Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  I must confess to the occasional faux pas of this kind – after a party chez Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates (who were too spaced-out to bother with placements), I said to my wife that I liked the saturnine fellow seated on my right – was he an Australian backpacker?

  ‘That was Nick Cave.’

  ‘And there was a pleasant young man on my left who looked like the young John Lennon?’

  ‘Yes. That’s because he is Julian Lennon.’

  There was one occasion on which my mindset proved a liability. The makers of a movie based on The Importance of Being Earnest decided to invite the smartest people they could find in London to a party in the French Champagne district, in which we would show off our Wildean witticisms. It was pretty much a second eleven by the time we climbed aboard the private jet to Reims, for lunch with Monsieur Krug (yes, the real Monsieur Krug), who presided over the table without much understanding of the English aphorisms that volleyed across it. To make him feel – well, proud – I said how happy I was to be drinking Krug rather than Taittinger, whose patron had been convicted of collaborating with the Nazis. As I dramatically expatiated on Monsieur Taittinger’s crimes, I felt the satisfaction of a speaker whose words are having an impact on his listeners, notwithstanding kicks to my shin from underneath the table. Monsieur Krug started to splutter into his own vintage, all too well aware – as I was not – that all the great champagne families had collaborated: Taittinger was jailed because they needed a scapegoat. Much as I admire Russell Brand for refusing to brand himself by wearing Hugo Boss (who made prison uniforms for concentration camps) I now doubt whether historical awareness need extend to champagne. I am afraid it flowed less freely after my well-intentioned interjection.

  It was often a pleasure to play consigliore to London’s Australia mafia, or to passing Aussies who got up the nose of the British establishment. Julian Assange was a prime example and Phil Nitschke was another, threatened with a ban at the Edinburgh Festival by ill-informed police who thought he would bring a ‘suicide machine’ to decimate its older patrons. Another was the brilliant pianist Roger Woodward, falsely accused of perverting justice after his son was accused (also falsely) of murder: on the day the charge was dropped, I asked the Recorder of London to say, exceptionally, that there was not a scintilla of truth to them. I handed up tributes to Roger’s impeccable character ‘attested, my Lord, by no less than three Queen’s Counsel: Gough Whitlam QC, Neville Wran QC and Lionel Murphy QC’. The judge was sufficiently moved to tell Roger, ‘You walk out of the Old Bailey without a stain on your character.’

  Only one of our dinner parties was designed to leak. Our friend Gordon Brown – a man even more serious than me – had become prime minister and was enduring bad press, pretty much on the basis that he lacked the common touch. In the simplistic world of tabloid spin, this was easy to refute – by inviting him to dinner with Kylie Minogue. Their meeting became a subject for mention in Parliament – even his enemies (or those with a sense of humour) celebrated his discovery of a lighter side. With Ed Miliband, we matched George and Amal Clooney, although sadly the stardust did not sprinkle. I have to say (since I am often asked) that George truly is one of the most decent, charming, intelligent and humble men I have ever met, and if the Democrats decide to pre-select him for president in 2020 I shall give up the day job to work for him pro bono. As for the latest Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, we have not yet offered a dinner party (he is verging on veganism) but have given him something infinitely more valuable – our daughter, who works indefatigably for his election.

  As for my first love, it was always a joy to open the front door of our little house in Longueville after the taxi ride from the airport to kiss my mother’s greying head. When I appear on those radio programs on which you choose music that means something to you, I begin with the judge’s song from Trial by Jury, end with Isolde’s ecstatic lament at the end of Tristan und Isolde and include somewhere Verdi’s ‘Dio, che nell’alma infondere’ from Don Carlos, a duet between two doomed young men determined to fight for human rights against the Inquisition. And I would always dedicate the Judy Collins version of the Lennon/McCartney ‘In My Life’ to my mother. She would sit every morning in a shaft of sunlight in the lounge, reading every word of the Sydney Morning Herald, cutting out for me the mentions of my friends and chuckling over my detractors. She had no liking for what she called ‘the limelight’ and would never appear on television programs– not even on Who Do You Think You Are?, which was about her ancestors. Only once did she allow me to mention her in print, and that was because the proceeds from the book went to the Blind Society. It was called Mum’s the Word and contained recollections by what it termed ‘celebrated Australians’ – Ita Buttrose, Alan Jones, Hazel Hawke, Rolf Harris and other names of 1988.3 Here is what I wrote then, and I did not alter a word when I read it at her funeral almost thirty years later:

  My first serious thoughts about Mum came when I had to list her occupation on a school form. ‘Put down “Domestic Duties”,’ she said. I had a first, childish twinge of male guilt: is that how society really regards mothers? In those days, of course, it was.

  I can’t help drawing inspiration from my mother, because I experienced at first-hand her humble strength and unfussy decency. She never preaches – just teaches by quiet example how happiness comes from giving to others, how to obtain pleasure from doing inconvenient duties, how to accept good fortune with humility and bad luck with the determination to fight another day. She has no time for riches or vanity nor what she dismissively terms ‘the limelight’. But although she’s self-effacing and sometimes in fragile health, whenever I’m with her I feel as secure as a cub protected by its lioness. And when I hear that haunting song ‘In My Life’ (‘there is no one compares with you …’) it always seems to sum up my feelings about her exactly.

  Of course, mums can’t be held responsible for their children. Even Hitler had a mother, who doubtless encouraged little Adolf in his ambitions. Mine always says she just wants me to be happy – but whenever I am asked to do something which I feel to be morally right, although difficult publicly or damaging for my career, it’s my mother’s principles which give me the strength to do it. If I were a guest on my own Hypotheticals, and were asked where I drew the ethical line, I would have to admit that I could never do anything of which my mother would disapprove.

  11

  Hypotheticals

  In the late 1970s I adjusted my name. In Australia it had always been ‘Geoff’. ‘Geoffrey’ seemed to add an unnecessary syllable (Kathy jokes that Australia’s too hot to say words of more than one), and was mainly used by people who were not minded to be friendly. It was as ‘Geoff Robertson’ that I wrote articles in the Guardian and authored my first book, Reluctant Judas. My second, however, was a lengthy treatise on censorship law, published in 1979 by Messrs Weidenfeld & Nicolson under what the editor described as a ‘cool’ title, Obscenity. For some reason this venture into serious publishing drove me to consult my mother: under which version of her son’s name would she like to see him make his academic debut? Her answer left me in no doubt: ‘Well, we named you Geoffrey.’ I could never go against Mum’s wishes, so I wimpishly reverted to the name on my birth certificate. Hence, a few years later, the television series Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals.

  The programs came about, initially, through my attachment to university life. I still rather fancied becoming a professor, with a large office overlooking a leafy quadrangle, where my textbooks could be researched and footnoted by a squad of eager postgraduate students. Instead they were written by a one-man band, toiling over footnotes that have sometimes betrayed a need for researchers. My career as a barrister did not permit acceptance of full-time lecturing offers, but in 1981 I did manage a six-month visiting professorship at Warwick University, with a lecture schedule occasionally disrupted by recalls to the Old Bailey. My main innovation there was to adopt the case-study teaching technique developed at Harvard, in the hope that m
y role-playing classes would be amusing and challenging as well as informative, and so live in student memory longer than the classroom dictation I had endured at Sydney and Oxford universities.

  The success of the case-study method had been impressed on me when I visited Harvard on the student leader scholarship in 1969, and caught up with Nick Greiner, who was studying there. Once the most indolent of students, he was in a lather of preparation for his case study the following day, in which his hypothetical company would, unless he mastered the background materials better than his fellow student competitors, be taken over or liquidated or sunk to the bottom of the harbour – and Nick sent to the bottom of the class. Memories of his frenzy motivated my introduction of the technique at Warwick, which was where a talent scout from Granada Television found me. He had come looking for an English academic to join a trio of Harvard law professors to ringmaster hypothetical case studies for a US (CBS) and UK television series.

  Our US producer, whose idea it had been to lift the Socratic method from the classroom and adapt it for television, was the legendary Fred Friendly. He had produced many of Ed Murrow’s shows, including his CBS program which helped destroy the red-baiting Senator McCarthy (in the film about this period, Good Night, and Good Luck, Friendly is played by George Clooney). He was a big, amiable American carrying the weight of history lightly on his shoulders, and was happy enough to let me take the action in the shows wherever I liked. But there were limits – we were recording for a US audience as well. I did one program about the media in war, with CBS journalist Morley Safer, New York Times correspondent Johnny Apple, General Alexander Haig and James Schlesinger, former US Secretary of Defense, plus British politicians and journalists, including Harold Evans and Jonathan Dimbleby. Fred made a late-evening visit to my hotel room the day before the show was to be recorded. He settled down with a whisky and asked, ‘How are you going to end it?’ I said that I would probably have Safer or Apple taken hostage and killed after a botched rescue mission. He shook his large, owlish head. ‘That won’t work on CBS – killing an American. Think of another ending.’ It was late, but I tried. ‘Okay, I’ll kill a Brit. Jonathan Dimbleby, perhaps?’ Fred smiled: ‘That would be entirely appropriate.’ In all the shows that I made for CBS/Granada, this was his only editorial interference.

  Under the guidance of Fred and the English producer, Brian Lapping, I spent exciting hours in TV studios during the eighties offering bribes to businessmen, dispatching policemen into massage parlours to arrest judges, encouraging American generals to invade Caribbean islands (and they actually invaded Grenada a few months later), arranging deals between journalists and terrorists, and becoming the world’s first pregnant man, all in the service of imaginary stories which might, and sometimes did, become true before the program went to air.

  One show caused an international stir – and still does, decades later. It was about the consequences of the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini – the first notable example of Islamic extremism. Among the panellists was the singer Cat Stevens, in his born-again persona of Yusuf Islam. In my hypothetical scenario, he found himself dining in a restaurant and noticed Salman at a nearby table. He evinced a willingness, in some circumstances, to execute him, responding ‘Yes, yes’ when I asked whether Rushdie deserved to die. It was a frighteningly real moment, but it shows how the format can elicit honest responses which would not be ventured on any other kind of program.

  The English editions were classed as ‘educational’ – copies were sent to universities – but they were not screened in prime time and they were performed before small, selected audiences who were not encouraged to laugh. I always felt these programs had the potential to be less earnest and more entertaining, as I mentioned over a tennis game with Peter Luck during a Christmas visit home. Peter was the producer of Channel 9’s Sunday program, and became enthused at the prospect of an Australian Hypotheticals.

  Thus it came about, one Sunday morning in early 1984, that his viewers were exposed to ninety minutes of industrial action, espionage and corporate chicanery, as Bob Ansett piloted a hypothetical helicopter company through the turbulence of takeover bids from Ron Brierley, strikes led by trade union supremo John Ducker, the moral scruples of Richard Walsh and government intervention from Nick Greiner, who was by then leader of the opposition in New South Wales. Viewers initially jammed the switchboard in protest against being deprived of their normal Sunday show, but at the end of the broadcast there were sufficient messages of approval for Sam Chisholm, the Channel 9 manager, to offer us a series. Peter suggested that our next show should be about the ethics of the media.

  Before I turn to that cause célèbre, I should explain something about my philosophy and practice in Hypotheticals. I call myself a ‘moderator’, although moderation is probably not the characteristic I mainly display; I am more of a Keystone traffic cop with ants in my pinstripe pants, directing intellectual pile-ups between sixteen opinionated participants, on subjects that are deathly serious (child abuse, the right to die, legal ethics) or in most contexts deathly boring (multiculturalism, the Australian constitution). Always at the back of my mind is a challenging statistic: viewers cannot absorb more than three minutes of a ‘talking head’. And I have to make sixteen talking heads, positioned around a horseshoe-shaped table, interesting television for sixty to ninety minutes.

  Historically, the first hypothetical moderator was Socrates, who walked around the ancient agora postulating imaginary situations and asking Athenians how – and more importantly, why – they would react. His imagination was mischievous, his dilemmas disturbing in a small society – so much so that it decreed his death because he asked too many unsettling questions. The Socratic method aims to tease out the rationale behind a decision, and then examine whether that rationale can serve as a general principle by applying it to other, similar cases. If not, the original decision is exposed as opportunistic or wrong. The method, properly applied, uses the hypothetical to draw out ethical rules and test their value by seeing how they apply to difficult cases.

  That’s the theory. My practice is to choose a subject which on close examination bristles with unforeseen ethical dilemmas. Then comes the selection of participants. All are allotted roles they play or have played or might well play, and they comprise men and women in public life as well as journalists, police officers, accountants and actors. There has to be a political and ideological balance (some do not understand this and want me to choose only panellists with nice progressive views, but many of the highlights of the show occur when the logic of the storyline induces a reactionary to act like a liberal, or vice versa). The event must be unscripted and unrehearsed: the show’s secret ingredient is its spontaneity. I meet the sixteen panellists briefly after make-up, to try to memorise any faces I don’t already know and to tell them not to make long speeches. I give no inkling of the questions they will be asked. I am never sure of them myself, because it is through the responses, which can be unpredictable, that I have to fashion and develop the storyline. I ask the participants to imagine themselves in a movie in which they are playing themselves.

  The format can elicit uncomfortable truths from practised equivocators. The very atmosphere conduces to candour, as a decision-maker is surrounded by experts who know how he or she has acted in similar situations. They cannot dodge a difficult question by saying ‘I’d call my lawyer’ or ‘I’d need to consult my advisers’ – the lawyer or adviser is on the panel, to be called or consulted immediately, after which the decision must be taken. The viewer is invited to become a fly on the wall, a witness to scenes that television cameras normally cannot capture because they do not penetrate the closed doors of boardrooms or lawyers’ offices or doctors’ surgeries. The fact that the scenarios are imaginary makes the Hypothetical a libel-free zone – truths may be told without the constraints of betraying confidences, embarrassing colleagues or creating political kerfuffle. The format might have induced truth-telling on Australia
n television in the eighties, but the popularity of Hypotheticals (we rated in the top ten) had one unintended consequence: the introduction of a new excuse for politicians to avoid answering difficult questions, by saying, ‘Oh, that’s hypothetical.’ It’s an answer that, by definition, could not be given by a participant on Hypotheticals.

  I control post-production (sometimes the program tape runs for a couple of hours) to ensure that no one is unfairly edited. And I have untrammelled authority over the choice of participants. You’d be surprised how often interference has been attempted. In the program I made with Bill Hayden and Kim Beazley, for example, the Department of Foreign Affairs took objection to my invitation to John Pilger, to the extent of threatening to withdraw Hayden and Beazley. I had to call Bill to make his people withdraw their opposition.

  I have sometimes gained inspiration from the plot conventions of Elizabethan dramas. Shakespearean theatre was as strapped for cash as the ABC: it could not afford scenery or fine costumes so it relied on imagery without images: verbal metaphors conjuring up scenes of violence and betrayal; unexpected denouements and the fall of kings – stories which would hold sufficient interest to be played out on bare boards. This is one reason why the simple Hypothetical stage with just its horseshoe table is so frequently littered with dead bodies, the panellists and I having conjured up more scenes of violence than an average episode of Game of Thrones. I enter that stage with the loosely constructed beginnings of a plot in my mind, hoping that my actors will improvise the best lines – they are, after all, playing themselves. The large and live audience invited to the recording, like the eventual viewers, must, in Shakespeare’s words, ‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth.’