Champ of the fourth estate

I think I'd better go easy on the cheese before bedtime. Apparently, I was talking in my sleep the other night, repeating over and over: "my west window has all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the concomitant crudities of the period."

Another night, I dreamed I was standing in a darkened cathedral, trying to light hundreds of candles with a single waxed tapir (if you hold them by their toes and dip their snouts in tallow, they'll burn for hours).

On a third occasion ( presumably inspired by the beatification of Mother Teresa, the predictions of Princess Diana, and a double helping of Welsh rarebit), I dreamed I was in heaven, and could see the two women in the distance. As I got closer, I saw Diana had a halo, whereas the shrivelled brown nun did not, but Teresa was pointing at the Princess and laughing. When I got closer, I could see why. It was not a halo, but the steering wheel of a Mercedes. I woke up laughing, too.

Professional do-gooders such as Mother Teresa and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer are usually regarded as beyond criticism or mockery, except in dreams, and it's a brave hack who dares to question their motives. That's one of many reasons to admire the late James Cameron, because he once described the patronising and racist Schweitzer as "a synthesis of Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler", and devoted his life to challenging the comfortable status quo which most journalists easily accept.

As James Cameron: A Pain In The Neck (BBC4) reminded us last night, this legendary foreign correspondent's work was fuelled by passion and commitment, and because he frequently spoke out against British and American foreign policy: "The Establishment didn't like him, but his colleagues loved him."

Cameron was one of those rare journalists whose columns could genuinely be described as essential reading, a glib Fleet Street phrase that should normally be used only when referring to the labels on bottles of pills.

Using the BBC's vast archive to the full, this engrossing Time Shift documentary retraced Cameron's life and work primarily through the many TV films he made. His views on the horror of nuclear warfare were formed when he watched the 1946 explosion at Bikini Atoll ("This was the answer of the little men in glasses to 20,000 tons of TNT"), and were reinforced in Hiroshima, where he saw the ghastly aftereffects of radioactivity on survivors of the "Little Boy" atomic bomb.

Tragedies in his personal life, especially the death of his first wife in childbirth, helped turn him into a workaholic (and a near-alcoholic, too), and periods spent in war-torn Korea and pre-partition India convinced him that humanitarian concerns must outweigh geopolitical considerations.

"I'm inclined to think now," he summarised years later, "that neither democracy, nor fascism, nor communism, nor religion, nor anything else, justifies one man pushing a button and killing hundreds of total strangers. I don't think anything is worth that."

As Cameron would doubtless have wished, the reverential tone of the biography was periodically soured by dissenting voices. Anthony Howard observed that "he didn't have any time for objectivity", while the increasingly vile Peregrine Worsthorne (for whom, I suspect, senility will be a smooth transition) rebuked him for having opposed the development of nuclear weapons, although he seemed more irked by Cameron's indiscreet conversations with Mrs Worsthorne.