The BBC and ME: A LOVE-HATE THING Part IV

Wherein I conclude this account of my sentimental education in one of the most institutional of British institutions. We last glimpsed our protagonist leaving BBC employ for the final time. I cannot now recall with certainty but I guess I must still have been on contract when my production of Farrukh Dhondy’s four-parter, King of the Ghetto, went out. At any rate, I do remember being interviewed for Radio Times in my office at Threshold House on Shepherd’s Bush Green. It was, I feel sure, part of the reason why Jonathan Powell, the Head of Drama, pretended that the production schedule was a lot more comfortable than it turned out to be that he required the tapes for transmission almost as soon as editing was completed.

As I was on hand, I couldn’t resist popping down to the viewing room to see my old previewer chums on the Friday that Part 1 was screened for them. Most of the faces were familiar to me, not least that courtly old gent Herbie Kretzmer, long the previewer for the Daily Express, whose lyrics for Les Misérables had not quite yet made him a millionaire. There was a new kid on the block, though, the previewer for The Sunday Times, who spent the entire duration of the episode on the telephone. Perhaps understandably, he has never been my favourite journalist. His name was Mark Lawson.


Herbie Kretzmer: do you hear the people sing his lyrics?

King caused a certain amount of flurry, not least because Farrukh had been writing loosely fictionalized versions of real people. I knew nothing of the background to his fiction and – call me irresponsible if you like, but – I was happy not to know. After all, the BBC had committed to production long before it was in any sense my responsibility. My first duty was to get the thing done in time for the booked slots.

In several ways, I was on a hiding to nothing. For instance, we were going to need a number of extras for several scenes shot around Brick Lane. I tried the usual gambit of placing an announcement in the trade magazine, The Stage. The mag’s advertising manager sharply informed me that we could not seek to recruit Bengalis, however. This evidently was a breach of provisions under the Race Relations Act. All we could ask for were people who could play Bengali. Consequently, on the day, the extras that reported covered the waterfront: Indo-Pakistanis, Arabs, Orientals, Afro-Caribbeans, Turks, Greeks and Cypriots, Jews and Muslims, Latinos, indeed anyone who didn’t look obviously WASPy or Nordic. Hence our crowd scenes did not bear much scrutiny.

Another problem was that Farrukh had written some dialogue to be exchanged between Bengali characters but did not himself speak Bengali. I contacted the Bengali department of the BBC World Service and someone there expressed himself delighted to supply the translations, which he duly did. Come the shoot, however, our actors who were to say the lines decried the translations, saying that they sounded more like the Bengali equivalent of Shakespeare than the appropriate demotic. This put me and the director Roy Battersby in a quandary. None of the actors was actually Bengali so how reliable could they be? On the other hand, there was no time to mess about. We had to trust the actors not to create a further problem.


Mark Lawson: he was never young, even when he was young

Before the run of the serial was finished, a formal complaint had been lodged with the BBC by people reckoning to represent the Bengali community around Brick Lane and a small if noisy demonstration was mounted at the gates of Television Centre. Roy happened to be at the Centre that day – I suspect we were still editing episode 4 – and he quizzed the protesters closely.

Farrukh, Roy and I were summoned to a meeting with some Bengali representatives in the office of the then Controller of BBC2, who was none other than Graeme McDonald, the producer of the one-off drama Circle Line that launched my BBC career. Graeme was obliged to play it lofty and impartial. The Bengalis – clearly articulate young men with a particular axe to grind and no conceivable right to speak for “the whole” Bengali community – were angry and dismissive. The three of us decided not to get into too much detailed debate or to reveal the difficulties under which we had been labouring or to concede much of anything. I remember one young chap declaring “you have raped my language and culture” and I decided he would be a local councillor before too long. I imagine some formal record of the meeting was kept by the BBC but, as far as any practical consideration went, that was the end of the matter.


Bengalis marching in Brick Lane (though not, on this occasion, against the BBC)

Whether that – relatively modest – outburst of controversy had any bearing on my own standing at the BBC, I cannot tell. The press didn’t pick it up, mercifully. On balance, it seemed to me that I had done exactly what was required and got Jonathan out of an awkward scheduling hole. But I was never rewarded for it.

I had spent quite a lot of the mid-1980s looking for work. After King, I was again unemployed. I recall feeling that, as I turned 40, I was good and ready for a major post in television. Yet I couldn’t even get an interview as an assistant sub-editor on Radio Times, a publication for which I had written quite often as a freelance. Meanwhile, my contemporaries were taking over the top television jobs. Soon after my departure from the BBC, Jonathan Powell was appointed Controller BBC1 and, simultaneously, Alan Yentob became Controller BBC2. As another contemporary pointed out, they were both 40 and neither had a family. Well, nor did I.


Alan Yentob, also old when young

Over the years, I have applied for a large number of posts, many of them at the BBC. I usually managed at least to get an interview because my cv, if I may say so, is pretty interesting. I may not be a particularly dynamic interviewee. The only two times that I actually enquired what in particular had counted against me, I was told that the person who had won the post was “hungrier”. I couldn’t but feel that this was not much help. In both cases, the appointed person was quite a bit younger than me. I suspect that “hungry” in someone older can easily come over as “desperate”.

One BBC post I applied for required applicants to furnish a list of “contacts” in the industry. As a long-time journalist, I could make a list running into hundreds but I confined my submission to a few dozen, beginning with the then BBC Director-General (John Birt) whom I had known as far back as when he was a humble programme-maker, let alone an executive.

But it occurred to me that I needed to append a covering note to my submission. The BBC form required one to enter one’s full name, in my case William Stephen Gilbert. If someone checking out my contacts claim were to refer to me as William Gilbert, she would draw a total blank. Stephen Gilbert would trawl many more confirmations and W Stephen Gilbert one-hundred-percent success. But I might be unfortunate enough to find myself being checked out by the one person in the exercise to whom no version of the name meant a thing.

As it transpired, I never heard any more about that post, so I have no notion whether my application was dismissed as fanciful. Another attempt at securing work was even more disastrous. Someone had decided to create a new post, that of executive producer on the BBC2 magazine The Late Show. The programme already had an editor so it was difficult to see why it had any need for an additional manager.

I rang the information number given on the advertisement for the post, only to be told that the person who had the information was on leave and no one else there could help me. This seemed somewhat amateurish. I decided that I would be sure to press the query when I was interviewed and sent off my application. I was given an appointment for an interview at Kensington House, in those days the home of BBC arts programmes’ offices, to be conducted by the then Head of Arts Programming, Kim Evans (whom I had never met), and Mike Poole, The Late Show editor, whose path I had crossed several times, never especially to my own advantage.


Mike Poole, not always as genial as he photographs

My appointment was for 3:15 and I arrived by 3:00 and walked round the block a couple of times (one should never appear too keen) before presenting myself at reception comfortably before 3:10. A young woman came to collect me, explaining as she took me up to the interview room that unfortunately Kim and Mike would have to go to the studio shortly so it would necessarily be a rather brief encounter. I felt pretty miffed but what choice did I have?

The beginning was taken up with explanations about their need to finish by half-past and their none-too clear account of why an executive producer was suddenly required for the programme. I was asked one or two desultory questions and then dismissed, feeling sure that an appointment had been agreed before I had even entered the room. As the assistant accompanied me back to reception, she remarked that it was a pity that I had arrived “so late”.

What did she mean? Well, she said, my interview was supposed to be at 2:45. I had the letter in my pocket so I fished it out and showed her: 3:15, perfectly clearly. Suitably embarrassed, she rushed back to the interview room while I reflected that of course Evans and Poole would have spent an unlooked-for empty half-hour deciding which of the applicants deserved the post, discounting the last one who was “so late” and who anyway Poole doubtless didn’t much rate.

The assistant returned, all apologies. I could have castigated her for the corporate failure to have an explanation of the post available as promised and for screwing up the particulars of my own interview but what would be the point? I went home and tried to call Mike Poole – we didn’t have mobile phones in those days – but of course he was unavailable in the studio. I got a letter off to him, which should have reached him first thing next day – we didn’t have email either but we did have relatively early postal deliveries. But I knew that it was futile and, sure enough, he didn’t bother to reply. Nor did I receive notice that I hadn’t got the job. I never troubled to check out who did get it.

Screw-ups like this and other posts that I applied for without any response made me wonder if I was on some BBC blacklist. Perhaps my file was decorated with one of those infamous Christmas-tree symbols that every BBC watcher had heard tell of. I wrote to the appropriate executive asking whether this was the case and I received a long and discursive letter back, full of pain that I should think such a thing and assurance that no such let or hindrance applied to my prospects at the BBC. Nevertheless, as I have indicated, I have never again worked for the corporation.

I had intended to go on to some more general reflections about the state of the BBC but it feels as though I have maundered on long enough for this posting. In due course, I shall work up a more considered conclusion. Be patient.

SENIOR MOMENT

Today my oldest friend turned 65. Later this month, I shall catch him up. If you know your musicals, my naming Eliza Doolittle Day as the date in question will give you the day that this event takes place. If indeed it is An Event.

Certain birthdays do have a resonance and a number of implications in our culture as well as in our body of English law. The very day of one’s birth, of course, goes on resounding throughout one’s life. One’s 13th birthday marks the start of those difficult, momentous teenage years. A number of changes in one’s legal status kick in on one’s 16th birthday and more at 17, the two most significant of the latter being the eligibility for a driving licence and the freedom to give blood.

Key of the door

In my day, you formally became an adult at 21 and there was a great fuss about reaching that milestone. “Key of the door” was the cant phrase and frequently the greetings card icon that went with turning 21, signifying the freedom to come and go like an adult. The general election of 1966 was the last at which 21 was the qualifying age to cast a vote and my generation missed out. Since then most of the rights that we could not enjoy until 21 have been granted on the 18th birthday which hence became “the new 21”.

How a pension book looked

There are just three joys still denied to those younger than 21: the rights to supervise a learner driver, to drive a bus and to adopt a child. Everything else applies at 16 or 18.

After that, “significant” birthdays are really only made so by their heralding new decades in one’s tally, the most sonorous, I suppose, being 30 and 50. For women 60 and for men 65 have traditionally marked one’s formal induction into the status of Old Age Pensioner but these transitions are losing their power, much as 21 lost its relevance, because the age at which the pension kicks in is to change. After 65, every five years carry the threat of being celebrated as another earnest of staying alive, until the Queen adds her greeting when one makes 100 (I don’t imagine that, if I become a centenarian, it will be the present monarch from whom I hear, determined to stay on the throne though she evidently is).

If you manage to survive to your late 90s, I imagine that a primitive desire to achieve “the ton” must kick in, if you haven’t completely lost your marbles by then. The great songwriter Eubie Blake, celebrating his centenary in 1983, declared “if I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself”. He died five days later and maybe he knew it was coming because it then emerged that he was in reality only – ha! only – 96.

Eubie Blake

I don’t obsess about my age. One may as well accept that, from the moment of birth to the moment of death, one is perpetually the oldest one has ever been. Where’s the use in getting to 45 and wishing you were 35 again when, ten years on, you’ll just wish you were still 45? Better to live the present to the full, whatever the number of rings through one’s core. The only time my age really hit me was when I turned 33 and I remember reflecting to myself: “I never thought about being this old”. The killing of John Lennon in December of that year felt deeply like a symbol of the end of my generation’s youth.

As presenting a moving target seems a good philosophy in most of life’s endeavours, so avoiding a sense of being hemmed into a particular age group feels like a smart way of fending off the curse of age – any age. I’m pretty incompetent, in any case, at accurately guessing people’s ages. The passing of the years leaves its mark in so many varied ways. Superficially at least, some people seem to alter hardly at all over long periods. Others metamorphose into someone who appears to be wholly other. The rock star Jack Bruce, for instance, bears no discernible trace of his 28 year-old self who was world-famous as part of Cream and yet he remains a remarkably spruce-looking 68, certainly not the Falstaffian ruin that the yet unmistakeable 70 year-old David Crosby has become.

Bruce then and now

An old friend told us recently of how she renewed acquaintance with someone she had not seen for 40-some years. He became uncomfortable at the way she was gazing at him and elicited from her this unguarded explanation: “I’m trying to find the face I remember”. The rest of their reunion was understandably marked by a certain froideur.

Crosby then and now

Anxious not to acquire, with Congreve’s Lady Wishfort, a “face like an old, peel’d wall”, increasing numbers of both men and women go in for cosmetic surgery and other drastic interferences with nature. This is always and without exception a mistake. Plastic surgery and botox turn one’s face into a more or less immobile mask and rob it of character, which is predominantly the very quality that made it attractive in the first place. In any case, attempting to pass off one’s face or one’s figure as that of a younger person is only ever a partial denial of the years. There are so many other clues to one’s true age: one’s hands, one’s eyes, one’s skin, one’s bearing, one’s walk and – perhaps the greatest giveaway and the most difficult to rejuvenate – one’s attitudes.

To appear younger is widely thought to be the next best thing to actually being younger. It’s a myth. I write as one who, for years, has routinely been taken to be younger than he is. I suppose my features have not changed all that much. I have kept my hair, the greyness of which is only really apparent under certain light. Like almost everyone except the ill, I weigh rather more than I did at 17 but I could not be termed, I think, in any way obese. I like to say that, though Mark Lawson is fifteen years my junior, he looks fifteen years older than I do.

50-somethings – Morrissey and co

But if ever someone rather ruefully remarks this Peter-Pan-ishness, I swiftly head it off at the pass. There is a down side too. Whereas I might be said to be a 64 year-old who is in fairly good shape, I am instead inclined to be taken for a 50-something who has let himself go. You decide which is preferable.

Not that everyone has found me so young-looking. One time I was striding up the stairway at the National Theatre. I could hear a woman calling “Michael, Michael” behind me but knew of no reason to turn. However, the calls got nearer and more urgent and I stopped and let her catch up whereupon she presented herself, rather flustered, and said: “Michael!” But already, before I could disabuse her, a pleat of doubt had crossed her face. “It is Michael Frayn, isn’t it?”

Michael Frayn

Now, Mr Frayn’s resemblance to me extends no further than our both being fair and bespectacled. He is at least half-a-foot taller than me. And – and here I found my pursuer losing my sympathy – he is not only balding but fourteen years (fourteen years!) older than me. And – I hope he will forgive – he rather looks it. Still, Mr Frayn is both an admirable writer and an admirable man. Rather more credibly, I fear, I have more than once been mistaken for the voice-over actor Enn Reitel, not a resemblance I would eagerly seek, even though he is a few years younger than me.

Enn Reital

The changes that the years bring are a matter of endless fascination and not a little emotion, the main reason (I am sure) why I am so looking forward to 56 Up next Monday. Initiated by Denis Forman’s Granada Television back in the days when that ITV company had the programme-makers to challenge the BBC’s creative and intellectual clout, 7 Up gathered a group of seven year-olds chosen primarily in the expectation that the class differences between them would prove to be unassailable – a very ‘60s preoccupation. Reuniting most of them at seven-year intervals ever since has been one of British television’s most potent and stimulating projects, generating spin-off versions in several other countries that do not seem to have lasted the course (or at least are no longer shown in Britain).

It will be instructive to discover whether the Granada guinea-pigs have found traversing their 50s as revealing as I did. The element that I had not anticipated was the extent to which one became so aware of the ageing process. Any kind of exertion, even the mildest, began to take considerably longer to get over than hitherto: while I could still run for a bus – and, up to a point, can still do so – it would take the whole bus journey to recover. What’s more, I found myself making the identical grunting and wheezing noises to accompany almost any physical action that my father used to emit in his latter years. Perhaps this is the most disheartening aspect of being a quinquagenarian: one becomes one’s parents.

Denis Healey, photographed in 2006, will be 95 in August

In one’s 60s, I have learned, the evidence of physical deterioration that is surely going to preoccupy and even overwhelm one in old age begins to define itself (unless, of course, one has had the misfortune that such conditions made their presence felt rather earlier). The heft of the phrase “one’s declining years” begins to be rather more apparent.

And the view of society adds to this awareness. If I get myself knocked down by a car or arrested for a drunken affray in the street, the local newspaper will doubtless now describe me as “an elderly man”. I have no friends or acquaintances under 80 whom I think of as remotely “elderly” but the language has settled on its distinctions. Even more bizarrely, people probably need to be at least 45 before the demeaning adjective “ageing” – and it is meant to be demeaning – is used of them. Show me someone who isn’t ageing and I’ll show you a corpse. You may as well make “alive” a term of scorn.

The OED locates the late ‘60s as the time when the term “ageism” first appeared; it is now certainly part of everyone’s everyday vocabulary. Doubtless, the aggressive self-confidence and presumption of my generation, the baby boomers, has reinforced the notion that to be past one’s youth is not in some mysterious way a sin or failure or disability. Nevertheless, there is clearly an unexpressed prejudice against older workers in the employment market, if only because employers believe that they can get away with offering lower rates of pay to youngsters.

When it comes down to it, though, every phase of life has its pluses and its minuses and the clichés about those phases remain potent: “young and foolish”, “to be young was very heaven”, “youth is wasted on the young”, “Youth is full of pleasance,/Age is full of care”, “older and wiser”, “anecdotage”, “the lean and slipper’d Pantaloon”. And, curiously enough, the most banal of such saws may be the most penetratingly pertinent of them all: you’re as old as you feel.

HERE’s YOUR CLASS

For a quarter of a century, I interviewed writers, directors, actors and comedians for newspaper and magazine articles. My first victim was the dramatist Christopher Hampton, my last the director Robert Altman. Among many others in between were Henry Fonda, Max Wall, Beryl Reid, Hal Prince, Trevor Griffiths, Paul Scofield, George Burns, Alan Simpson & Ray Galton, Edward Bond, Sue Pollard, Mervyn LeRoy, Stanley Baxter, Donald Sinden, Betty Marsden, Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Berkoff, Ursula Andress, Ken Dodd, Joel Grey and Patricia Routledge.

I learned one golden rule very quickly: that an interview is only as good as the interviewer, not the interviewee. Whether for print, screen or radio, a well-prepared, imaginative interviewer who listens can make the dullest subject – Cameron Diaz, say – come across as interesting. A cloth-eared, self-centred interviewer can disrupt the timing of even a Peter Ustinov.

The interview as a television form has been making something of a comeback, largely because it is one of the cheapest ways of filling a BBC hour or a commercial half-hour. Mark Lawson, who falls into the cloth-eared camp as far as I am concerned, gets regular hour-length slots to fill on BBC4 and, I guess, has a lot of say in whom he gets to interview even though, in recent times at least, his interviews have been apt to be slotted into themed runs: thus tonight his interview complements the opener of a short series on British sculpture. I might be more likely to watch if the programme were entitled Anthony Caro Talks to ... Mark Lawson but it follows the usual formula of Mark Lawson Talks to ... Anthony Caro and who the hell wants to watch that? But, having caught the end credits of a lot of his interviews while awaiting the start of something less irritating, I notice that he rarely enjoys the services of the same producer and/or director twice, so I cannot help wondering if this suggests that he is impossible to work with.

Mark Lawson Doesn't Listen to ...

Sky Arts have been bankrolling two interview series: In Confidence has Laurie Taylor quizzing a variety of accomplished individuals, mostly not from among the usual suspects; In Conversation has Derek Malcolm taking on a range of movie directors and actors. Taylor’s approach is the nearest in recent years to that of the granddaddy of serious cultural interview series, Hugh Burnett’s Face to Face, which was presented by John Freeman. Though it ran only from 1959 to 1962, that series still casts a long shadow, particularly among those who mourn the dumbing-down of television. The format was that the interview was broadcast live and hence uncut and the focus didn't leave the subject’s face (shown from two or three angles) – Freeman was never seen. The range of guests was huge, from Bertrand Russell to Danny Blanchflower, Hastings Banda to Cecil Beaton, Edith Sitwell to Nubar Gulbenkian, Carl Jung to Adam Faith. Of all the interviewees, only Bernardo Bertolucci and Albert Finney survive, but Freeman himself, splendidly, turns 96 this month.

The great John Freeman

The present granddaddy of interview series pretends to be a seminar. Inside the Actors Studio sits a professional before an audience (supposedly) of students of Pace University in New York (rather than the actual Actors Studio itself). The guest is interviewed according to a well-worked format by the dean of the Pace Actors School, James Lipton, and has been recorded for transmission since 1994 (a total of sixteen seasons). In Britain, the individual programmes are shown in any old order and have been shunted around the satellite, housed variously by the Biography Channel, Performance, Sky Arts and now Sky Atlantic (both the latter two channels screened the Hilary Swank edition last Sunday).

Episodes from the first three seasons, many of which did not get onto air at the time, can be considered as collectors’ items: Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Shelley Winters, Dennis Hopper, Arthur Penn, Carol Burnett, Christopher Walken, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Reeve. Mike Nichols. How enticing to be able to see those – why has no broadcaster snapped up the rights?

Le vrai Lipton at work

Of course, the sessions are cut to ribbons for transmission. The ellipses are very apparent, none more so than in the interview with Peter Falk. Every continuity person in the movies will tell you that the biggest headache for editing is cigarettes. Falk chain-smoked through his interview – you still could on public platforms in New York City in 1999 – and the respective lengths of his cigarettes shot back and forth like Roadrunner.

This being an American show, much time that could be accorded to matters of substance is wasted on applause, in particular the applause that denotes recognition (a much feted movie, say, or the name of a great star dropped). Naturally, the audiences are generally enthusistic, though poor Ellen Barkin could barely half-fill the hall. Other precious minutes are taken up by establishing the guest’s credentials. In his introduction, James Lipton always gives a comprehensive run-down of the award nominations that the guest has received, however fatuous they might seem, and then, as each movie comes up for discussion, reiterates the nominations that the particular performance has garnered. “All right, already” you shout at the screen, “it’s still a pretty crappy movie”. What’s more, Lipton modulates his welcome according to the awards. He is “proud” to welcome a guest who has never won an Oscar, “very proud” to welcome an Oscar-winner and “very, very proud” when it’s a two-time Oscar-winner (like Swank). But people who hand out awards are not the sole judges of merit. The arbitrary and destructive nature of awards (and of honours) may perhaps furnish the subject for another posting as the prize-giving season gets into its stride.

The main problem with Inside the Actors Studio is that it is such a missed opportunity. Talking seriously about the craft of film-making is a perfectly useful exercise. Several years ago, before Lipton cornered the market, my old pal Beth Porter and I took a notion to The Guardian when it was in the process of investigating how it should join the on-line market. Our proposal was to build a bank of formatted interviews with actors, all answering an identical, comprehensive list of questions, upon which television programmes could draw for illustrative material. Our title was Lights, Camera, Acting! We thought we had hit on a winner. We got to pitch it to a guy who looked like a school-leaver and whose surname, rather worryingly, was Murdoch. We never heard back from him.

Lipton is a really terrible interviewer. His self-regard is such that he can never resist telling his guests how much he and they have in common, from which continuous reinforcement of public detail the regular viewer knows well that Lipton comes from the mid-west, that his parents divorced when he was a child, that he shares a birthday with Jeremy Irons (how utterly fascinating, Jim), that he is the proud holder of a pilot’s licence and a regular horse-rider, that he would have a tattoo if his wife would only allow it, that he was spoofed by Will Ferrall on Saturday Night Live and is determinedly genial about it, that he once arranged a gala in London at which the guest of honour was the Duke of Edinburgh, that he has acted in and written soap operas, acted on Broadway and in Hollywood, written book and lyrics for a musical and produced television specials including for Bob Hope. He is also a Francophile and a proud Chevalier. And of course he is a teacher of drama and, though there is comparatively little talk about technique, at least until the students get to ask questions, he is always keen to signal that he knows or knew every acting teacher to be mentioned. One of the most legendary of all American acting teachers, Nina Foch, is perhaps known to the widest public for her role as the “older woman” chasing Gene Kelly in An American in Paris. Lipton was married to her for a few years in the 1950s.

The programme logo

Lipton is also a sucker for a party turn, especially a (snatch of) song or dance and, that arsehole of show business, an impersonation. “Oh god” he is apt to laugh suddenly, the kind of laugh that sounds utterly phoney. This stuff is mere playing to the gallery, nothing whatever to do with the study of acting or movie-making, but of course the guests love to be called upon to show off. Only Barbra Streisand, who anyway resisted the show’s invitation for a long time, made it clear that she wasn’t doing any singing from cold. Quite right too.

Before throwing it to the floor, Lipton ends with a questionnaire. He used to characterise this document as being “invented by Marcel Proust”, perhaps misled by the magazine Vanity Fair, which has long run its own variation on the exercise, calling it ‘The Proust Questionnaire’. Someone has evidently set Lipton right. In reality, Proust was the most famous person to have submitted himself to a similar questionnaire – on two occasions, the first as an adolescent – and to have given the most precocious and high-falutin answers.

Lipton always attributes the questions he employs to Bernard Pivot, smug in the knowledge that his (Lipton’s) audience will never encounter this person, though we did get to see him when Lipton and the production team took a trip to Paris to record interviews with Jeanne Moreau and Juliet Binoche. The French broadcaster is clearly as dopey as Lipton. The questions are:

– What is your favourite word?
– What is your least favourite word?
– What turns you on?
– What turns you off?
– What sound or noise do you love?
– What sound or noise do you hate?
– What is your favourite curse word?
– What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
– What profession would you not like to attempt?
– If heaven exists, what would you like to hear god say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

"The Great Bernard Pivot"

How can anyone have a favourite or a least favourite word? Virtually all Lipton’s victims cite an attractive or repellent concept – energy or truth or negativity and so on. Few offer a sequence of sounds they find especially euphonious or horrisonant – imbroglio, say, or montbretia or thew. My response to this question would be that I am a writer, all words are my friends, though those upon the spelling or exact nuance of which I forever trip are treacherous friends. Again, many things turn one on and off, many sounds likewise. Some guests are so keen to ingratiate that they give as a sound their children laughing or saying ‘Daddy’. Eeeuuuuwwww!

The curse is often bleeped for transmission, rather defeating the purpose. Anyone routinely deploying an expletive is anyway in danger of becoming a prize bore. As for professions, why would anyone working in a state of perpetual ego-massaging for millions of dollars on the world’s most envied racket think of another profession? Ah, but they want to be rock stars, write children’s books and give their names to wines and perfumes as well.

Finally, heaven doesn’t exist. Anyway (it’s hardly my place to correct the interpretation of other people’s superstitions, but) it isn’t god who greets you at the pearly gates: “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” Christ says to Peter [St Matthew’s Gospel 16:18-19]. I would want St Peter to say: “Don’t worry, there’s no questionnaire”. I never saw any form that made a fit with my circumstances or asked questions I cared to answer as framed; and questionnaires are the most perverse form of forms.

Over the years, it’s not to be wondered at that Lipton has become a parody of himself. Now (perhaps surprisingly) 84, he may be the only man on television whose hair and beard are dyed different colours. He clings to his prompt cards as to a life saver and rarely veers from his standard set of questions, beginning with: “Where were you born?” (hurrah if it was in the mid-west). These are the questions of an attorney, questions to which the questioner already knows the answers. (Were it me being asked who was my co-star in such-and-such a movie, I’d be sorely tempted to reply: “I don’t know, I haven’t seen it”). A proper interviewer, seeking new knowledge, asks questions to which he doesn’t know the answers.

Lipton and guest Liza Minnelli

Another infuriating tic is the question that begins “when [for instance] Robert De Niro and Marty Scorsese occupied that chair, they told us about the experience of making Goodfellas. What was your experience?” I would want to reply: “Well, funnily enough, when Larry King interviewed me, he asked about Goodfellas too”. I mean, what has it got to do with the present guest that his predecessors have talked about a movie that he was in?

After the dreaded questionnaire, Lipton blessedly departs the stage, handing the guest over to “your class” and the students pitch their own concerns, usually a lot more probing than Lipton’s and yielding more interesting responses but of course the television cut allows only a couple of these. After all, there are the credits to be got through. You can be sure that Lipton’s three end-credits (count ‘em) are perfectly legible, along with the one he had at the top of the show, but what Leona Helmsley famously called “the little people” whizz by in a blur. At least Lipton’s “tailored clothes” no longer get a credit that would have been the reward for dressing him at no cost (and you bet he got to take them clothes home).

How much longer will television draw from this well? Anthony Hopkins was the first Brit to guest on Actors Studio but not before the fourth season. John Hurt followed him the next year and then, as the list of willing Yanks was whittled down, more and more of them were invited, even some, like Vanessa Redgrave, who only really wanted to talk about the theatre. In recent years, Hopkins has been among those who have returned for a second session. Moreover, the net has been thrown wider and wider, now embracing stars of television comedy, rock musicians and even ensemble casts.
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Adam Godley as Elliott

On the subject of British actors in America, I was amazed to see Adam Godley turn up in the episode of Breaking Bad most recently broadcast in Britain on the FX channel. Godley is a surpassingly English actor – among his triumphs was his performance as Kenneth Williams in Terry Johnson’s comedy Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick at the National Theatre over a decade ago – yet here he was playing a wholly American character (the hero’s oldest friend) in an American teledrama. When you think of the numberless native actors in their mid-40s who could have played the role, it does seem extraordinary that a Brit should land it. But then all the comic superheroes currently being regurgitated for the movies are being played by Brits. I suppose the secret must be that they come cheaper than Americans.

Incidentally, I like Breaking Bad very much. It’s a noirish tale about a chemistry teacher going spectacularly off the rails after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. The spiral he plunges into, through a mixture of circumstance and impulse, develops enticingly and with the right level of mordant humour. Bryan Cranston’s gritted-teeth portrayal of the anti-hero, never remotely tempted to try for the ingratiating, gets it pinpoint right. His reward has been an Emmy for “outstanding lead actor in a drama series” for each year that it has played. Vince Gilligan, who cut his teeth on The X Files, is the instigator and director.

Breaking Bad: the poster

But why has it taken three years to reach Britain? In the States, it will begin its fourth season in the summer and I cannot imagine how it will have sustained its premise through more than thirty episodes. How long must we wait to find out?

VOTE, VOTE, VOTE for PUBLIC ENEMY nos 1-to-20

The list of “greatest television dramas” constructed by The Guardian last week (see the immediately previous posting) got me thinking about the compelling need for yet more lists. So here I propose one that all of us can enjoy: The Twenty Most Overrated and Irritating Figures in the Public Eye.

Having dibs on the notion and, what’s more, proprietorial rights on this particular corner of the world wide web, I shall herebelow propose my own list of overexposed underachievers, but I do urge my readers to join in the sport and to add to, amend, reinforce or excoriate any or all of my choices (and do tell your e-familiars; who knows, we may together begin a thread that eventually topples a star and gets a mention on BBC Breakfast).

There are those “celebrities” who, were I to encounter them on any kind of regular basis, would, I feel sure, propel themselves into the lists. Sensing that they are emphatically not for me, I simply skirt their manifestations. As a result, I would argue that, in all good conscience, I should not include them if I cannot begin to essay any account of why they are to be publicly humiliated. Others are welcome to sketch quite what it is that makes them so compellingly dispensable. For the record, I will here list these also-rans alphabetically but in the manner we are perforce accustomed to on the net (as illustrated in my index of subject labels to the right of the site), to wit, in alphabetical order of their forenames: Ant & Dec, Chris Evans, David Gest, Gordon Ramsay, Katie Price (whoever that is), Paris Hilton, Richard & Judy, Sadie Frost and Simon Cowell. These are people who – I am relieved to admit – I simply do not feel competent to describe.


A complete winker

Unlike the following, the real list:

Andrew Lloyd Webber: Crossover artists are always deeply suspect and His Lordship has been crossing over these 40 years. His father William was a distinguished if not especially individual composer, particularly for the organ (his instrument), his mother was musical too and his brother Julian is of course a renowned cellist (if not a very arresting one). Andrew was a published composer at nine and went on to study at the RCM. His long career as a composer of musicals has continually brought an ersatz operatic style to the form, most obviously aping Puccini (I have traced the main theme of one of his most popular and most recorded songs, ‘The Music of the Night’ from Phantom of the Opera to a passing phrase in La Fanciulla del West: “e provai una gioia strana,/una nuova pace che dir non so!”, the last two lines of Dick Johnson’s ‘Quello che tacete’ in Act One. It’s a barefaced lift). Lloyd Webber has worked with the three worst British toilers in the field of writing lyrics – Don Black, Ben Elton, and Sir Tim Rice – but his shows, especially Phantom, have enjoyed vast, unprecedented success and have made him seriously wealthy. My sense of it is that he has brilliantly tapped into the shallowness of the age and that, like Chu Chin Chow and the shows of Ivor Novello (which were comparably popular in their day), his work will not stand the test of time.

Anne Robinson: In truth, I see The Weakest Link very rarely. As a quiz, it’s hardly at a level comparable with University Challenge or BBC4’s Only Connect. Even so, the simplest questions appear to defeat contestants, whether obscure or famed, on a regular basis (see Private Eye’s regular selection under the title ‘Dumb Britain’). Robinson’s preposterous Nurse Diesel act may make some viewers long for her to meet her match but it just turns me off. Much of the reason for that repellent quality is that it is patently phoney, a not very well applied mask for the purposes of stirring up the contestants. And how her producer can permit her to perpetrate a wink at the end of every edition beats me. Winking is a peculiarly naff form of communication at the best of times but anyone who, like Robinson, cannot actually perform it properly should be soundly beaten until she stops. It astounded me that the US took her to its bosom when the show was launched on American television but at least her star fell there as swiftly as it had risen. I don’t imagine it hurt her pension fund, however.


"That barbeque's in Birmingham – and that's your weather"

Daniel Corbett: Modern weather forecasting is a debased endeavour, with a curious, florid meta-language of its own. But Corbett is the only one I actually have to switch off before hearing his forecast. He thinks he’s a redcoat, I imagine. Certainly he believes that patronising his audience with matey references to “that barbeque” or “those umbrellas” is endearing. It’s not. Just tell us the bloody weather, you prat. To discover that he learned his trade on American television, where he was a much prized (and, I imagine, much mimicked) token Englishman, explains a great deal about his style and manner. Come back, Bert Foord, all is forgiven (oh sorry, you can’t, you’re dead).

Delia Smith: This entry, I realise, could be the most inflammatory in the list. Delia has legions of devoted fans. Why? Talk about Little Miss Suburban. It always seemed to me that she has never had an original thought in her dreary little head and learning, as we have lately, that she “cheats” (her word) was no surprise to this viewer. Her descriptive powers are certainly not tested by her recipes – “nice” seems to be her most emphatic term of approval. Her idea of “a pinch” of some ingredient always looks as if it is in actuality about half a cup, and “a small cup” about a cauldronful. There are of course way too many television cooks, most of them wholly unnecessary and some not at all watchable (Tamasin Day-Lewis always looks to me as though she could do with a good scrub, either before or after removing all that finger jewellery that she repellently wears while at work). So Delia may stand as representative of a whole deplorable breed.

Esther Rantzen: This woman has been a major part of the British television landscape for more than 40 years. A great deal of her work has been dedicated to shoehorning serious and even urgent issues in alongside matters of stultifying triviality, as if to proclaim that it is all grist to her limitless mill. Eloquently enough, her most widely viewed vehicle (it ran for more than two decades) was called That’s Life. That show grew out of On the Braden Beat, a light consumer affairs magazine made by ATV that switched to the BBC and employed Rantzen as a researcher. When Bernard Braden was sacked after doing an ITV advert (a BBC contract breach), Rantzen got her chance. Not dissimilarly, her chat-and-issues show, Esther, was carefully modelled on Oprah. Such programmes gave her a succession of vehicles upon which to leap, preferably of a heart-on-sleeve, campaigning nature. (She must seriously wonder where her damehood has got to). It’s the trademark Rantzen smug grin that always gets me, the one that seems to say “and I brought you this heart-tugging story/colourful character/smuttily-shaped potato, I did, me”. Now she reckons to be standing for parliament as an independent anti-expenses candidate. The voters of Luton South should be sure to demand full disclosure of her BBC expenses.


Eyes up, please

Fiona Bruce: It’s not just Bruce’s faintly creepy and oleaginous manner that turns me off, it’s also that way she puts a surprised spin on certain words of a news story, like a junior school teacher trying to catch the kids’ attention. Don’t patronise me, Fiona. If it weren’t already worthy of my attention, it wouldn’t be on the news. And here’s another weird thing. Ordinarily, I don’t find myself looking at women’s breasts but Bruce always seems to wear clothes that draw your attention to her flat-chestedness, as if she’s making a virtue of it. This is most disturbing. Of course one looks in an appraising manner at people on the box, notes that one is overweight, another thin-lipped, another rather camp. Personally, I don’t feel that newsreaders need to be especially easy on the eye as long as their appearance isn’t positively distracting. I never wanted to watch that newsreader who had the look of a woman who appears in porn movies (you know the one I mean). I especially liked Moira Stewart who I thought was charming-looking, but more important had a deliciously authoritative voice that made me pay attention. I was astonished when she was “pensioned off” as too old. But if I’m squirming at Bruce’s vocal quirks and staring at her (lack of) tits, I’m not getting proper value from the news. And I think it must be significant that, without thinking about it at the time, I found myself drifting away (after many devoted years) from Antiques Roadshow pretty much as soon as she took over from Michael Aspel. I read that the figures have increased since she joined (though it also has a different transmission slot) so what do I know?

Gary Lineker: Not being interested in football, it should be noted that I haven’t seen the majority of Lineker’s broadcasting work and I am in no way qualified to assess his days as a player. But I sometimes watched They Think It’s All Over, mostly because I found the regular feature in which blindfolded panellists felt their way round a mystery guest was one of the most astonishing and captivating things on the box. The quiz part didn’t interest me (and I couldn’t stand Rory McGrath and other participants) but the way Jonathan Ross smelt Lineker’s blood and cruelly undermined him like a schoolyard bully made me think Lineker was a major wimp. It’s not that he’s just too "nice", because I feel sure that he isn’t at all "nice". Certainly the years he coined it fronting the ad campaign to push unhealthy crisps at kids undermined any claim he might have had as a role model. When Chris Morris stitched him up royally in his Brass Eye special, nominally on paedophilia but in reality on the stupidity of media coverage, Lineker was exposed as a fool who would do anything for cash and exposure. Sounds right. And serves him right.


Fifteen years older – than everybody


Ian McKellen: I have followed McKellen’s career pretty much from its outset, having seen him in the 1960s in the West End in The Promise, alongside two other young thesps of promise, Ian McShane and Judi Dench, then in the double whammy of the title roles of Richard II and Edward II that he played at Edinburgh, at the Mermaid and on tour, thereby sealing his reputation. By that time, those of us who sussed these things already knew that McKellen was gay, but it was another twenty years before he “came out” as we’d almost given up calling it by then and doing so, rather shamingly, only through the urgings of gay activists in the States. Knighted by a notably homophobic Tory government in 1991, he became known in the biz as Serena but hey, girlfriend, I prefer to call ‘er Damian. While not quite as pompous about his title as Sir Ben Kingsley, Damian is clearly proud of it and it is often included in his credit when he appears as himself. The London Lighthouse centre for HIV care has an Ian McKellen Room, dubbed before his elevation, but wouldn’t The McKellen Room have sufficed, if indeed his support really needed to be so acknowledged at all? All of that aside, McKellen makes my list for his acting, which I have never truly enjoyed. I have seen him enough to know all his tricks. And I have never witnessed a performance of his – not even his Macbeth, Iago or Richard III, and villainy suits him best – when I couldn’t detect the wheels going round. In that respect, he is like a parody of a stage-trained actor, a latter-day Donald Wolfit (whom I am old enough to have seen on stage), the opposite of an American movie actor. Mostly his screen performances are just too big for the medium – he hasn’t learned the obvious lesson that the camera projects to the back of the balcony for you. So while I concede that he has given his all to acting, especially in the classical repertoire, I think more rounded players have led the profession before and will do so again.

James Nesbitt: From the would-be sublime to the frankly ridiculous: most actors do not enjoy a career like Damian’s. These fifty years, television has provided a good living to thousands of jobbing actors, many of them very accomplished, some – like Michael Bryant who specialised in challenging television roles in the 1960s and ‘70s before leaving the medium altogether and spending some twenty years as the backbone of the National Theatre company – utterly brilliant. In recent years, casting directors (the curse of the business in my view but that’s an argument for another day) have focussed on a small group of supposed bums-on-seats actors to such an extent that dramas are hard put to get the green light unless at least one of these privileged people has signed up. What is so depressing about this system is the dreary quality of those players: Robson Green, Amanda Burton, Martin Shaw, you know the type. James Nesbitt may even be the best of them but, dear god, haven’t we seen everything he does over and over again? If the hands of directors and producers weren’t tied by know-nothing executives who can’t make a decision unless at least a dozen marketing people have done their “research”, we might get teledramas that were appropriately and interestingly cast. As it is, you know that if Nesbitt and his peers are taking the lead, it won’t be anything you haven’t seen before, probably better done.


Cheeky Chappie


Jeremy Clarkson: The American radio shock jock is evidently a force in that land and largely responsible for the otherwise inexplicable collapse in President Obama’s support. The nearest thing we have here to Rush Limbaugh and co is Juvenile Larksome, the all-mouth-and-trousers opinionist and climate-change denier. Needless to report, I have never seen a single minute of Top Gear which, I understand, is now followed on a global scale. Well, my old friend, we are going to hell in a handcart and no doubt the Juvenile is steering that handcart. Meanwhile, I suppose every age has to have a licensed blowhard bloke and at least until this one is rendered dead or quadriplegic by driving head-on into a bus queue at 130 miles-per-hour, we probably won’t have need of another one.

Madonna: Whatever one says about Madge, she’s certainly a world-beater at one skill – self-publicity. She persuades commentators and punters alike that she constantly reinvents herself and that the latest manifestation is even better than the last. As my partner puts it, she’s especially adept at catching every passing wave. A large part of that self-promotion is her aggressive projection of her own sexuality. But this kind of appeal is hardly new – think Clara Bow, Mae West, Eartha Kitt, Julie London, Marilyn Monroe, Lena Horne, Tina Turner, Pat Phoenix … As a performer, singer, songwriter, interpreter of a lyric, several of her contemporaries are or were superior: Annie Lennox, Bette Midler, Sade, Cyndi Lauper, Chaka Khan, Alison Moyet and Kirsty McColl for starters. I would rather bracket Madonna with Whitney Houston, Donna Summer and Cher – in other words, pretty limited performers whose natural constituency was quite small but who drew attention to themselves (and hence to varying degrees expanded that fanbase) by behaving in an ostentatious way. Cher in particular has a saving grace that Madonna signally lacks: Cher doesn’t take herself seriously, indeed takes delight in sending herself up. Madonna could profitably study Cher’s stance.

Mark Lawson: Soi-disant polymath and incorrigible swankpot (“my 45th visit to the States”), Lawson is the jack of all trades/master of none for the age. Following the Clive James/Charlie Brooker route from television reviewing to television appearing, Lawson has a view about anything and everything and, necessarily, makes a wealth of egregious errors of both fact and judgment in expressing his view. He is certainly no great shakes as an interviewer, never having learned the first law of interviewing: an interview is as good as the interviewer, not the interviewee, so you have to listen to the answers as well as prepare the questions. Lawson of course thinks anyway that it’s about him rather than them. He’s wrong. I would happily watch, say, a programme called Alan Bennett Talks to Mark Lawson but why in hell would I want to see one called Mark Lawson Talks to Alan Bennett? And who wants to look at Lawson, a face for radio of ever there was one? He’s fifteen years younger than me but he looks all of fifteen years older.


Before and after lunch: Winner eats all

Michael McIntyre: Has anyone come down the pike lately who is quite so pleased with himself as this chortling stand-up comic? I thought the Cheeky Chappie style went out in the 1950s but McIntyre appears to thrive on it. In that he seems terribly impressed by everyone else, he is perfect for hosting that show whose title I forget that’s been on BBC1 recently; and indeed perfect for showbiz in general. Surely he’ll be hosting the BAFTA Awards before too long, which would present another perfect reason not to watch them. With any luck, he would do a Jack Docherty and thereafter sink without trace.

Michael Winner: As for being pleased with oneself, no one exudes self-satisfaction more expansively than the alleged movie director and gourmet. At the time, I was quite diverted by a couple of Winner’s ‘Swingin’ Sixties’ movies (I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Isname and The Jokers, though I can’t guess how they would look now), but nothing he’s made since is worth anyone’s time. The advertising satire of What’s ‘Isname sits awkwardly with Winner’s recent sideline as “an insurance salesman”. But his main showcase is playing restaurant critic for The Sunday Times. Winner earns his place in this list in part to represent all those non-journalists who have gaily taken the bread out of the mouths of bona fide journalists like me by writing (or, as often as not, merely putting their names to) columns in the papers. Not many movie directors do that. Roland Joffé had a general comment column in The Evening Standard for a while. The most common sort of celebrity columnists are novelists, sports people and stand-up comedians – is there any British humorist under 55 who has not at some point had a personal newspaper space? As a writer, Winner makes a competent lavatory cleaner at Kings Cross Station. I read the first third of his piece at the weekend and then flung the paper across the room.

Richard E Grant: There are plenty of actors whose careers are already a mystery and who then, as the parts start to dry up (or, like Simon Callow, they don’t after all get to play all the big classical roles), parlay themselves into a series of secondary careers as a personality-cum-cultural observer. While he seems to have clambered onto that track, Grant has also set off in other directions favoured by slipping actors, such as directing, writing novels and presenting programmes. A one-note actor if ever there was one, Grant got a seriously lucky break in his first movie role, playing the title character in Withnail and I. As a result of this, he can evidently do no wrong in some quarters. In others (like mine), he is the star of almost certainly the most overrated British movie ever made.


Simon Hogwash as a young lightweight

Simon Hoggart: Richard Hoggart, evidently in good shape at 91, is one of the great men of the age, having written several importanr books crowned by (almost certainly) the finest socio-cultural study since the War, The Uses of Literacy. There is no law that states that great men must have great sons and Richard doesn’t. Paul Hoggart is barely average in a field where mediocrity is the norm, that of television reviewing. The elder and wider-known son is Simon who has written for The Guardian for more than 40 years and did two stints chairing the radio News Quiz, a heavily scripted panel game. He writes parliamentary sketches, a lowly trade in which not very funny journalists (e.g. Quentin Letts) score easy points off politicians who work far harder and risk far more every day than such sketchers would dream of doing. He also writes a complacent diary column, frequently dependent on readers sending in stuff from which he has an unerring knack for selecting the least funny examples. He also fancies himself as a political sage, predicting a loss for Labour in the next election – how unusual – and lately setting himself up as a critic of Gordon Brown’s pronunciation, apparently unaware that the PM is a Scotsman. It’s way past time for a halfway good writer to replace him.

Stephen Fry: Fry can stand for all those Oxbridge graduates who arrived on the public stage bursting with talent and then frittered it away on frivolous, facile projects, so that the body of worthwhile work that they left was tragically and pitifully small, confined to the first decade or so of their working lives. I’m thinking of, for instance, Peter Cook and Richard Burton. John Cleese looks destined to accumulate a similar reputation. Like them, Fry appears unable to say no to any offer, especially if it’s easy money. Is there anything, one wonders, that he wouldn’t advertise? Fry provides another major source of irritation in that he is frequently accounted “the cleverest man on television”. Only someone who has never met anyone really clever would imagine such a thing. Then again, Fry is often not even the cleverest person on QI. And when I was a lad and television was bold enough to transmit programmes with intellectual content, programmes that actually dealt in ideas rather than trash, you saw people on the BBC every night of the week who would have eaten Fry for breakfast.

Steve Coogan: The last couple of decades have been marked by an enormous amount of overpraised television comedy, much of it heavily dependent on catch phrases that enthusiasts greet as uproariously on the five hundredth time of asking as on the first. I can’t list all the highly variable comedians to whom the strictures here apply but you know the kind of people I am writing about – Whitehouse, Lucas, Henry, Tate, Enfield – all of whom have done some work that is very nearly brilliant (usually more in concept and initial impact of execution than in any sustained level of working), but much more that is mere treading water. Coogan is the one who (along with David Walliams) interests me least. Alan Partridge seemed the dullest kind of running character with the weakest material – what kind of a show-stopping catchphrase is “Ah-ha!”? And if that’s (ah-ha) the point then it’s still only pointed the once and not exactly funny even the first time. You can perhaps argue on paper that Partridge always trotting it out is what makes it funny but only those who have willingly suspended belief (and critical faculty) can continue to enter into the spirit of the joke every time, behaving as if they are as deep-dyed wallies as Partridge is supposed to be. That is the definition of a comic dead end. Paul and Pauline Calf are less original creations and only intermittently successful, depending entirely on the script of the moment. Coogan is a passable actor but it’s hard to see him keeping his place in international movie-making unless he’s exceptionally lucky with projects that are brought to him.


Big Mc: News in Bun (Fry's not illustrated)

Trevor McDonald: Sir Trev always seemed to me to possess a sort of parody of gravitas, delivering the news as if at some level he heartily disapproved of most of it. Of course, he was the head honcho of News at Ten when it was in full decline, which was bad luck for him, save insofar as he contributed to that decline. What I couldn’t sanction was how, when editors had some grand occasion and put McDonald in as anchor, he consistently failed to rise to the occasion, neither able to improvise interestingly or authoritatively nor (worse) smart enough to conduct impromptu interviews with any degree of dash or resource. If he was cast as the Richard Dimbleby of the 1990s, he failed completely.

And who should be the twentieth candidate? How about Nick Ordinary, the man who brought blokeishness (and lists!) to the hitherto literary book? At one point in his highly-regarded novel High Fidelity, the hero describes the other guests at a dinner party vis-à-vis himself thus: “they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists”. This must be what commends these books to the kind of bloke who follows football, still has all his old vinyl albums and regularly throws beer down his neck in the pub, but who is sufficiently conscious that the nature of this life-style is unattractive to most desirable women that he actually reads books. Presumably, this too intrigues the women who seek to comprehend such a bloke. None of them has opinions but they do have lists. That the relationship between writer and reader should have dwindled so low makes me despair for the future of the novel. We want the legacy of Trollope and the Brontës, Arnold Bennett and Elizabeth Bowen, Ian McEwan and Beryl Bainbridge built on, not demolished. My edition of High Fidelity quotes that celebrated taste-maker for blokes, Tony Parsons: “Made me laugh out loud more than any book I can remember”. He’s not read Tristram Shandy, then.


Titchmarsh among fans

Or Alan Titchycock, the obsequious cardigan who virtually singlehanded invented the lingua franca of modern broadcasting – banter – and who slithers easily from gardening programmes to writing potboiler novels to conducting interviews with unchallenging guests while (so it is said) driving a certain kind of middle aged, myopic, housebound woman wild with lust?

Or Marathon Dimblebore, the longest-serving chair of Any Questions? I listen in spite of him. His style is highly interventionist (“hold on a second”). His verbal formulae are often curious; for instance, he ends his introduction of the guests, having summarised the last, with: “He’s the fourth member of our panel”. If it were me thus described, I would say, when first called upon: “I hardly have the temerity to open my mouth, having been firmly put in my place as the fourth member of the panel”. As is his wont, Dimbleby would then launch into a long-winded explanation as to why I should not feel less than an equal member of the panel and I should respond: “All that being said, the fourth is certainly not the first in any language or culture that I have encountered”. And Dimblebore would be off again.

There it is, a pretty persuasive list of dim stars, I’m sure you will agree. But do not, I beg you, feel that you are browbeaten into agreeing. Put in your twopenn’orth, do, by clicking on the Comment button just above the labels list that attaches itself to this particular posting, which requires the merest of scrolls downwards. In the few days after The Guardian’s teledrama list, there was a thread of some 1500 comments on the on-line version. I feel sure we can match that, maybe even trump it. Go for it.

And, while we do this, let’s remember good people – like Kate McGarrigle who died yesterday – and remember them for all the joy they have brought to the world.

OH BROTHER!

I deplored in my book Common Sense (see right sidebar for free download) the increasing tendency of BBC television news bulletins to be used to trail BBC programmes. You can bet that the near-fatal spill last summer by a reckless presenter of the car-lad show Top Gear would not have occupied such a succession of reports or such repetition of footage if the programme were made for ITV. At the weekend, the miraculously restored delinquent was to give his spin-by-spin account of the accident on the first edition of the new series (cue Radio Times cover) so, needless to say, “never before seen footage” was previewed repeatedly on BBC news bulletins.

At the same time, the whipped-up furore over Celebrity Big Brother was reaching its apparently unmissable climax. You sensed the reluctance with which BBC News knuckled down, embraced the agenda of the tabloids and reported the progress of this particular spectacle on a rival channel. The reluctance was carefully tempered with the emphasised subtext that Channel 4 had done itself no good by playing host to a meretricious abomination. Evidently someone called, I think, Jaded Ghastly, had been turfed out of the “house” for making remarks of a racist tone and, since then, has taken the well-travelled path to The Priory, a mansion wherein the staff rake in the lolly but otherwise walk around in white coats looking grave and studiously avoiding wealthy, untalented and thick-as-planks people who want to feel martyred.

By the by, isn’t it odd that two notions from Orwell’s 1984, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’, have been purloined by television production companies and had their meanings surgically removed in order to make a vacuous entertainment sound somehow weighty and significant? Perhaps television itself should check in to The Priory.

The news bandwagon has moved on to Birmingham, gathering equally empty-headed observations from passers-by about the “dramatic” police raids on supposed Muslim terrorists. Meanwhile the rent-a-prepared-to-do-anything-for-attention-crowd movement has moved to an even more ludicrous proposition, that people you can’t quite put a name to (obvious exception: Janet Screech-Talker) can learn to be nurses in the NHS. I so look forward to the first court case in which an insufficiently briefed “celebrity” is sued for infecting a patient with MRSA.

In The Guardian on Monday, that most authoritative of media commentators, Mark Lawson, was given a whole page upon which to ruminate on the climax of Big Brother. I only read the quote extracted and enlarged: “Viewers who wished to show themselves to be liberals had to switch over to watch Top Gear”. It’s quite surprising that Mr Lawson, given the authoritative nature of his commentary, has access to only two channels. But he lives in a world in which the only existence possible is watching television (though today, bemusingly, he writes about theatre, which I guess he must channel by osmosis). In our house, we watched neither Big Brother nor Top Gear. But that’s what you get with old-fashioned socialists.