Last modified on Wed 20 Jan 2021 22.18 EST
Oliver Laughland, US southern bureau chief: It was somewhere along the 700-mile night-time drive from Tampa, Florida, to my home in New Orleans that I realized filming the Anywhere But Washington series was becoming one of the hardest assignments in my career.
Hours earlier, my colleague Tom Silverstone and I had interviewed a conservative radio host spreading baseless conspiracy theories about Covid-19 to a crowd of at-risk, Donald Trump-supporting senior citizens. We had been forced to make a sharp exit, and got caught in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm that drenched us through. Thankfully, we’d managed to keep the camera dry and preserve the footage, but the whole day became a precursor to the rest of our two and half month long trip through America.