The challenge, as filming progressed, was how to get past the pontifical persona to a more honest and grounded version of the man. We had a meeting in the office to discuss ways we might do this. It was agreed that he seemed most ‘normal’ around his family and that his wife, Karron, in particular, came across as approachable and no-nonsense. We decided we should banish the big camera and the sound recordist, and with just two of us present – the director Alicia and myself – we would film an evening chez Eubank as they did their evening routine with the kids, followed by food, which we would order out, so as not to impose.
What followed was a domestic scene both familiar and bizarre, with four young children all making claims on Karron’s attention as she rushed up and downstairs signalling her exasperation, and Chris, in an almost surreal way, stood in the hallway in a handsome tailored suit and tie, seemingly doing not much of anything. I asked Karron if she wished Chris would help a bit more. ‘Yes, he’s lost the plot on that, I’m afraid. Totally and utterly. And I don’t mind telling the world about that. Useless. As most male men are I’m afraid.’
As it became clear that Karron was going to broadcast her feelings of frustration to the world, Chris’s face took on the hooded look of an Easter Island statue, and weirdly I couldn’t help feeling a degree of sympathy for him – self-styled role model to an abstract concept of the nation’s youth, dragged into an undignified domestic squabble on national TV about a more concrete kind of childcare.
Once the kids were in bed, Chris and Karron and I ate our takeaway in the kitchen. Chris was in a dress shirt, tieless now, with the sleeves rolled up. Seeming stung, he admitted to a style of parenting that was out of keeping with the modern way prescribed, as he saw it, by Richard & Judy and political correctness. He pleaded guilty to having almost never kicked a ball with his children. Then he said, ‘My father – can I remember my father playing with me? No. My father never played with me . . . I can remember my father telling me he loved me – behind a closed door, he was on the other side of the door – once.’ He paused, appearing emotional. ‘I give probably 80 per cent more to my children than my father gave me. And still it doesn’t come up to scratch. Well, what is scratch? That’s your perception. That’s your reality . . . I don’t feel guilty. I’m doing as much as I need to do.’
Afterwards, off camera, Chris said to me, ‘So you got what you wanted.’
I said my on-camera goodbyes to him and Karron a few days later at their house. I went in for a hug – ‘You’re too thpindly to hug,’ Chris said, and asked again whether I had found the chink in his armour. I told him, with a little flourish, that I had. The chink . . . was the armour. His obsessive need for self-protection was a weakness he needed to overcome. He didn’t think much of this analysis. He told me I hadn’t found the chink.
When the film eventually went out he was jubilant. ‘I’ve had all thortth of people coming up to me to tell me it’th a total win for me,’ he said. ‘You let yourthelf down with the documentary.’
Chris separated from Karron a few years afterwards. I still have a soft spot for the film, though it’s been a while since I watched it. I have a soft spot for Chris, too.
Ann Widdecombe was a difficult subject for me for very different reasons. The documentaries that had tended to work best so far were those that placed me as a straight man in a strange world – in subcultures that were alien or amongst people who were flamboyant or egotistical. Ann’s eccentricity was more low-key, genteel rather than outlandish. She was not a performer or a light-entertainment ‘turn’; she was a politician; the world of Westminster and MPs she inhabited was much more guarded, and her instinct for risk more finely tuned.
With Chris Eubank.
She was famous at that time for having been prisons minister and defending the shackling of pregnant inmates in hospitals. Later, as shadow home secretary, with her devout Catholicism informing her political positions, she had opposed gay marriage, opposed the equalization of the age of consent for men, opposed abortion, but hadn’t opposed the death penalty – a hanger and a flogger, she wanted that brought back. All of this might have made her unlikeable, but some found her uncompromising and antediluvian moral outlook appealing, possibly because of the unlikeliness of her physical appearance: tiny, rotund, with massive breasts but oddly slender limbs, and a small and delicate head that was crowned with a pudding bowl of hair. She was, as they say, a ‘conviction politician’, utterly sincere and a little unworldly.
The most intriguing factoid about Ann may have been that she was, so it was said, virgo intacta – like Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man, a possible candidate for a placatory offering to the gods. I don’t think Ann ever confirmed this but the rumour was widely circulated, based on her strict religious morals and her having never been married. I’d been told that she didn’t like addressing questions to do with her sex life – or rather her lack of one. Out of pique at this restriction, when filming commenced one morning at her house in Elephant and Castle, I made ‘the virginity issue’ an early question, figuring it was better to derail the project on the first day rather than waste each other’s time pussyfooting, ahem, around. We’d been looking at the furnishings and knick-knacks in her front room – plates with teddies on, pewter-wear, antique maps and ceremonial swords – when the subject was raised of what it was about her that had excited my interest.
‘You’re an intriguing public figure,’ I said. Then I asked, ‘What will we see in the documentary?’
‘If you tell me what intrigues you, I’ll tell you what’s coming up.’
I mentioned her outspokenness, then slid into an observation about her having announced she would never marry, landing gently on, ‘You’ve said you’re a virgin.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ Ann replied. ‘People ask impertinent questions, then make deductions. But I always tell people to mind their own business.’
‘Do you?’ I ventured. ‘I read last night a quote, and this surprised me, “If anyone says I’m not a virgin, I’ll sue them.” ’
‘As I said, I’m not going to go any further than I’ve just gone. I don’t regard it as anybody else’s business.’
‘Well, I’ll winkle away at that one.’
‘I was actually told you would not,’ Ann said, her head turning now to invoke my director Kate. ‘I said I wouldn’t agree to the documentary if it was along those lines. Frankly, I regard it as an impertinence.’
We weathered that wobble, for the moment at least, though Ann nearly pulled out a couple of days later due to a feeling that my questions were insufficiently serious – possibly it was an aftershock of the virgin question. Kate and I were summoned to an off-camera summit at Ann’s offices to get the project back on track. Ann said she’d felt badgered and bullied by my questions. She said that during one conversation, as she drove, the distraction of attempting to answer had caused her to break a traffic regulation – possibly she veered into a bus lane. For her, a stickler for law and order, it had been embarrassing and she held me responsible for beguiling her into criminal activity.
I took all of this on board and felt rather bad, particularly at the idea that I might have ‘bullied’ her – though there is an irony somewhere in the idea of a strident disciplinarian feeling ‘bullied’ by cheeky questions. She went on to mention her consternation at – as I saw it – a harmless bit of small talk when I’d spent the day with her in her Kent constituency and visited her home in a tiny town with a name like Zazie-dans-le-Métro. While waiting for someone, parked up in a car, I’d asked about the difference between the Duke and Duchess of Kent and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. How was it possible to have a duke and duchess and a prince and princess all of the same place? Wasn’t it likely to lead to civil war? Or were they in fact the same people? She didn’t seem any clearer than I was and, I suppose, as a royalist and Kent MP, she found that a little embarrassing.
Filming resumed, though there was always the lurking sense of her having mixed feelings about the projec
t, enjoying the attention but hating and resenting any question that hinted at salaciousness or even carnality. It was difficult for me, since I’d always regarded a person’s sexuality as a key to their personality and an exploration of intimate romantic relationships as the most reliable way of understanding who someone really is. With Ann that was all off limits, my hands were tied, and more than once I reflected on Anatole France’s observation, ‘Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.’
The most intimate moments with Ann came during a cruise on a Norwegian liner. Kate and I had finagled tickets at the last minute – I suspect one of the aged passengers had passed away – and we flew to Tromsø to join the ship halfway through the cruise, spending a night in the nacreous summer light of the Arctic Circle before we boarded. Ann had brought her mother, Rita, who was as cheeky and playful as Ann was stolid and withholding, and also a female friend of Singaporean heritage whose name I don’t recall – no sapphic interests are implied, I think they were just friends. Rita had written a poem about Kate and wanted to read it to us on camera. It began, ‘Kate ate a cake, Kate ate a jelly’, but how it went after that we will never know because Ann kept interrupting, telling her mother to be quiet, seeming to feel that to have a family member declaiming nonsense verse on TV would be a blot on the family honour.
At the end, when filming was completed, I felt we’d got away with it, just about, and had enough material to make an entertaining fifty minutes of television, but that we hadn’t broken through the crust of her carapace of self-protection. I was aware Ann probably regretted taking part in the programme, which didn’t feel great, but I didn’t dwell on it. By now I had bigger things to worry about, and for once it wasn’t the struggle to get programmes going, but something far weirder: the fact that a programme, having got going, had unexpectedly gone too far: blown up, and become a national news story, with me in the middle of it.
Chapter 17
Professional Objects of Curiosity
Making a documentary is like surfing. I imagine. I don’t surf. But there is a similar combination of applying skill and technique to elements that are outside your control. The ‘waves’ in this metaphor are the vagaries of life itself. You follow stories and people that have a likelihood of leading to actuality-driven scenes – a porn star failing to get wood on set, a confrontation provoked by a homophobic cult. On occasion you arrive at the beach with your board, having read reports of monster waves, only to find the sea as calm as a millpond. You keep coming back and usually, eventually, you get what you need. Or sometimes you don’t. And then on occasion the unexpected happens, and your contributors are accused of a bizarre sexual assault at a swingers’ party in Ilford.
The Hamiltons had been among the names we approached without thinking that hard about whether or not we really wanted to film with them. At that time they were fixtures of a low-wattage celebrity circuit. Neil Hamilton, a former minister of arch-Thatcherite views, had been forced out of politics for allegedly taking bribes in return for asking questions in parliament. He’d become a poster boy for what was termed Tory sleaze and had lost his seat in a high-profile election. His wife, Christine, had featured prominently in the coverage. Whereas Neil seemed mild and slightly robotic, she came across as fierce. She had helmet-like hair that looked as though it had been glued in place and when her dander was up, which was not infrequent, a scary basilisk gaze.
The accusation that Neil had taken bribes came from the owner of Harrods, Mohamed Al-Fayed. Fayed said he’d given Neil money in brown envelopes. Neil disputed this and brought a libel suit against the Guardian. He lost the suit, and a subsequent appeal, to the tune of several million pounds, finally declaring himself bankrupt a few months before we commenced filming.
At the time we approached, they were attempting to make lemonade from the lemons of their disgrace, plying their trade as ‘professional objects of curiosity’ – Neil’s term. Any money Neil earned was siphoned off to pay his legal debts; Christine wasn’t technically bankrupt so she could keep her fees for media appearances.
And there had been one or two suggestions of non-mainstream romantic practices, including an Oxford student who’d gone public to say that, during a speaking engagement at the university, Christine had snogged him.
They weren’t busy. As documentary material, it wasn’t a lot to go on. Still, they made an intriguing couple – there was something about them, his otherworldly quality and her intensity – and we weren’t exactly spoiled for options.
I arrived one summer morning, getting lost on the stairs leading to the top-floor flat in a modern block in Battersea. This was their London pied-à-terre. They also had a large rambling house in Cheshire but they were in the process of selling that to pay their legal bills. As was our custom in those days, we started with a tour of the place, chatting as we went. The Hamiltons were friendly, forthcoming, conscious of the need to perform for the camera.
The flat, which overlooked Battersea Park, was cosy and piled with knick-knacks and books. A mug in the kitchen said, ‘I am a naughty forty’. There were prints and portraits on the walls, and old political cartoons – several of them referring to a libel suit Neil had brought against the BBC. In 1984, a BBC Panorama documentary entitled ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’ had alleged that Neil was part of a cabal of right-wing extremists that had infiltrated the Conservative Party – he’d sued and the BBC had settled, paying him £50,000 in damages.
Not having much to go on, other than the allegations of Neil’s corruption and Christine’s snog, I was nibbling away at the idea that they might be sexual boundary-pushers in some vague way. We went into the bathroom, which was also cluttered with books and tiles with Willie Rushton caricatures of fat naked ladies running around. Not quite knowing what I meant by it, I asked Neil if he and Christine were ‘saucy’. His reply became the opening exchange of the finished documentary. In words reeking of prophetic irony, he said, ‘No, not at all. It’s been a permanent source of regret that the one thing I’ve never been involved in is a sex scandal.’
A few days went by. We filmed a sequence of Christine getting her hair done at a salon in Mayfair called Michael John, and another of me and Neil working out together on a ‘trim trail’ in Battersea Park. In their front room we watched a pilot of a TV show they had appeared in entitled Posh Nosh. A strange cookery-cum-travel format, it showed the Hamiltons descending upon a big unruly family in a council house. Christine whipped up a gourmet meal while Neil did duty as a butler.
We filmed a trip down to the South Coast somewhere to meet a friend and supporter of Neil’s, an influential academic called Lord Ralph Harris or Ralph, Lord Harris – I’m honestly not sure how you write that. His name was Ralph and he was a Lord. An economist and disciple of Milton Friedman, Lord Harris had a comical tweedy air about him. He seemed a man born out of time – he should have been stepping out of a flying machine, smoking a pipe. My chief recollection from the visit was of Lord Harris leaning in and confiding his sense of confusion that his academic protégé and his wife had been reduced to going on a Channel 4 programme – The Harry Hill Show, as I knew it to be – ‘dressed up as badgers’. It was one of a handful of times in my filming career when I’ve laughed involuntarily.
Then their diary went a bit quiet for a few weeks. It wasn’t quite clear what else there was to do with the Hamiltons and there was a dawning possibility that they were so unbusy that we might need to let the project slip gently away.
At dinner one evening – it may even have been after the Lord Harris visit – Neil and Christine made an elliptical reference to a new commitment, something in the diary that was causing them a lot of stress and anxiety. They couldn’t tell me what it was, they said. I was fairly sure it didn’t involve dressing up as badgers. But off camera – possibly off-the-record – they told Will my director a little more. He in turn told our executive producer David, and there followed a weird few days when they knew what ‘the thing’ was and were in a position to tell me m
ore while I was keen not to know. I was a bit more of a purist in those days and I liked the idea of being informed about ‘the thing’ – whatever it was – for real on camera by Neil and Christine themselves.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering.
‘Is it big?’ I asked.
‘It isn’t Cheggers’ Bedroom, put it that way,’ David said.
‘Will it have implications for the documentary?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it something we can follow?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s good, because fuck knows we need something.’
‘Yeah, quite,’ Will said.
‘Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?’ I asked.
‘Look, what harm can it do for you to know?’ David said.
‘Well, I’ll have to act.’
‘All you have to do is say “shit!” or something like that.’
‘It’s just more fun like this,’ I said. ‘It’s tantalizing.’
The result was, on 10 August 2001, I stood on a road near Harley Street and was blindsided by Neil telling me that he and Christine were about to drive, with their lawyer, to a police station in Barkingside, where they would be arrested, by arrangement, on an accusation of indecent sexual assault.
A woman, about whom they knew little, had alleged that Neil and Christine had raped her at a swingers’ party in Ilford in Essex. As unlikely as it sounded, the police were taking the accusation seriously. They’d had three months to check the information. (The Met would later claim that they had twice invited the Hamiltons to provide alibis, which would have forestalled the arrest. The Hamiltons deny this.)
The drive to Barkingside involved a long circuitous car ride through the capillaries of east London’s traffic system. We were in the company of the Hamiltons’ lawyer Michael Coleman, in his car, license plate: ‘1LAW’. Despite the Hamiltons’ evident stress and anxiety, Coleman was having trouble hiding his own relish for the impending battle with the police and media. ‘This hasn’t got anything to do with law,’ he said. ‘Principally what this is about is a psychology game.’ He referred to the Hamiltons as a mere ‘ball’ in a grudge match between himself and the authorities. Christine, in one of her stock phrases of disapproval, said, ‘Well, thank you very much.’
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