The accusation is familiar, along with the suggestion that people like me are responsible for the fact that so many of the public despise mainstream politicians. I reject the charge, of course – all we try to do is to get straight answers to pretty straightforward questions, and often a cloud of obfuscation is as revealing as an unexpected outbreak of frankness. But I accept that if you present yourself uninvited in people’s homes, they will take a view on you. That’s how it goes. In my case the progression of newspaper-columnist opinion went from ‘a breath of fresh air’, through ‘Who does this cheeky bastard think he is?’, to ‘peevish old sod’. It is intrinsic to the trade I follow that we constantly seek novelty, and once the novel becomes familiar, it is ripe for aerial bombardment. The only hope then is that in the years when you’re wondering where you left your teeth before your afternoon nap, someone reaches for another cliché and deems you to have become a ‘veteran’ – as if you are a car on the London–Brighton run, and unlikely to get much beyond Croydon. Then you die.
There were dozens of letters in the cupboard, too – a tiny fraction, I suppose, of the total I received, and which I had kept for no rhyme or reason I could discern. I rather enjoyed hearing from viewers, since broadcasting is such a one-way business, and letters often described a first-hand experience of issues which would otherwise be hidden behind clouds of political verbiage. Since anyone who presents news or current affairs programmes on the BBC is effectively an employee of the viewers who are forced to pay the licence fee, they are perfectly entitled to say what they think of them. (Anyone who performs the same role on a commercial channel is also paid for by the viewer, of course, but rather more indirectly.) I relished the exchanges which often followed, and only a handful of times had to use the tabloid editor Kelvin MacKenzie’s tactic, which was to tell my correspondent that I would reluctantly have to ban them from watching. This generally led to even angrier letters, protesting, ‘You can’t do that – I pay the licence fee!’
I discovered that generally, if you’ve made a mistake it is best to answer a letter of complaint with ‘You’re quite right. I’m so sorry. I’ll try to do better.’ This often has the complainant writing back to say, ‘Oh, please don’t take it too seriously.’ The nuclear option is to employ the tactic refined by the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Rob ‘Piggy’ Muldoon: ‘Dear Mrs Smith, I think you should know that some lunatic is using your name and address to send offensive letters in the post.’* I perhaps sent something similar to the man who wrote from Sutton in Surrey during a journalists’ strike I supported in 1985. He described how he had arrived home, ‘blessing my luck at not having to look at you on television. Then I picked up the Standard, and damn me, there you were, leering in the front rank of the picket line, puffing out your chest like a stuffed ulotrichan and posing with drooping pants.’ I must have kept the letter as a vocabulary lesson – apparently ‘ulotrichan’ means having crisp hair.
Other letters included numerous requests to donate items for sale in charity auctions, or for recipes to be included in fundraising cookbooks – further evidence of the conviction I reached a few years ago, and which is quite the reverse of the impression given by most of the mass media, that most people are decent human beings. There are an awful lot of generally unacknowledged individuals doing terrific things in the world.
In one letter, someone said they had managed to read my palms off the television screen: ‘You are quite healthy and energetic. Minor ailments are inevitable and may sometimes do you much harm if you neglect them,’ followed by similarly vacuous diagnoses. Amateur cartoonists sent awful caricatures they had drawn; singers, songs they had written; and poets their poems. For a while, a kind viewer would post me hand-painted ties every couple of months. A lady still brings pots of jam she has made to recordings of University Challenge, and over the years plenty of fishing folk have sent me flies they have tied up with feather and fur, which they claim are ‘certain’ to catch salmon or trout. When I was blackballed by the Garrick Club (for the crime, apparently, of being beastly to politicians on television) I was bombarded with supportive letters from outraged club members I had never met. They coincided with numerous invitations to join other clubs, including the Crediton Men’s Group, where there was ‘no danger from bores – if someone’s being dull we tell him to shut up and buy us another pint’.
A public life is as inadequate an expression of the whole person as a patient’s medical notes – they only record what he or she told the doctor, and often disclose nothing much about the texture of their life. I suppose that when I eventually expire, the likely headline will be ‘Man Who Asked Same Question Fourteen Times Dies’. This is no more of a claim on anyone’s attention than ‘Man Who Collected 5,000 Tin Cans Dies’. It wasn’t fourteen times, but the repetition of that number proves that what matters is who produces the first account, and that was the figure used on the radio the morning after the notorious Michael Howard interview. The rest of the caricature – ‘Mr Rude’, the truculence, the so-called sneering, I just have to live with. Is it just the media which can only deal with a monochrome stereotype, or are we all a bit like that?
You don’t learn much more from personal tastes. I am a strong swimmer, love fly-fishing, drink more than the Department of Health says is good for us, and have a dodgy knee. I like dogs, but am allergic to cats. I am easily bored, read a lot, don’t watch much television, would love to be able to play a musical instrument but can only sing – badly – in the bath, dislike shopping and enjoy watching birds. For years I had to stay up late, and my real idea of a good time is to be in bed by 10.30. I don’t sleep particularly well, and I don’t much like kale. Or the parson’s nose on a roast bird. I would rather ride a bike than drive a car. I spent several years seeing a therapist, and several more on antidepressants. Though I think I’m an atheist, I have a passion for old churches. Occasionally I sit on the loo and shoot squirrels out of the bathroom window.
Journalists like to brag that their account of events is ‘the first draft of history’. Sometimes this is true, although it is really a boast that can only be made by a small minority of our trade. I have been lucky enough to have had an interesting job and to have worked with clever, funny people. We had a lot of laughs, and sometimes we found things out. That’s all. What follows does not pretend to be history or rounded portraiture, just some recollections of how it seemed at the time. There is often a disclaimer at the front of novels to the effect that ‘Any resemblance to individuals alive or dead is unintended.’ In a memoir, the reverse ought to be true – any similarity is entirely intentional. But, just as every witness to an accident tells a slightly different story, others will have discrepant memories from my own. As Bertrand Russell said, ‘When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man.’
‘The world is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think,’ that pipsqueak eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole is supposed to have said. He ignored the fact we can all both feel and think, and I find that what made me weep at the age of twenty made me laugh at fifty. Both responses are right, but as time passes the fierce clarity of youth gives way to a more textured