A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  In The Best of Both Worlds, Driberg describes the pleasures and perils of this form of live broadcasting in those pioneering days. No wonder even Freeman said that in the last moments before transmission he would be ‘shaking with nerves’. After an expensive meal in a private room at A l’Ecu de France on Jermyn Street, Piccadilly, the In the News team was driven by Rolls-Royce to the studio in Shepherd’s Bush for the rehearsal:

  In one corner of the huge warehouse-like studio, a table has been set in front of a bookcase full of incongruous books. Our names are inscribed on cards round a table. We are told to sit on chairs and rehearse our opening lines. When the cameras are focused, workmen fix the chairs to the floor; we mustn’t move them. Penned in his chair, strong lights glaring in his face, it is difficult to marshal a case philosophically.

  That still left lots of time before transmission. Time to wander the streets near the studio or sip a nervous half-pint at the British Prince pub at the top of Lime Grove, imagining the public in their scores of thousands settling down to watch the television. Then back to the studio:

  Now and then one of those anonymous technicians who are always moving about in that huge place will give a friendly nod or a wink, or even a whisper, ‘Give it to ’em tonight, Tom!’ At last the summons to the table comes: a moment of relief and pounding tension. The lights are on, the fearsome-looking cameras trained all about us. Silence. A hand signal. We’re off…

  The time passes in a flash. The arguments tumble out pell-mell. It is a hot free-for-all between four garrulous, provocative, experienced politicians. There are other than verbal tricks to this trade; the old hands, such as Bill Brown, are adept in the art of camera stealing by fiddling interestingly with cigarettes or pencil or by raising the eyes to heaven in mock agony.

  When it is over you lean back with a ‘Whew!’ and mop your brow. The make-up ladies give you little boxes of grease to take away, and you hurry off in the waiting Rolls to John Irwin’s house.14

  At the end of December 1957, Freeman wrote to radio producer Leslie Smith, with whom he made several Home Service programmes on crime and criminals: ‘The affectionate letters I’ve had from a great many friends really have been a comfort at a time of utter misery.’ Mima had died of cancer on 17 December. Although they had led very separate lives, her slow death caused him much grief. ‘I have not really left the hospital since I last saw you,’ he wrote to TV producer Christopher Burstall on 12 December. ‘I am not easy to reach because I am sitting with my wife.’ Lizi recalls ‘a lovely last holiday John planned for us’:

  He took me on the Orient Express to Athens and my mother flew. When we changed countries we got a new restaurant car, which was exciting. We would sit separately either end of the restaurant car because we had breakfast at different times.

  She got skin cancer skiing in the Swiss mountains and this developed into a brain tumour. In Athens a nurse used to come and give her injections, but no one said anything. Then in November she went into hospital because she had lumps on her arms and by this time she was virtually unconscious. My father took me out for coffee and told me she wasn’t going to come home. This was just three weeks before she died. I really wished I’d had more time, just to talk.

  A month later, Freeman recorded a discussion for religious broadcasting entitled ‘The Intrusion of the Press into Private Grief’. That Easter he took Lizi to Paris:

  My lasting memories – he took me to the Rodin Museum and to see the Toulouse Lautrec posters. We did nice things and had nice meals. We went halfway up the Eiffel Tower but he would not go further because he said he suffered from vertigo.

  He always said, ‘I don’t think I’m much of a family man,’ but he always made everything fun. On Saturday afternoons he would take me to his favourite record shop on the Finchley Road and listen to records, everything from ‘Guys and Dolls’ to opera.15

  Lizi was sixteen when Mima died, after which Freeman formally adopted her.

  Freeman’s first Panorama had been broadcast on 8 July 1957 and his second on 7 November, the subject of the latter being ‘brainwashing’ – a topic of contemporary controversy because of the allegation (and refutation) that US and British prisoners of war had been brainwashed in the Korean War. In both programmes, Freeman’s role was as discussion chairman. Suddenly he was in demand and Panorama was paying him 40 guineas per programme, plus another 10 guineas to cover interviews and commentary dubbing. A review of his TV schedule for the first half of 1958 shows how busy he was, bearing in mind he was also deputy editor of the New Statesman magazine.

  At the time of Mima’s death, Freeman and Christopher Burstall had been trying to set up an item on freemasonry, using Freeman’s father’s former clerk in Lincoln’s Inn as the contact. ‘The approach’, wrote Christopher Burstall to Michael Peacock, ‘is one of hard curiosity, a refusal to take things on trust. John Freeman is very interested and I’m sure he will fit the bill.’ This was one Panorama project that did not come off, because the Grand Lodge would not cooperate. That same spring, 1958, Freeman was in Cyprus and France sending back film reports on civil wars for Panorama, while also filming in Dr Barnardo’s village for an item on adoption.

  In the midst of this he presented a hard-hitting programme on ‘family tensions’ for Meeting Point, ‘cutting across the sentimentality of the day’. The producer, the Reverend Oliver Hunkin of the religious affairs department, had written persuasively to Freeman to book him:

  The star is a woman doctor, Dr J. E. Mackworth. She is 6 ft tall, uses psychoanalytic methods [on dysfunctional families] and states in her prospectus that her clinic is a meeting point for priest, doctor and psychologist. I hope you will do the programme because I feel you will go a certain way with her, and therefore scrutinise her closely.

  This was a shrewd invitation that may have reminded Freeman of his time living in the Hubback household ten years before. That Meeting Point episode was broadcast on 16 March 1958, and Hunkin was delighted: ‘My dear John, to have someone so practised and perceptive in the chair certainly eases a producer’s tensions!’16

  The same month Freeman agreed to script and present a schools TV film on Algeria for its Spotlight series. He was working overtime, recycling material for different audiences and finding new storylines. The producers were delighted until even Freeman’s meticulous planning went wrong. He wrote to Ivan Gilman of the schools TV unit on 25 April: ‘I owe you an apology. I mistook a film viewing on Monday afternoon for Panorama when it should have been with you. I am very sorry.’

  By mid-summer, Grace Wyndham Goldie was fending off producers wanting to use Freeman.

  As overworked freelance reporters are bound to do with the BBC, Freeman fell out with the television bookings department over expenses. Sometimes he could not produce all his receipts – ‘Dear Miss Knight, you must be beginning to think I’m mad as well as incompetent: I’m sure I had 11.5 francs on 19 May!’ – and on one occasion he claimed for hardship outside the line of duty:

  From: Jeremy Murray-Brown, television talks

  To: Miss D. E. Knight, television bookings

  2 June 1958

  In view of the fact that John Freeman has, in fact, put in rather more work on the French story than was originally intended (and also met with temporary imprisonment in Paris) I should be grateful if he could be paid an additional fee of 15 guineas.

  To: Jeremy Murray-Brown, television talks

  From: Miss D. E. Knight, television bookings

  We feel he has already received a very adequate fee. The temporary imprisonment is one of the risks of the job for which he would surely not expect monetary compensation.17

  Had Miss D. E. Knight been aware of the circumstances she might have been more sympathetic. That last weekend in May, with the French people expecting an army coup in Algeria and a consequent civil war in France, Charles de Gaulle was invested as President. In Paris there was pandemonium:

  Gaullists, communists, plotters and police clashed all over the city. Th
ere was a vast eruption of motorcars, jamming the Champs-Élysées and spilling into side streets, their horns tapping out in extraordinary unison the beats of ‘De Gaulle au pouvoir’ and ‘Algérie française’.18

  Presumably it was while filming this ‘pandemonium’ that Freeman and his crew were arrested and imprisoned for between four and five hours that Sunday (1 June). They knew that if they did not get the film back to London the same evening, they could not have it developed, the negative would not get cut and the positive would not get printed in time for Panorama the following evening. Technical limitations in those days added to the stresses of the TV reporter’s job.

  And so it went on for the next two years. In February 1960, with ITV also after his services, the BBC programme contracts department took Freeman out for a smart lunch at A l’Ecu de France and offered him an exclusive contract of £3,750 per year, to which TV talks, light entertainment, schools, the Home Service etc. all offered to contribute.

  Catherine Dove had joined the film department after attracting BBC attention to her acting at Oxford University in the early 1950s. She soon met Grace Wyndham Goldie, who was on the prowl among the dingy Victorian terraced houses of Lime Grove (where the TV talks department was based), looking for new talent.

  Grace recruited Catherine to work on the general election programme of 1955 and then appointed her Panorama’s first producer-director. She was responsible for some remarkable programmes – two in particular found their way into Panorama history.

  One, on natural childbirth, aimed to be the first film on television to show a baby being born, although by the time BBC managers had taken fright and heavily edited the film, all the viewer saw was the baby’s head – then it was in its mother’s arms.

  The other was a live interview with the Irish playwright Brendan Behan, who, Catherine remembers, stumbled into the studio ‘virtually comatose’. ‘Millions see drunk man on TV show’ splashed the Daily Sketch the next morning.

  Catherine also managed to lure the poet T. S. Eliot into the Lime Grove studio, and was very proud to have done so. Her Panorama colleagues were less enthusiastic because, as she admitted, his performance was disappointingly wooden.

  On the Panorama team was Charles Wheeler, an ex-marine who had become a newspaper reporter in Germany after the war. Initially colleagues, they became lovers and lived together at his mews flat in Primrose Hill, north London, travelling to work in his MG and motoring around Europe on holiday. He was keen on the idea of getting married, but Catherine didn’t think it would work: ‘I felt that he was too nice and too young to be good for me and that probably I needed an older man. I was a bit of a handful in those days.’

  At work, Catherine was beginning to press the department for a magazine programme dedicated to the arts. And so, eventually, Monitor was born. Grace appointed Catherine as its editor, but proposed Huw Wheldon, a senior producer, as a back-up: ‘You’re very young, Katie, and Huw will be able to help you.’ Catherine takes up the story:

  Wheldon was a macho ex-soldier who had had a very good war, having been awarded the MC in Normandy – very much a man’s man. He was keen to take on a major magazine programme like Panorama and, at that time at least, did not seem very interested in the arts. At our first meeting he said, ‘Listen, Katie, our audience isn’t going to care about what the artist wrote or painted. What they want to know about is their sex lives – were they queer or straight?’ I was terribly shocked, being young and priggish, and also worried because his approach boded ill for our collaboration. I was also aware that he didn’t like me very much.19

  After this little demonstration of powerplay by Wheldon, and in the absence of Catherine (who, with terrible timing, was nursing a broken knee in hospital), Monitor went on air in February 1958. Wheldon became editor and presenter and moulded the show in his own image for over 100 editions, until he had ‘interviewed everybody I wanted to interview’. He handed over to Jonathan Miller in 1965.

  Wheeler, meanwhile, had transferred to the news department. His departure from Panorama had displeased Grace; she called him ‘a traitor’ for leaving. He visited Catherine in hospital and once again tried to persuade her into marriage:

  You’ll never get Monitor back from Huw. You’re twenty-six and you won’t meet the man you think you are going to meet. We get on really well together so why not give it a try? But make up your mind now, because I’m off to India for the BBC in three weeks and there’s not much time to arrange things.

  At a low ebb in hospital, depressed about losing Monitor and considering leaving the BBC, Catherine gave in, against her better judgement. They were married in the Church of our Lady of the Assumption (she was a Catholic) on Warwick Street in May that year. Wheeler left immediately for India as the BBC correspondent there and Catherine intended to join him in Delhi in October when the weather was cooler. Left on her own, she recognised that the marriage had indeed been a mistake. She spent a wretched summer feeling guilty, ashamed and confused because, as a Catholic, she didn’t want to consider divorce. Finally, she resolved to go out to India, explain to Wheeler how she felt, and arrange a separation. She booked her passage on the P&O liner Chusan.

  That September, Freeman was the ‘leading panel member’ in three editions of Press Conference, produced by Catherine. This was the first time they had worked together and, as far as Freeman was concerned, it was love at first sight. He told her later that he decided to marry her as soon as he set eyes on her in the studio. At the time she lived near Kensington Church Street in west London, where a neighbour – the journalist Peregrine Worsthorne – knew them both: ‘She was, of course, very beautiful, extremely attractive and mischievous. I was an admirer of John, though he was a mystery figure who was very hard to know. It was the sight of him that was really splendid. He was formidable; his appearance, his charm, his high principles.’20

  The last programme of the three was a Press Conference with Bertrand Russell. After the production meeting, which in those days was always held in the Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho, Freeman told Catherine how sorry he was that she was leaving: ‘I’ve never enjoyed working with anybody so much.’ She told him how miserable she felt about her marriage and that she was going to end it. That evening her phone rang: ‘John asked, “Are you too busy packing or would you come over for a drink?” I did, and that was that. I realised with amazement that this was the man I’d been waiting to meet. It was not difficult to promise to come back as soon as possible.’

  When she went on board the Chusan, she found her cabin filled with red roses.

  Wheeler met her off the boat in Bombay. He was appalled when she immediately confessed – ‘I thought Freeman was a gentleman’ – but he asked her to stay with him in Delhi over Christmas, partly to save face and partly because he thought it possible that she would change her mind. But at New Year, when Wheeler discovered letters Freeman had sent to Catherine, he was generous enough to accept the situation. In May he saw her off at the airport and Freeman met her the other end.

  Freeman immediately asked her to give up her career. ‘I have no right to ask you this, but it would be wonderful to find you here in Heath Mansions when I come home.’ And so she ended her pioneering work at the BBC.

  Was she disappointed?

  Not at all! I enjoyed the BBC for five years. They were good to me and I’d done quite well. But I was in love and all I wanted was to settle down with John and have a family. He said that I needed him to look after me. The age gap between us was sixteen years and he could be positively paternal, which I liked.

  Soon Freeman became an actual father. Matthew was born in June 1961 – John was present at the birth, which was rare in those days – and they married as soon as Catherine’s divorce from Wheeler came through the following year, despite her Catholic scruples. Charles Wheeler married again soon after, to an Indian lady named Dip Singh, with whom he had two daughters. He went on to become the longest-serving foreign correspondent in the history of the BBC and received a knigh
thood for his work. After his memorial service in Westminster Abbey in 2008, the bells were rung.

  Freeman never did sign the exclusive contract the BBC had offered him. In the summer of 1960, he knew he would soon be editor of the New Statesman (not that he revealed this to the BBC) and, in any event, he wanted to cut back on his broadcasting commitments. It was probably no coincidence, therefore, that he then wrote two articles highly critical of the BBC. This was not exactly biting the hand that fed him, though it could well have felt like that at the BBC for he was still under contract for the last series of Face to Face.

  In May 1960, Freeman was in hospital for a few weeks and therefore a ‘Captive Viewer’. This was his title for his Listener article:

  I cannot help feeling depressed and alarmed by the utter triviality of nine-tenths of the flood of pictures that are so earnestly and expensively hurled at us. What ought we to expect of this medium, which now dominates the leisure life of most of the people most of the time? Ideas? Instruction? Entertainment? Or just the gentle, ceaseless, scarcely perceptible erosion of the angularities of free will and personal responsibility?

  Then he focused his attack on Lime Grove, criticising in the New Statesman the BBC’s all-embracing rules of ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ for factual programmes: