When the National Lottery began in 1994 I was reading about one of the very early winners, an Asian man living in Blackburn, who, after years of humble work in a factory, since coming to this country twenty years earlier, had only recently bought his own semi-detached house. I wondered if winning £18 million had ruined his satisfaction and pleasure in all those years of saving and scrimping, becoming rich just by chance and luck, making a nonsense of his previous efforts. And how would it change his life?
I had actually bought a ticket in the very first lottery, on 19 November 1994, not to win anything, as obviously I did not want or need the money. I won the lottery in life when I met Margaret. As I always said, while Margaret rolled her eyes, but I always meant it. I wanted the ticket as memorabilia, to add the first-day lottery ticket to my various dopey collections, such as first editions of newspapers and magazines.
But on that first day in 1994, it made me think of all the ordinary, unknown people, in the years ahead, whose lives were going to be changed by this new creation, the National Lottery – and also society as a whole. There was great play made with the fact that billions were being promised to good causes, culture and sport.
I wondered if I could somehow follow ten or so winners over the first year of their win, see how their lives changed. I rang Camelot, found out who their publicity director was, and told him my brilliant idea. Only to find other writers had already thought of it. But I managed to get a meeting with him – and Camelot eventually agreed to help me.
They could not provide any winners. That would be up to me. But if I attended a press conference when a winner had decided to go public, and was being unveiled, they would allow me to meet him or her. It would then be up to me to persuade him or her into letting me follow them for a year.
I slowly persuaded Camelot that I was trustworthy, would not publish stuff about any winners without their permission, and that I had written lots of books they could look up. I eventually managed to extract two more vital things from Camelot.
One was access to their staff, to the so-called winners’ advisers, who go to the homes of the big winners, tell them the news, and offer advice. Even more important, Camelot agreed that even when a winner wanted no publicity, and had ticked the appropriate box, if a winner’s adviser decided, after a few weeks, that the winner might just possibly be willing to be interviewed by me, a letter from me would be passed on to them. I would not know their name or anything about them.
In my letter, I explained who I was, how serious a project it was, how Camelot was helping, how they would read every word about themselves, how I would disguise their identity, not reveal their jobs or families. I explained it was how they themselves felt, how their lives and attitudes, desires and ambitions had changed over the year, that was what I was most interested in. Which was true. I have always been fascinated by money and the effects it has on people. And on myself.
In the end, I was able to follow ten jackpot winners, half of them known, half not known to the public. There were in fact around twenty individuals I followed, as some were in partnerships or syndicates.
By a sequence of events, I had no agent at the time. My first agent, Richard Simon, who had done so much to get me going, had retired and moved to Scotland. I personally contacted several publishers with whom I had done books before. The first one to jump at the idea was Alan Samson, then working at Little, Brown.
I don’t know how it happened, but in the contract I kept control of the serial rights, which is not normally the case. Usually the publisher handles it, and the income goes against the advance.
When I had finished the manuscript, the National Lottery was an even bigger story than when I had begun, with the big winners dominating the TV news and all the tabloids. The Sun had even appointed a Lottery reporter, Lenny Lottery, making him change his name by deed poll.
So I knew that all the papers, broadsheet and tabloids, would be interested in taking bits from the book. I also knew how newspaper serialisation works – there is one person in each main paper, whose name is not known to outsiders, whose job it is to buy and gut books for serialisation.
I found the names of the right person on three papers, got them interested, then worried about sending them copies of the manuscript. There was one paper in particular I did not quite trust. If they did not acquire the rights, they might well leak the names and details of my winners to their newsroom, and therefore bugger up the coverage of whichever paper did buy the rights.
So I made each of the three come in person to my house. I gave them a certain time, and then allowed them two hours each to read the manuscript, but not to copy anything or write down any notes. Then I allowed them two days to make an offer.
They all did and I chose the Sunday Times. From memory, they paid £100,000. Can I have made that up? The days of silly money for serials have all gone. Even the richest papers, like the Daily Mail, rarely pay more than £5,000 for book rights nowadays.
In the book, I did lots of surveys, questions and answers, for each of my twenty assorted winners, just as I had done with the Spurs footballers in The Glory Game. I realised I had access to people in unusual circumstances, in this case lottery winners, so I wanted to record everything about their lives, likes and dislikes, before and after winning.
One of the interesting revelations was that what people say and promise before their win very rarely comes to pass. On a Saturday evening, when they are queuing up at the corner shop to buy a ticket, they tell themselves that if they win, you won’t see me for dust, I will be out of this place, off, off and away to some sunny island and sunny beach. And if I win, I will help poor people, oh yes, I will give a huge amount to charity, help cure cancer, help the homeless.
My surveys showed that in 90 per cent of cases, none of this happened. After a year, not one had moved abroad and almost all of them were still living in the same area as before, though perhaps in a slightly bigger house. They had given between 10 and 20 per cent of their wins to their immediate family and friends, but hardly anything altruistically, i.e. to a charity. Only two out of the twenty had given to charity, though several others said they would do in the future.
The big cliché about lottery winners, in the public minds, and encouraged by the tabloids, is that winners waste their money on cars and drink and drugs, and that it will all end in tears. This is a compensatory myth – to make up for the rest of us not winning. Money, so many like to believe, does not make you happy.
I did try to gauge their happiness and only one out of twenty was less happy a year after their win. I always knew this, but it seemed to come as a surprise to many of the newspapers. The most common source of everyday arguments and distress in most households is about money – not having enough to pay the rent, pay bills, feed their families. So if this is eliminated, one major source of unhappiness has gone.
If of course you have problems in your marriage or your relationships, or in your personality, suddenly having money might well make everything worse. But the average person copes well with money. The average person is sensible and prudent.
Of my twenty, the only one who thought he was marginally happier before he won was a single man who worked in the kitchens of a college at Durham. Despite his win, the single most happy moment in his life was not his win but securing a job, some time before his win, after several years of unhappiness at being unemployed.
I like to think my book, Living on the Lottery, was social history, a human dimension to one of the biggest innovations of the nineties. It is now being said that it was John Major’s greatest achievement as Prime Minister. Theatre, music and the arts generally up and down the country have been helped while our sport has been transformed. Would we have won so many gold medals in London 2012 and Rio in 2016 but for the Lottery money?
Social history? Perhaps that is getting carried away. But looking back, I do seem to have done quite a few books with a social dimension, starting with The Other Half, in 1966, about the new poor and new rich. I
never did The Class of ’66, about university students, but I did do The Creighton Report, about comprehensives. Born 1900 was about people and institutions born in that year. I also did a book about adoption, Relative Strangers, about triplets adopted very young who then meet again after seventy years. This was an idea from Alan Samson, one of the few times a publisher has come to me with an idea, rather than me badgering them.
I have done quite a few books which dear Margaret always dismissed as non-books, such as the Book of Lists, or collections of newspaper columns. And I have put up dozens if not a hundred book ideas over the years, which have been turned down flat by every publisher. In the old days, they did reply nicely and fairly quckly. The response tends these days to be one of total silence. That’s when you know it is not a runner.
One of my failed projects was a biography of Canon Rawnsley, co-founder of the National Trust, and a great friend of Beatrix Potter. I always thought he was worth a proper biography, but I got fed up with every publisher saying no (quite recently a religious publishing house in Oxford did contact me, out of the blue, about a Rawnsley biog, but I had too much on – and still have).
I did for a while specialise in biographies, and have done ten overall, not counting the football ones. They include biogs of Wordsworth, George Stephenson, Beatrix Potter, the Beatles, Alfred Wainwright, the Grades, Eddie Stobart, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Christopher Columbus.
The Wordsworth biog, which first came out in 1980, is still in print, but what a slog it was. He lived till he was eighty, still writing away, and it took me practically a whole year just to read all his poetry, plus his letters and other writings. I always told myself that if I did another literary biog, I would go for someone like Keats or Shelley who died young. But I never did.
Two of those biogs were about travellers, about Robert Louis Stevenson and Columbus, going back to the places associated with them. In alternate chapters, I told their life story, and then visited places associated with them, so there were past and present stories. Total pleasure to write and research them, but they did not sell well. I think people who like biographies like proper ones, in straight chronological order, not mixed up with the present day.
The majority of my books are now out of print, bastards, but this is the nature of publishing today. There are just too many new books coming out. You could of course be lucky and find one or two in a charity shop.
But at least three have remained constantly in print since the day they first appeared, now almost fifty years ago: the Beatles biog, The Glory Game and A Walk Around the Lakes. There are a few others which go out of print and then someone wants to reissue them, such as George Stephenson and Wordsworth.
For about forty years I turned down ideas and suggestions from various publishers for another Beatles book, and ideas for other pop music biogs.
I did not want to be seen as a pop music writer. So in the forty years after 1968 I did around forty other books, none of them about the Beatles, but then in 2012 I did The John Lennon Letters, followed two years later by The Beatles Lyrics, both published by my old friend Alan Samson at Weidenfeld, a publishing house I used to be with many years ago. I like to think those two Beatles books were original pieces of research, with material no one had seen before, not just another rehash of the same old story. Though yes, I know, I have done endless rehashing in my writing life.
How many books have I written? When asked this, I have to say I don’t know, which sounds like boasting, inverted snobbery, which of course it is. When people say they don’t know how much they earn, or how much they are worth, or how many houses they have, everyone always scoffs and sneers, but I can understand that some people might not know these things, being too busy or not really all that interested in counting up their possessions.
The first problem is – what is a book? Does it mean any book which has my name on, even books I have edited? Should I include books which are anthologies of columns, or are new editions of old books? The Beatles biog, even though I never did a completely new one, has emerged over the years in different editions, such as an illustrated version. Do they count as different books if they are from a different publisher, in a different format, with extra material and with a different ISBN number? Or is that cheating, just to get the numbers?
And what about all the children’s books I have done? For about twenty years I did one if not two every year, particularly about a little girl called Flossie Teacake, aged eight, who by a piece of magic becomes sixteen. Then I did a series for Penguin called STARS, set in a comprehensive sixth form, one of them coming out every month for a year. Should I include them as well?
Oh God, I haven’t got the time to tot them all up. I can’t even guess what the total might be. When I have finished writing this book, I will sit down and make a list and put it in the appendix, unless Iain MacGregor, the publisher of this book, says oh no, too boring, are you an egomaniac or what?
17
MY LIFE IN COLUMNS
My life as a columnist has continued to this day, which is surprising. Columnists tend to have strong opinions, and can come out with instant judgements and thoughts, criticisms and comments. In normal life, I don’t have that facility. In fact I rarely know what I think. I agree with the last person, or anyone who sounds sensible. I need to sit down and start writing a column, to find out what I really think or feel.
Margaret was excellent when it came to opinions, whether asked or not, yet the last thing she ever would have wanted to do, or ever did, was write a newspaper column.
Over a meal, when we were discussing topics of the day, she would come out with some biting, original angle I had not thought of, and I would say there is a thousand words in that, pet, shall I ring the Sunday Times? Don’t you dare, she would reply. I won’t answer the phone.
Almost from the beginning of my journalistic career, back on the student newspaper in the 1950s, I have been writing columns. And they have almost always been on the same topic, myself. Well it is what I know best, what I am expert on. My thinking is that if I have felt or observed something, however apparently trivial, other people will have done so as well. My job is then to make it amusing or interesting. And possibly informative. I can’t do that all that well verbally, as I get lost, ramble, lose my thread, but I seem to be able to do it better on paper, though I always overwrite, at great speed, and then have to boil everything down later.
The minute I went to fathers’ classes, over fifty years ago now, or had my vasectomy, or had a child who never slept till he was five, or last week when I fractured my finger, I immediately thought, hmm, there must be a thousand words in that.
Is it showing off, in that I think somehow my ordinary experience and my thoughts are better, more interesting than other people’s? Not really. I want to share. Just as when I was a little boy aged four in Scotland, I stood at the gate in Johnstone and told everyone in the street, total strangers, passing by, exactly what my parents were doing, that very moment.
You have of course to develop or create a style, find a voice which people will recognise. They might hate it, and I know my silly phrases and slang and style have annoyed many readers over the years – and also my own friends and family. Hard luck. If the editor still wants to print it, that’s what matters.
When you have a regular column or several, you are thinking about them all the time, all week long, looking for something to happen, something overheard, seen or thought, which somehow can be used and turned into a column. It’s the reason I always carry a pen round my neck, ready to write down possible material.
One of my heroes as a columnist was Miles Kington, who died in 2008. He did a daily column in the Independent which was always funny, creative, imaginative, never hurtful, never boastful, always wry, and always wise.
People used to ask him how he managed it – and he said it was what he had done, all his life. In his days on the staff of Punch, he would come in every day and have to write something amusing. So in his later life, as a free
lance, it was a daily rhythm he had got into, a pattern of life, just doing the job he had always done.
I first met Miles in 1979 when I too joined Punch, not on the staff but as a weekly contributor, one of the most enjoyable and interesting jobs I ever had.
It was Alan Coren’s idea. I think he had invited me to one of their weekly lunches and I was going on about my three children, how when you work at home, people think you don’t have a proper job, or actually do anything, so you get asked to do stuff, like take other people’s children to school. He suggested I write a family, domestic column, purely from the father’s point of view.
From the beginning of mass-market newspapers and magazines in the early nineteenth century, there have of course been domestic columns, advice for cooking or child rearing, but rarely have they ever been written by men. In the 1970s there was a new batch of domestic columns, this time with feminist overtones, in publications like the Guardian and Observer. Alan’s idea was that it was about time a man answered back – not in the sense of giving his views, but from his perspective, on his day-to-day experiences of being a dad.
The column was called Father’s Day. From the very beginning I made an awful mistake which later rebounded on me. I did not want to call my children by soppy names, which was what some women columnists were doing, such as calling their children Little Treasure and Big Treasure. I wanted my column to be real, so I decided to use their real names – Caitlin, Jake and Flora. They were quite young at the time. Flora was only seven, so was not going to object, and their friends would not be reading Punch anyway.
With this sort of family, domestic column, on the lines of the one by Tim Dowling in the Guardian Weekend magazine, you flam up things, exaggerate, put incidents and experiences together, spin things out, but basically you don’t lie, don’t totally make up things. It’s just that there are other truths you don’t reveal. You play to the character you have created in the column. I wrote about stuff that had happened, sort of, but I did not write about bad or sad things which happen in all families.
A Life in the Day Page 19