Jeremy Thompson: 'I'm a modern town crier'

Sat behind a large pane of glass, overlooking the studios of Sky News, Jeremy Thompson is musing on his career in the movies. He has a new one out in October, Incendiary, a thriller that also stars Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams. Last year he appeared alongside Colin Firth and Rupert Everett in that old-fashioned caper St Trinian's, and with Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum. But his finest performance of all was surely in the cult classic Shaun of the Dead.

In each of his five feature films, he has played the same part – Jeremy Thompson of Sky News – but in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's horror flick, the newscaster was obliged to draw strongly on his thespian tendencies as he advised his audience on how to deal with the zombies in their midst. "What was the line? 'Cut off their heads and take out their brains.' Something like that. It was duly delivered with a great deal of conviction and meaning," recalls Thompson dryly. "I was telling them to beware of zombies, while [actors] Simon Pegg and Nick Frost actually had zombies out in the back garden. It's just before they go out in the garden and start throwing their vinyl collection from the garden shed at the two zombies." So enthusiastically did Thompson enter into the role that Pegg persuaded him to reminisce on his reporting of the great zombie story as if it had actually happened, for an additional feature on the DVD.

"I got much more street cred with youngsters out of being in Shaun of the Dead than anything that I've ever done on Sky News. They say, 'I saw you in Shaun of the Dead, it was brilliant, what else d'you do?'" he mimics, showing his acting talent by adopting a geezer's accent.

No one with the remotest interest in news would display such ignorance of Thompson's place in modern broadcast journalism, given that he has reported stories from the Yorkshire Ripper case to the Bhopal chemical disaster, the OJ Simpson trial to the Asian tsunami and the London terror bombings. When Sky chooses to move its big guns into the field, JT (as he is known in the industry) is its heaviest howitzer. As such it is he, perhaps more than any other British journalist, who is most associated with the words "breaking story".

Today he starts broadcasting live from Beijing ahead of the start of the 2008 Olympics. For weeks, the Sky team has been trying to get permission for Thompson to present from landmark sites such as the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. As a former ITN Asia correspondent, based in Hong Kong, he knows the complexities of Chinese bureaucracy. "I will be very interested to see how the Chinese authorities cope. They've invited the world in, and the big question is whether they realise the consequences of that. It's fine winning an Olympic Games, but you can't then lay down conditions for the rest of the world. We are all curious to see how open the invite is."

Thompson, 60 this year, reported the run-up to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, as well as the aftermath (though he was on home leave the weekend the tanks went in), and he realises the need to canvass views from all levels of Chinese society. "We'll meet politicians and athletes, and hopefully meet road sweepers and stall holders, and try to give people a flavour of what the people there think – whether they are proud, whether they think it will change things," he says. "We like to get the mood of people and feel what it's like down on the street." He notes that many of his reports on the build-up to the American election in November have come from "diners and farms and factory floors".

Comparing Sky News to its rivals, Thompson, suited and booted though he is, declares that there is "a bit more informality" on his network. "I don't think we stand on ceremony and I don't think we are stuffy."

In spite of his cult movie status, he maintains that there is something very simple to what he does. "I'm a storyteller – that's what news is about. I actually don't think the news has changed very much since we had town criers in the main square. Basically I go out there, metaphorically, and ring a bell and say, 'Hey, I've got some really interesting stuff to tell you folks, gather round.' I just see it as delivering a cracking yarn with credibility in a compelling way that people want to listen to. There's a lot of machinery and technology that has got in the way and has facilitated it, shall we say, but in essence that's what it is."

The notion of the technology getting in the way might not be quite what Thompson's Sky News boss John Ryley wants to hear as he tries to maximise the network's presence on multiple platforms. But the newscaster quickly redeems himself by pointing out that he will be "Twittering" from Beijing – not a self-deprecatory reference to his presentational skills, but an indication that he will be texting messages to the fast-growing social network site Twitter. "Everyone who is there will be able to text in lines, like, 'Hey, I've just seen the Olympic stadium for the first time,' or, 'This pollution is so bad I can hardly breathe.' That's something I can do in two minutes in between doing lives or interviews."

One of the first things on Thompson's Chinese checklist is to sink his teeth into some jiaozi. "They're fat, juicy dumplings that we used to go and eat in the park. Much simpler than having to eat bears and snakes and lizards and all the other things that you get suckered into. To get permission for [filming] you invariably had to take officials out for large banquets that invariably involved things that looked a little dubious. You really didn't want to find out what they were: body parts of animals that you wouldn't normally have dreamt of eating."

That particular recollection brings back memories of his adventures in South Korea at the time of another Olympiad, in Seoul in 1988. "There was the great dog-eating scandal," remembers Thompson. "I had the most fantastic driver by the name of Mr EB Lee. I said to EB, 'I'm afraid we need to go and expose your dog restaurants, EB.' He said, 'Oh all right then, I know where there's one.' I got mic'd up. EB and I went into the restaurant, and he ordered dog. We got the plates of dog in front of us and I whispered into the mic [Thompson puts on his Inspector Regan from The Sweeney accent], 'Alright lads you can come in now,' and the camera crew came crashing through the door. When I looked round, the restaurant owner was coming at me with an empty beer bottle, and so was his wife. Meanwhile, EB, my loyal driver and interpreter, was tucking into the dog meat in rather embarrassing fashion. It was quite a difficult one to edit, that one."

Thompson has had many escapades since starting out as a trainee reporter on the Cambridge Evening News before joining the BBC. His hero was Charles Wheeler, with his "fantastically understated style that carried extraordinary power and conviction".

Though the Sky News presenter can cause chaos in supermarkets in South Africa (where the network has a strong following) because he finds himself "accosted by women of a certain age", he says that Wheeler taught him the value of not getting in the way of the story. "We are ciphers, we are mediums in the media. I certainly don't and never have aspired to the idea of celebrity journalism. I hope they trust me to tell them the story but not get in their way in understanding the story."

Even so, he needs little encouragement to relive one of his finest moments: when Sky News scrambled him on Boxing Day 2004 to the scenes of devastation caused by the tsunami. "I got to the Thailand end and set up a beach head – quite literally, reporting from the beach in Phuket – and two other teams landed in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Once they were up and running, we managed to go live for 18 hours a day without throwing back to the studio, which had never been attempted before in any way, shape or form." He is a little riled, however, when told that the BBC believes it had the better of Sky in coverage of the 2006 war in Lebanon. "In the areas that counted, I thought we did fine. If they want to play games, you could always remind them about the liberation of Kosovo, when I don't think they even got off the starting blocks, did they?"

Thompson is not the type to hide away. He had barely joined Sky in 1993 when he was nearly killed covering a gun battle in a Johannesburg township. "The photographer in front of me got nailed through the back and out through the front. The young radio reporter behind me got winged. It was pretty touch-and-go, really. I did rather a breathless piece of camera, and we managed to escape and put it on air," he says, almost casually.

He has put his experience to good use in making a recent film to mark Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday, drawing on his memories of Mandela's prison release and subsequent election as president, which Thompson covered. He wants to compile a similar retrospective to examine Rwanda's progress since the genocide of 1994, on which he also reported.

When he has completed his work in Beijing, Thompson will head for Denver to cover Barack Obama's acceptance of the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention. It is the fifth American election that Thompson has covered, and he has seen nothing like it. "The fact that four out of five Germans or Brits would vote for Barack Obama will cut absolutely no ice with the blue-collar American voter in the Rust Belt of the Midwest. I think it will be a fascinating thing to see whether, when it comes to the moment in the polling booth, Americans can bring themselves to vote for a black guy. It's a huge question, as yet unanswered."

It has all turned out rather well for Thompson, considering that his father was "horrified" that he chose a career in news ahead of such respectable vocations as insurance and banking. He says that in those days there was but a single media course – "at Darlington Technical College" – in the whole country.

"It has blossomed into a terribly sought-after and fashionable job," reflects Thompson, who is often told by young people that they covet his career of being "on telly". The modern-day town crier feels obliged to correct them: "I'm a journalist who happened to end up on telly."