The inspiring truth behind Salman Rushdie's exile When the Ayatollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death on Valentine's Day 1989, it was Alan Yentob (then Controller of BBC Two) and not the authorities who first rescued the novelist from the crowds of photographers, potentially concealing an assassin. So perhaps we should forgive the rather self-congratulatory tone he adopted in last night's tense and absorbing episode of Imagine... (BBC One) about Rushdie's decade in hiding, which was aired to coincide with the author's publication of his memoir of the period, Joseph Anton. The extracts read aloud in sonorous tones throughout the programme revealed an author describing himself like someone out of his fabulising fiction. He writes of a man living beneath the beating wings of an "exterminating angel." But interviewed to camera Rushdie was more likeably human, peering at fear, defiance and humour through glasses with lenses like riot shields - so big I wondered if they'd been bulletproofed. He told Yentob that after he heard the news of the fatwa in an early morning call (from a BBC journalist seeking a reaction) he ran around, rather ridiculously, locking all the doors of the home he would leave that morning and not return to for seven years. He went, as planned, to a memorial service for the writer Bruce Chatwin, where Paul Theroux, sitting in the row behind him leaned forward and said, "I suppose we'll be here for you next week." It was after leaving this service - already thinking himself a dead man - that Yentob rescued him. Then, as Martin Amis famously observed: "He vanished onto the front page." Through interviews with friends and family the documentary revealed the reality of fleeing international terror in everyday England. He went, at first, to the Cotswolds. As the programme makers spliced images of extremists burning his books with Victorian London terraces and honey-stoned Gloucester villages it occured to me that perhaps Rushdie felt that by concealing himself in such quintessentially English scenery, he was also cloaking himself in the British ideals of free speech and fair play. There was certainly something quaintly English about some of his literary friends" support: Ian McEwan described packing a hamper, a protection officer recalled talking cricket with Harold Pinter. Most touchingly, the literary agent Deborah Rogers, whom Rushdie had recently dumped, offered him sanctuary, knowing their public separation made her country home the last place his enemies would look. The programme forced viewers to acknowledge the bravery of those in the literary world who stood by Rushdie's right to speak for the doubts of Muslims in prose he described as "hot." It was not a case of guys in corduroy waffling against an abstract threat. Translators and publishers were shot and stabbed. And support for Rushdie extended far beyond the bookshop door. When Yentob asked him if members of the public had moved away from him on the street, Rushdie said: "No, they stood closer." It was inspiring.