Have I got current affairs for you

So viewers think current-affairs TV is dull. The answer is not dumbing down, but lightening up, says John Sweeney

How can boring old current affairs compete with the sexy, in-your-face appeal of 10 DIY enthusiasts from Basingstoke air-dropped into Kazakhstan with only a Mars bar and a codpiece between them? But that's what the viewers want.

Or do they? How does humanity begin to address the murderous stasis in the Middle East, the obscenity of 9/11 and the agony of Africa – to name but three matters reality TV shows would go nowhere near? Do you want to know why the world has turned upside down? The answer is a big yes.

Current affairs broadcasters are up against it. In the mid-Eighties I worked as a researcher on ITV's This Week. Programmes like Death on the Rock so irritated Mrs Thatcher that she put a bullet into the head of Thames TV.

The suits at Granada did the same for World In Action. ITV has replaced two great strands with a pricked soufflé called Tonight With Trevor McDonald. The BBC's approach to current affairs is beyond reproach. I work there, so I should know. The attack on current affairs uses the following words: "boring, dull, old-fashioned, switch-off."

Have I Got News For You is perhaps the most widely watched current affairs show on the screen. It's so sassy, sharp, original and funny that no one thinks of it as a current affairs show. But that's what it is. It's been going for 10 years now, but too much current affairs output carries on as if it doesn't exist.

So let's fight back. Let's not be boring, dull and old-fashioned. The besetting vice of current affairs is a fake piety – a switch-off. It boils down to a failure of story-telling. We want to tell the best stories.So, you go to the victims, the witnesses. Too often, we cut out the humour and play the story dull. But people aren't like that. Even in Auschwitz, wrote Primo Levi, the sun shone and people laughed.

In Zimbabwe earlier this year Fletcher Delini explained why he had spent a month in prison. He's an elderly Christian with diabetes. He's also the national treasurer of the Movement for Democratic Change. Robert Mugabe's police didn't give proper supplies of insulin, so he began to lose the sight in his one good eye. He had been charged with double murder. And the evidence? Mugabe's police said that he had plotted the double murder on a certain date in Bulawayo. On that day Fletcher wasn't in Bulawayo. He was in Nyanga.

We were meeting in a safe house in Harare. On the wall was a map of Zimbabwe. Show me, I asked him. Bulawayo was bottom left, Nyanga was top right. With his left hand he touched Bulawayo. But with his right he couldn't stretch to Nyanga. "Try harder," I instructed. He did his best but he physically couldn't be in two places at the same time. And that was only on the map. His alibi witnesses were 20 MPs including the Speaker of the House of Parliament. His arrest and detention on those charges were, therefore, an utter farce. So, for BBC2 Correspondent's producer Will Daws and I made a farce of Mugabe's rule of law.

To get to see the Leader of the Opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, I hid in a car boot. I have been attacked for doing this and for being one-sided. Seumas Milne wrote in The Guardian that our film was "relentlessly one-sided without a balancing interview".

Milne – the son of a former director-general of the BBC – must have missed the beginning of the show where you see us being deported from Zimbabwe having entered the country legally (sic) in June 2001. Mugabe's goons kicked out executive producer Simon Finch, cameraman James Miller and I because we worked for the BBC. So, when Daws and I went back in January this year we were undercover, as birdwatchers. And as undercover birdwatchers we can't say we're from the BBC and can we have an interview, Mr Mugabe? Can we, Seamas?

The point about the car boot trick is that it got a huge laugh the moment people saw it in the cutting room. My kids laughed at the car boot scene and the bird-watching gags, and their attention was caught, and they listened to Zimbabwean democrats talk about being tortured and their loved ones being burnt to death. Result.

I have done human rights stories from Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe – but the one that got on to the main BBC1 evening news bulletin started with my bottom diving into a car boot. It worked because it was funny. And because it was funny many more people saw what followed: evidence of torture and murder.

There are some stories so grim and bleak that humour may not be right. But in the battle against the reality TV brigade, it seems plain daft to abandon one of humanity's great strengths – to laugh in the face of cruel adversity.

John Sweeney is a special correspondent for the BBC