A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

The BBC is antithetical to both good art and good politics, because it excludes not only malice, sex and evil, but the possibility of intellectual offence and above all the decisive conclusions that are the proper end of civilised dialogue.

  It is an appalling reproach to our civilisation that having developed the most pervasive means of communication in history, we have taken the necessary steps to see that nothing more potent than the carefully measured platitudes of Panorama can be communicated through it.

  The archetypal BBC liberal is, in his own habitat, such an ambivalent and emasculated creature.21

  Freeman was finding it difficult to reconcile his role as deputy editor of an opinionated left-wing political magazine with being a prominent public service broadcaster. He had already been criticised by the new director-general, Hugh Carlton Greene, for his Panorama description of France’s war in Algeria as ‘colonial’: ‘He is slipping into his bad habit of speaking as a deputy editor of the New Statesman.’

  Freeman was then rebuked by the director of television broadcasting for writing in the Daily Telegraph that he strongly deplored the amount of lying that went on during a This Is Your Life programme.

  Grace Wyndham Goldie’s policy of employing guest stars with minds of their own was showing signs of wear and tear.

  When Freeman was appointed editor of the New Statesman in January 1961, the time had come for him to end his primary career as a broadcaster. He continued to appear on both BBC TV and radio (as well as ITV), and made one more series of Face to Face, but another door was closing in his life as a new one opened.

  Notes

  1 Grace Wyndham Goldie: First Lady of Television by John Grist, New Generation Publishing, London, 2006, p. 222

  2 Quoted in ‘Panorama’: Fifty Years of Pride and Paranoia by Richard Lindley, Politico’s Publishing, London, 2003, p. 37

  3 Ibid., p. 37

  4 Facing the Nation: Television & Politics 1936–76 by Grace Wyndham Goldie, The Bodley Head, London, 1977, p. 90

  5 Wyatt, op. cit., 1985, p. 239

  6 Wyatt, op. cit., 1985, pp. 255–6

  7 WAC Panorama file dated 22 February 1960

  8 Wyatt, op. cit., 1985, pp. 255–6

  9 Michael Peacock interview with the author, 2014

  10 The Guardian, 23 February 1960

  11 Freeman’s own summary in an article he wrote in the New Statesman, 15 October 1960

  12 WAC John Freeman file

  13 www.bbc.co.uk/archive/gay_rights/12001.shtml

  14 Driberg, op. cit., 1953, pp. 162–5

  15 L. Freeman interview with author, 2014

  16 WAC John Freeman file

  17 Ibid.

  18 De Gaulle by Aidan Crawley, The Literary Guild, London, 1969, p. 351

  19 Catherine Freeman interview with author, 2015

  20 Peregrine Worsthorne interview with author, 2014

  21 ‘Constant Loudspeakers’ by John Freeman (his review of The Birth of Broadcasting by Asa Briggs, OUP, 1961), New Statesman, 27 October 1961

  Chapter 6

  Television interviewer – Face to Face

  THE FIRST INTERVIEW in Face to Face was broadcast live from the BBC TV studios in Shepherd’s Bush in February 1959. The subject was Lord Birkett, the famous cross-examiner in murder trials of the 1920s and ’30s.

  The screen opens to reveal a sketch of Birkett, drawn earlier by the Polish artist Feliks Topolski, and the camera then moves to a very simple title sequence of cut-out cardboard (‘Face to Face, John Freeman interviews’) before continuing to pan over more Topolski sketches.

  Underneath runs the title music – the overture from an unfinished opera by Berlioz – Les Francs-Juges. (After the programme, Birkett wrote to the producer, Hugh Burnett, informing him that the opera actually concerned the sinister tribunals of the Middle Ages in Westphalia, which saw condemned men disappear for ever. ‘What do you think the damages would be,’ he asked, tongue in cheek, ‘if a powerful broadcasting corporation were to play this music to a television programme consisting of an interview with a celebrated judge?!’) The music rises to a crescendo then fades, and the camera moves into a profile of Lord Birkett against a black background.

  His voice is heard saying, ‘It’s the strain of waiting that’s so hard’ – evidence that the programme is live and he does not know his microphone is on! – and then another camera takes an over-the-shoulder shot from behind John Freeman, before moving in on Birkett. Freeman begins: ‘Lord Birkett, you are known to the world, I suppose, as one of the greatest three or four criminal lawyers of this century…’

  After a few minutes, the unique style of Face to Face was apparent. The studio setting was simply an armchair and a side table mounted on a plinth, with black drapes to isolate the interviewee. The camera remained focused on a close-up shot of the subject’s face, showing, in Freeman’s words, ‘every bead of sweat, every flicker of the eyelid, a dimension that had not existed in television before’. The camera, in fact, was a second interrogator, or, as Freeman put it, ‘the interviewer and the camera and the lights and the studio environment are all integrated into a single concentration on the individual’.

  Freeman’s face was rarely seen: ‘That would be a total distraction,’ said Freeman, ‘and I strongly applauded the style.’ The idea was one of Hugh Burnett’s. He was a producer in talks television who had spent two years trying to persuade Grace Wyndham Goldie to accept the series, but far less time persuading John Freeman to present it:

  I wanted him because he was highly skilled at probing closely without causing offence. Walking round the block at Lime Grove we discussed the series and the second time round the block he agreed. He also accepted the idea of sitting with his back to the camera, a tiny but important detail that gave rise to a brand new programme format.1

  So the interview unfolded. Freeman’s speech was unhesitatingly firm and precise, his pace unrelenting, his manner persistent. Unlike TV interviews before that time, there was nothing deferential or reverential about his manner. Unlike TV interviews of today, there was nothing hectoring or impolite. Freeman told Anthony Clare in 1988 that his intention most of the time had been simply to ask ‘the sort of questions I thought an intelligent person, given the chance, might want to ask’. In the case of Birkett, that must have been true:

  FREEMAN: Did you always believe in the innocence of your clients when you defended them?

  BIRKETT: To be quite, quite frank, no – I just ought to add that whatever your belief is, you’re not allowed to state it in the court. You’re allowed to speak as an advocate, but you mustn’t give your opinion.

  FREEMAN: Did you ever personally have any qualms about defending someone on a murder charge whom you thought was guilty?

  BIRKETT: None. You see, the view I took of the advocate’s duty is this: he’s there to present one side only, and he must do it to the best of his ability, and what he thinks really is irrelevant.

  FREEMAN: Would you think it your duty as counsel to use every possible trick within the law to get your man acquitted?

  BIRKETT: I would be against tricks of all kinds, but if you would alter the question to saying, ‘Do you regard it as your duty to do everything within your power to get him acquitted?’ then I would say yes.

  FREEMAN: Yes. And that would include bamboozling a jury?

  BIRKETT: Well, shall I say, persuading a jury.

  FREEMAN: Have you ever got a man or a woman acquitted on a murder charge whom you believe in your heart to be guilty?

  BIRKETT: Yes.

  FREEMAN: Any regrets about that?

  BIRKETT: None.

  FREEMAN: Have you ever defended a person on a murder charge whom you knew to be guilty?

  BIRKETT: No. Indeed, you’re not allowed to. You may think he is guilty, and of course it’s really quite impossible for any man of sense to defend a man and read all the facts without coming to some conclusion in his mind, but that’s quite irrelevant. He’s not the judge.2

  Over four million view
ers watched that first Face to Face, and they loved it. Its reaction index (a BBC viewer panel evaluation) was 83 per cent – the highest of all the interviews that were shown over the next three years. Face to Face became history. It was the most famous interview series on British television, and the Topolski sketches and Berlioz signature tune became its brand label.

  Face to Face sold throughout the English-speaking world and, on its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, the BBC released a DVD box set of all thirty-five interviews. The series became a benchmark for later generations of TV interviewers, like Michael Parkinson: ‘People of our generation revered John Freeman as one of the foundation stones of early television. I watched him with a mixture of awe and admiration. He was a great man and the present generation who know not of him don’t know what they are missing.’3

  Despite the world fame of many of the contributors to Face to Face – Carl Jung, Bertrand Russell, Martin Luther King etc. – it is known as ‘that interview series with John Freeman’. It is the work he is best known for, yet he disliked the celebrity status the series conferred. In his Who’s Who entry, he didn’t even mention the BAFTA for Outstanding Television Personality he won for the series in 1960.

  Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, growled sourly: ‘John is the only man who has made himself celebrated by turning his arse on the public.’ Undoubtedly, his anonymity contributed to his celebrity. He was a man of mystery and the public loves trying to uncover mysteries. Exposing the real person behind the celebrity was, of course, exactly what he was doing with his guests on Face to Face, but he gave absolutely nothing away about himself.

  He carried this anonymity to extreme levels when other programmes or press articles tried to turn the tables on him. In 1961, the other famous interviewer of those days, Malcolm Muggeridge, did his best on Granada’s Appointment. The Guardian TV reviewer Mary Crozier wrote: ‘The most curious thing was that John Freeman remained virtually the faceless man. Nothing came out that could not have been known without this interview. We were left with the impression that Mr Freeman was an almost alarmingly impersonal person.’4

  Perhaps Lord Birkett would have been more successful than Malcolm Muggeridge, but when Birkett suggested a reverse Face to Face to end the first series, he was given short shrift. Many journalists made attempts to try a Face to Face on Freeman, but none got further than Anthony Clare in 1988.

  Freeman was prepared to talk about the programme, but not about himself. He had the gift of thinking up an interesting reply that did not answer the question. He never said what sort of man he was.

  The interviewer for an article in Tatler, ‘The Grillers Grilled’, got closer than most:

  INTERVIEWER: In the broadest terms, a psychiatrist would classify you as an introvert rather than extrovert, wouldn’t he?

  FREEMAN: Probably, yes.

  INTERVIEWER: Dr Carl Jung says that introverts tend to be governed at the unconscious level by their emotions. Could that come across to your audience?

  FREEMAN: One can’t know for oneself. Someone else must answer that.

  Interviewers got more out of Freeman when he was talking about his cats, who roamed around Heath Mansions when the press came to call. Indeed, the press probably turned to the cats in desperation, as ‘television’s most penetrating interviewer’ was full of insight about them: ‘Pushkin has all the male characteristics in that he’s bossy, sometimes bad tempered, with a logical brain and an engineer’s approach to life; Dulcie is flighty, silly on occasions, but very affectionate.’5

  The myth about Face to Face is that it was ‘trial by television’ with Freeman as the ‘grand inquisitor’. The interviews with comedian Tony Hancock and TV entertainment celebrity Gilbert Harding were undoubtedly forensic in a highly personal way, and perhaps that is why they are among the best known, but they were the exception. Most of the others were unremarkable ‘the real person behind the public façade’ interviews, and, in fact, only fourteen of them were ‘live’ broadcasts.

  Yet there was something inquisitorial about the interviews. Freeman often let the subject know what was coming with a semi-jocular opening question: ‘Are you going to come clean?’ Then ‘his matchless voice, ultra-polite, devastatingly persistent’, dominated the studio in the absence of any glimpse of its owner. He admitted that, for him, interviewing was ‘a psychological exercise’:

  I am, I think, a purely intuitive interviewer. I read a lot about the person I am going to interview, and I think up questions, but most of my work is taken up with making up my mind about what sort of person I am dealing with. After the opening question, I tend to play the whole thing by ear, though usually I have an idea with which question I shall end the interview.6

  The ambience, then, was inquisitorial but the substance only rarely justified the press term ‘trial by television’.

  Freeman’s second guest, in March 1959, was the renowned philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. He was eighty-seven and campaigning vigorously for nuclear disarmament. Before the recording, which took place at Russell’s home, Hugh Burnett found an obituary that Russell had written about himself. Beaming widely, Russell read it out at the start of the interview:

  His life, for all its waywardness, had a certain anachronistic consistency, reminiscent of that of the aristocratic rebels of the early nineteenth century. His principles were curious; but such as they were, they governed his actions. In private life he showed none of the acerbity that marred his writing, but was a genial conversationalist, not devoid of human sympathy. He had many friends but had survived almost all of them and politically, during his last years, he was as isolated as Milton after the Restoration. He was the last survivor of a dead epoch.

  Freeman took Russell through his life with probing but courteous questions and the old genius replied succinctly, sometimes with an air of mischief. He was well capable of avoiding Freeman’s traps:

  FREEMAN: Do you think, on the whole, the fanatics in the world are more useful or more dangerous than the sceptics?

  RUSSELL: I think fanaticism is the gravest danger there is. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.

  FREEMAN: But then are you not fanatical also? In your current campaign in favour of nuclear disarmament you encourage your supporters to undertake extreme demonstrations. Isn’t that fanaticism?

  RUSSELL: I don’t think that’s fanaticism, no. I support them because everything sane and sensible and quiet that we do is absolutely ignored by the press and the only way we can get into the press is to do something that looks fanatical.

  Two years after the recording, Russell was sent to prison for taking part in an anti-nuclear sit-down in London.

  In May, the guest was the poet and critic Dame Edith Sitwell, the 71-year-old grande dame of English letters. This was an extraordinary encounter, partly because of her eccentric attire. With a headdress she called her ‘bird-king’s hat’, an ermine jacket, and huge, exotic rings on her fingers, she looked like what she said she was – ‘a throwback to ancient ancestors of mine’ (an impression the Topolski caricatures did nothing to dispel). Her deathly white, sharp features stood out against the black background. Some of her answers made her sound less like a medieval ‘throwback’ than a witch in a fairy story:

  There was a peacock, you see, and he and I loved each other very much. I was four years old. He would fly up to the leads outside my mother’s bedroom, when I went to say good morning to her, and would give a harsh shriek. Then he would give another scream and fly down to the garden to wait for me. We would walk round the garden arm-in-arm, excepting he hadn’t any arms; I would have my arm around his neck; and I was asked why I loved him so and I said, ‘Because he is proud and has a crown, and is beautiful.’ And then my father got him a wife, with his usual tactlessness, after which he never looked at me again, and my heart was broken.

  Freeman’s questions on this occasion were gentle, almost flirtatious. He tried to coax her into frank answers, though not always successfu
lly:

  FREEMAN: Have you ever – I hope I may ask this – seriously contemplated marriage?

  SITWELL: That I think I can’t answer.

  FREEMAN: No reason why you should at all. Do you consider, looking at young people today, that the standard of taste and behaviour is lower than it used to be?

  SITWELL: Well, you see, I think you said that I was a forbidding old lady – well, I’m very forbidding. No young person would dare misbehave in my presence, and I can think of one very great poet who died some time ago – I never saw him behave in a way that a great man shouldn’t behave.

  FREEMAN: Would you tell us who he was? I can guess and it would be nice for you to…

  SITWELL: …Dylan Thomas. He always behaved impeccably in my presence.

  The interview was another success. The Daily Herald declared: ‘Here was a living legend captured on the popular screen.’

  Grace Wyndham Goldie was delighted:

  8 May 1959, from assistant head of talks television

  My dear John,

  I have already told Hugh Burnett how superb I thought the Sitwell programme was, and how beautifully he had handled it visually. I thought I must write to say that it seemed to me also the best thing I have ever seen you do on television.

  I don’t know how you made her so obviously at ease and happy that she could reveal herself, in ways that were fascinating and resounded to her credit as a person, in front of the television cameras. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it enormously.

  Yours ever, Grace

  12 May, 8 Heath Mansions

  Dear Grace,

  Thank you so much for writing. I value your praise more than anybody else’s – without exception.