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Everything I do is about finding the story, and the true voice to tell it in. So let me tell you a story about story-telling …

One day ninety years after it happened, the British and Australian Governments found 6,000 allied soldiers who’d gone missing during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. They asked me to help them tell the story as they re-interred them in a live broadcast.

From the moment they asked, it was so clear how we had to tell this story! Our voices and our words should be entirely absent - so the voices of these soldiers could speak. We had to find those voices in their journals, their diaries, their letters home.

Gradually, from fragments, we pieced the story together as these young men wrote about joining up, embarking for France, reaching the training camps, going up to the Front Line, waiting through the long night to go over the top – into oblivion.

Every word was theirs, read by their descendants, with no other adornment.

The only bit I wrote was about the rediscovery of these missing soldiers 90 years later. Early on, the archaeologists found the unused part of a return railway ticket to Adelaide in the gas mask of a 19 year old Australian private. In the Front Line your gas mask was the safest place to keep something precious. For this young man, his most precious possession was his ticket home.

In that story was every story.

And my story too. To be absent, so those present can speak in their true voice. To listen, so their story is heard.

That’s not humility – it’s the buzz I get. It’s what I do.