Glen Oglaza, "When I Stories" (Pegasus, 2024)

Mar 9, 2026

Glen Oglaza, award-winning TV news reporter and poet, reflects on decades at ITN and Sky News. He revisits major moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dunblane and the miners' strike. Short, vivid stories explore life on call, newsroom logistics, traumatic reporting and the turn to poetry in later years.

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ANECDOTE

Reporting The Miners Strike As A Turning Point

Covering the miners' strike felt like witnessing a seismic shift as Thatcherism dismantled union power and pit communities.
Glen recalls villages ruined when pits closed and Thatcher calling him a "moaning mini" on unemployment questions.

INSIGHT

Photo Ops Become News Because Everyone Must Get The Shot

Political photo-ops are deliberately crafted to generate headlines, and journalists join them because rivals will get the image otherwise.
Glen admired how Thatcher's team engineered visuals and felt compelled to cover them.

ANECDOTE

Dubček Interview Was A Long-Winded Historic Scoop

Glen secured an interview with Alexander Dubček after weeks of groundwork, but Dubček's long-winded answers required tricky editing.
The interview had to be tightly edited because he spoke for 20 minutes about shoe production.

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As news reporters, we are in the story-telling business, the eye witnesses to history, writing, it's ‎said, ‘the first draft of history'.‎

The fall of the Berlin Wall. Lockerbie. Hillsborough. Dunblane. Mad Cow disease. 9/11. ‎
These are all events that have entered our national, and international, consciousness. Events so ‎momentous that we can all say where we were, what we were doing, when the Berlin Wall fell, or ‎when the planes hit the Twin Towers. Award-winning television news reporter and political ‎correspondent, Glen Oglaza, can say exactly where he was when these events happened. He was ‎there, he had a front-row seat as history unfolded. And in this informative and fascinating account of ‎those years, he allows the reader to be there too. From Thatcher and the miners' strike, to the Gulf ‎War, the Good Friday Agreement and Tony Blair at Number Ten, captivating national and global ‎events are all given an intriguing new inside angle. ‎

Glen Oglaza is an award-winning television news reporter and political correspondent with more than twenty-five years' experience with ITN and Sky News. At ITN, he covered many of the biggest stories of the 1980s and 1990s, and was part of the award-winning ITN teams covering the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the plight of the Kurds in the wake of the First Gulf War, and the massacre in Dunblane. He was BAFTA-nominated for his coverage of the London Poll Tax riot. As a political correspondent, he covered the governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Glen is also an accomplished poet with several volumes of poetry published these Religion Fake News and Misdemeanors, No Words, always and his latest collection Spam and other poems.

In this podcast we discuss Glen's books When I Stories and More When I Stories (Pegasus, 2024), starting in local journalism in Television news with ITN and Sky News, and the great events he covered during his career.

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