

Starting at a point of pure practicality, the book is a paperback in A4 format. Setting aside the fact that it is incorrectly advertised as being hardback, this page size does not do it any favours. There is a lot to read in this book. This is difficult in such a hefty tome, which needs to be supported by a desk or table to be read. This is not a book you can carry with you to read. The choice of this format seems an odd one. It is a size more usually associated with “coffee table” books. Whilst “Private Diary” contains many photographs, they are not of the glossy colour variety expected from such a book.

Indeed, all the photographs are black and white, quite small, and their quality is variable. They are mostly presented without captions, leaving the reader to work out their content from their position within the writing. There is at least one example of a photograph being repeated and given different descriptions. There are also examples of remarkably similar photos, for example, the same street photographed from the same angle, once empty and once with people in it. The inclusion of some of the photos seems bizarre, for example, a hotel bathroom, a beer label, or the logos for foreign television channels. These do not serve any purpose or add anything except bulk.

Sadly, that is also often an issue with the writing. Undoubtedly, the author has been in incredible situations and had amazing experiences. He has also, like everyone, had to deal with the mundanities of everyday life. Prabhu, in sharing the contents of his diaries, has failed to remove the mundanities, and often these have swamped genuinely interesting information. It is frustrating to read about his hotel room numbers, mealtimes, and whether every single satellite news feed was successful. What we want to read about are the challenges of working in a warzone, the feelings this evokes, and how the author manages (or fails to manage) these. Maybe it is the mundanities that have seen him through, but this should be expressed.

The writing fails to settle into any particular style, which presents further problems for the reader. On occasion, Prabhu appears to have copied directly from his diary, including grammatical errors and jargon, which make the writing difficult to follow. At other times, he is careful and clear in his explanations, appearing to recognise that the layperson reading his book will not understand the meaning of terms such as “525 NTSC camera channel” or “Lo-band and Hi-band U-matic tapes and 625 and 525 formats.” Sadly, when explanations do appear, they often arrive long after the first use of the terminology. Broadly speaking, there are also an excessive number of mistakes and typos. There are certainly more than one would expect to find in a publication that has been professionally proofread.

In terms of content, there is less information about the work of a BBC news cameraman than the title suggests. This may be because, for at least half of the book, Prabhu is sharing stories about his life before he became a cameraman. There are stories from his childhood, his BBC training, and his work as an engineer. For himself and others who know him, these are interesting. However, he does not develop them into any coherent story arc about his life. Events are not told chronologically and are described without relation to each other. As a result, they read as a series of individual moments rather than the story and growth of one person’s life. On top of this, the dates attached to each event are inconsistently recorded, with clear labelling errors. More than once, the author lists an event as occurring in different years. Often this happens within a few sentences. Such carelessness does not help the coherence of the book.

Ultimately, it is difficult to see what the author wants to achieve by publishing these diaries. They are poorly edited and haphazardly arranged. His attempts at discretion about certain people’s identities are unsubtle and ineffectual. A simple search engine check is enough to discover who he is talking about, particularly as he uses initial letters or, in one case, an unusual secondary letter as pseudonyms. He spends a lot of time complaining about his employer and colleagues. As a result, the book reads more like an exercise in settling scores than in sharing the outstanding experiences of this man’s life. Hardly anybody comes out of the book well: not the BBC, not its employees, not even the author himself. That is a real shame, because there is no doubt that Prabhu has exceptional stories to share.

For these reasons, I have found the book disappointing and give it a mark of 2 out of 5.

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Private Diary of BBC News Cameraman
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Post by **Kibet Hillary** » 16 Jul 2025, 23:58

The book would have definitely been more interesting and moving had the author focused more on the unique experiences, rather than focusing on the mundanities of life. The fact that it is hard to tell what the main aim is is also a bit worrying. Nonetheless, I am certain that some readers will find some sections really captivating. Thanks for the amazing review, @Hilary Cooke.