A Life in Questions

William Collins

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London SE1 9GF

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Jeremy Paxman 2016

Lyrics from ‘Mrs Worthington’ by Noël Coward, © NC Aventales AG, 1935, reproduced by permission of Alan Brodie Representation Ltd, www.alanbrodie.com

Jeremy Paxman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover image © Carsten Windhorst

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008128302

Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008128319

Version: 2017-05-04

Epigraph

Here richly, with ridiculous display,

The Politician’s corpse was laid away.

While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged

I wept. For I had longed to see him hanged.

Hilaire Belloc

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Foreword

1 Why Do You Talk Like That?

2 Didn’t You Hear the Bell?

3 What Do You Really Know?

4 Why is it Like That?

5 What is ‘the Oxygen of Publicity’?

6 Remembered that Question Yet?

7 What Sort of Pizza Topping Would You Be?

8 Dizzee Who?

9 What is Torschlusspanik?

10 Would You Answer the Question?

11 And?

Picture Section

Index

Also by Jeremy Paxman

About the Publisher

Foreword

What do we know of our lives? I am certain my blood group is A Negative, because the nurse vaccinating me before some trip to a war zone sent a blood sample off for testing. I noticed that, in private, we all scrawled our blood group onto the back of our helmets, in case something awful happened. I know I passed my Eleven-Plus, took two attempts to get good enough marks at my Common Entrance exam, failed Maths and Latin O Levels at the first attempt, got pretty average A Levels, won an exhibition to Cambridge and got a 2:1 in my final exams. The mere facts which categorise you aren’t interesting. If only one could tell children that once you’ve finished your exams, no one cares much about how you did, or even asks to see your certificates. Instead we expect them to play the game we played.

When the time came for me to start work I applied for the obvious jobs, but without much enthusiasm. I was then astonishingly lucky. One of the irritating characteristics of life is that it can only be understood looking backwards, yet you must live it looking forwards. Though it didn’t really seem like that at the time, I now see that there was only one occupation suitable for someone who, like me, was driven by curiosity and loved words. For over forty years I have followed the same trade, whether in radio, television, newspapers or books.

As my own shelves show, the world has a surplus of books. Why perpetrate another? I have no great prescription to dispense. But it’s been fun, and along the way I met some interesting people and heard some terrific stories, which I might as well share before I forget them. I have no scores to settle, no unfinished business. I just did things that seemed interesting at the time. A collection of memoirs offers the chance to try to set the record straighter than it might be otherwise, and to laugh at the silliness of so much of life.

The other day I was rootling through some boxes in the bottom of a cupboard. Whatever the reasons for keeping the stuff I found inside – the hours devoted to an essay, the brief moment of insight which seemed so vital at the time, the transitoriness of television – earlier in life I wanted to preserve my past. I have now lost that urge. There, among the Panamanian hotel bills, Swiss speeding tickets, defunct fishing permits, libel-reader reports and now unplayable videocassettes, was the evidence that I was once vain enough to subscribe to a cuttings agency, which dutifully clipped pieces from newspapers and magazines across the land. I suppose I kept the subscription for a year or two, and it is embarrassing to confess. For a while, my head was turned. Even after deciding that the agency was a waste of money, I still occasionally clipped stories from the newspapers in which I had appeared. From them I learn, among other things, that my weather forecasting colleague on Breakfast Time was ‘a sex machine’, and that a Scottish sports reporter on the same show with ‘a squashed face’ was tipped as the future of broadcasting. I seem once to have told a celebrity magazine called Best that ‘I find clothes really boring,’ and soon afterwards a designer called Jeff Banks nominated me as one of the worst-dressed men in Britain, saying, ‘That man should loosen up and get into some soft linen.’ In 1994 Ruby Wax told Options magazine that she had noticed I had ‘huge genitals’, and in March 2008 Marks & Spencer took a full-page ad in the Guardian to proclaim that I was wrong about the drop in quality of their pants. David Cameron let it be known to some obliging reporter that he detested me. Tony Blair’s Health Secretary, John Reid, accused me of disrespecting him after I described him on air as the government’s ‘all-purpose attack dog’ (the ten minutes of foul-mouthed abuse which his assistant afterwards heaped on Kate McAndrew, the producer of the day, was not disclosed), and the next day the Daily Mirror quoted a ‘friend’ of John Reid calling me ‘a West London wanker’. In the following weekend’s papers the novelist Howard Jacobson accused me of ‘coarsening public life’.

The accusation is familiar, along with the suggestion that people like me are responsible for the fact that so many of the public despise mainstream politicians. I reject the charge, of course – all we try to do is to get straight answers to pretty straightforward questions, and often a cloud of obfuscation is as revealing as an unexpected outbreak of frankness. But I accept that if you present yourself uninvited in people’s homes, they will take a view on you. That’s how it goes. In my case the progression of newspaper-columnist opinion went from ‘a breath of fresh air’, through ‘Who does this cheeky bastard think he is?’, to ‘peevish old sod’. It is intrinsic to the trade I follow that we constantly seek novelty, and once the novel becomes familiar, it is ripe for aerial bombardment. The only hope then is that in the years when you’re wondering where you left your teeth before your afternoon nap, someone reaches for another cliché and deems you to have become a ‘veteran’ – as if you are a car on the London–Brighton run, and unlikely to get much beyond Croydon. Then you die.

There were dozens of letters in the cupboard, too – a tiny fraction, I suppose, of the total I received, and which I had kept for no rhyme or reason I could discern. I rather enjoyed hearing from viewers, since broadcasting is such a one-way business, and letters often described a first-hand experience of issues which would otherwise be hidden behind clouds of political verbiage. Since anyone who presents news or current affairs programmes on the BBC is effectively an employee of the viewers who are forced to pay the licence fee, they are perfectly entitled to say what they think of them. (Anyone who performs the same role on a commercial channel is also paid for by the viewer, of course, but rather more indirectly.) I relished the exchanges which often followed, and only a handful of times had to use the tabloid editor Kelvin MacKenzie’s tactic, which was to tell my correspondent that I would reluctantly have to ban them from watching. This generally led to even angrier letters, protesting, ‘You can’t do that – I pay the licence fee!’

I discovered that generally, if you’ve made a mistake it is best to answer a letter of complaint with ‘You’re quite right. I’m so sorry. I’ll try to do better.’ This often has the complainant writing back to say, ‘Oh, please don’t take it too seriously.’ The nuclear option is to employ the tactic refined by the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Rob ‘Piggy’ Muldoon: ‘Dear Mrs Smith, I think you should know that some lunatic is using your name and address to send offensive letters in the post.’* I perhaps sent something similar to the man who wrote from Sutton in Surrey during a journalists’ strike I supported in 1985. He described how he had arrived home, ‘blessing my luck at not having to look at you on television. Then I picked up the Standard, and damn me, there you were, leering in the front rank of the picket line, puffing out your chest like a stuffed ulotrichan and posing with drooping pants.’ I must have kept the letter as a vocabulary lesson – apparently ‘ulotrichan’ means having crisp hair.

Other letters included numerous requests to donate items for sale in charity auctions, or for recipes to be included in fundraising cookbooks – further evidence of the conviction I reached a few years ago, and which is quite the reverse of the impression given by most of the mass media, that most people are decent human beings. There are an awful lot of generally unacknowledged individuals doing terrific things in the world.

In one letter, someone said they had managed to read my palms off the television screen: ‘You are quite healthy and energetic. Minor ailments are inevitable and may sometimes do you much harm if you neglect them,’ followed by similarly vacuous diagnoses. Amateur cartoonists sent awful caricatures they had drawn; singers, songs they had written; and poets their poems. For a while, a kind viewer would post me hand-painted ties every couple of months. A lady still brings pots of jam she has made to recordings of University Challenge, and over the years plenty of fishing folk have sent me flies they have tied up with feather and fur, which they claim are ‘certain’ to catch salmon or trout. When I was blackballed by the Garrick Club (for the crime, apparently, of being beastly to politicians on television) I was bombarded with supportive letters from outraged club members I had never met. They coincided with numerous invitations to join other clubs, including the Crediton Men’s Group, where there was ‘no danger from bores – if someone’s being dull we tell him to shut up and buy us another pint’.

A public life is as inadequate an expression of the whole person as a patient’s medical notes – they only record what he or she told the doctor, and often disclose nothing much about the texture of their life. I suppose that when I eventually expire, the likely headline will be ‘Man Who Asked Same Question Fourteen Times Dies’. This is no more of a claim on anyone’s attention than ‘Man Who Collected 5,000 Tin Cans Dies’. It wasn’t fourteen times, but the repetition of that number proves that what matters is who produces the first account, and that was the figure used on the radio the morning after the notorious Michael Howard interview. The rest of the caricature – ‘Mr Rude’, the truculence, the so-called sneering, I just have to live with. Is it just the media which can only deal with a monochrome stereotype, or are we all a bit like that?

You don’t learn much more from personal tastes. I am a strong swimmer, love fly-fishing, drink more than the Department of Health says is good for us, and have a dodgy knee. I like dogs, but am allergic to cats. I am easily bored, read a lot, don’t watch much television, would love to be able to play a musical instrument but can only sing – badly – in the bath, dislike shopping and enjoy watching birds. For years I had to stay up late, and my real idea of a good time is to be in bed by 10.30. I don’t sleep particularly well, and I don’t much like kale. Or the parson’s nose on a roast bird. I would rather ride a bike than drive a car. I spent several years seeing a therapist, and several more on antidepressants. Though I think I’m an atheist, I have a passion for old churches. Occasionally I sit on the loo and shoot squirrels out of the bathroom window.

Journalists like to brag that their account of events is ‘the first draft of history’. Sometimes this is true, although it is really a boast that can only be made by a small minority of our trade. I have been lucky enough to have had an interesting job and to have worked with clever, funny people. We had a lot of laughs, and sometimes we found things out. That’s all. What follows does not pretend to be history or rounded portraiture, just some recollections of how it seemed at the time. There is often a disclaimer at the front of novels to the effect that ‘Any resemblance to individuals alive or dead is unintended.’ In a memoir, the reverse ought to be true – any similarity is entirely intentional. But, just as every witness to an accident tells a slightly different story, others will have discrepant memories from my own. As Bertrand Russell said, ‘When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man.’

‘The world is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think,’ that pipsqueak eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole is supposed to have said. He ignored the fact we can all both feel and think, and I find that what made me weep at the age of twenty made me laugh at fifty. Both responses are right, but as time passes the fierce clarity of youth gives way to a more textured palette, primary colours fading to pastel pigments. I don’t like the fact that I have mellowed, but I cannot deny it. For all the sound and fury, there are very few people indeed that I actively dislike: in fact, looking back over the decades I could count them on the fingers of one hand. Assuming I could remember who they all were.

There is, then, nothing all-encompassing about what follows. It’s just some stuff that happened, what it felt like at the time, and, maybe, what might be learned from it. I have taken the decision not to write about my family, because what they choose to disclose of their lives is up to them.

As for sources, I have kept many diaries over the years, though some of them were clearly begun as New Year resolutions and petered out by March. Some of the incidents recounted here come from those diaries, some from memory, and others from responses to the sort of letter Auberon Waugh sent when he was invited to produce his memoirs: ‘I have been asked to write my autobiography. Does anyone know what I’ve been doing?’ The following were generous with their recollections: Steve Anderson, Peter Barron, David Belton, Keith Bowers, James Bray, Neil Breakwell, Jasmin Buttar, Julia Cleverdon, Frank Considine, Lucy Crystal, Richard Danbury, Peter Davies, George Entwistle, Tim Gardam, Jim Gray, Peter Gwyn, Robert Harris, John Hay, Meirion Jones, Rhodri Jones, Laura Kuenssberg, Anita Land, Adam Livingstone, Barton Macfarlane, Hannah MacInnes, Sally Magnusson, Linda Mitchell, Eddie Morgan, Shaminder Nahal, Andrew Nickolds, Jeff Overs, Charlie Potter, Celia Reed, Peter Snow, Jillian Taylor, Kirsty Wark, Peter Weil and Michael Whale. Carly Wallis, the one person without whom Newsnight would fall apart, kindly sent me screeds of paper detailing what happened during my twenty-five years there. To those I have stupidly left off this list, many apologies. I hope it goes without saying that any mistakes are all my own work.

I am grateful to my literary agent, David Godwin, for the occasional lunch, and to Arabella Pike for her encouragement, skill and charm in steering the thing from manuscript to bound copy. Neither is to blame for anything I have got wrong or misremembered.

* Muldoon lost power in 1984 after calling a snap election when three sheets to the wind. The event became known as ‘the schnapps election’.

1

Why Do You Talk Like That?

Some people claim to remember their own birth. I don’t believe them, and I certainly can’t do so. The night my second younger brother was born, and the day I arrived back from school to find I had a younger sister, I recall vividly. Where I left the book I borrowed from the London Library last week I have no idea.

When I was growing up we lived in an absurdly pretty pink-washed, mullion-windowed cottage at the edge of a village green in Hampshire. Rose Cottage really did have roses around the door, and at weekends we could watch the local team play cricket on the green without leaving the front garden. There was a big old fig tree in the garden which splattered ripe fruit onto the ground each September, and a pump in the middle of the lawn with a white-painted seat around which I learned to ride a bike.

In the cottage next door lived Mr and Mrs Ball. Mrs Ball was very old, and baked a lot. The only thing I can recall about Mr Ball was that he drowned kittens in a sack. Mother wore her long black hair tied back in a bun, and rode a black sit-up-and-beg bicycle with a child’s seat over the back mudguard which I occupied as she pedalled the four miles into Fareham for groceries. What little I remember of Dad – he was away at sea a lot – is of a curly-haired figure in loose trousers and lightly checked cotton shirt. There was a black-and-brown family dachshund named Dinah.

My first education was at the redbrick Victorian primary school at the end of the village green. Mum would walk me down to the playground, and was there at the gate when classes finished. The teacher sat at a raised desk, and the classroom was high-windowed and cavernous. I cannot help that it all sounds such a clichéd picture of a vanished England, but that’s just how it was.

My father, Keith, was stationed at the Royal Navy base in Portsmouth, and was away at sea when I was born. In the final days of her pregnancy my mother, Joan, took the train north to be with her family, and I was delivered in a nursing home near Leeds. At the time, Yorkshire County Cricket Club operated a selection policy under which only those who had been born in the county were eligible for selection. My Yorkshire father occasionally offered this as an explanation for my mother’s long pilgrimage from the Solent to Leeds, though he never seemed to take that close an interest in the game. While I failed to acquire any great skill with bat or ball, I never lost an unreasonable pride (insufferable smugness?) about having come from God’s Own County, even though I never really lived there.

We were not a close family – as Mother told it when she was older, there was one occasion when Dad returned from sea service and I ran away screaming, because I had no idea who he was. This must have distressed him, but relations between us never really improved much. I suppose the family would have been classified as middle class, but there was always a slight sense that we were hanging in there by our fingernails. The constant refrain of my childhood was ‘We can’t afford it,’ which I now recognise wasn’t really a declaration of poverty so much as mere Yorkshireness, although it didn’t seem so at the time. We shared the generally improving standard of living in the fifties, but did not live extravagantly: there was only one foreign holiday, in 1959, when we took a boat from Southampton to Vigo, in Spain – on the return journey the ship carried great numbers of Caribbean immigrants, whom my brothers and I, never having seen a black person, found fascinating.

As a family we did not number doctors, dentists, bank managers or similar worthies in our circle. No one in the immediate family had been to university, though one of my mother’s sisters had spent some time at RADA, hoping to become an actress. It was a very brief career which distressed her parents almost as much as her incomprehensible decision to become a Roman Catholic. But my father was a naval officer, and while Mum’s father had started out as a travelling salesman, he ended up with his own canning factory and a small country estate in North Yorkshire. It was he who paid the fees when I, my younger brothers Giles and James, and my sister Jenny later went to private schools.

All children like to imagine their parents have heroic histories. In my childhood I believed Dad to have spent the war on convoy duty, protecting the supplies which came from North America to Britain, or those sent from a remote Scottish sea loch to Russian allies in Archangel and Murmansk. Of the many miserable fates which stalked the war generation, unannounced death from a U-boat torpedo in the icy waters of the North Atlantic has always seemed one of the worst. I imagined Dad as the sort of figure played by Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, binoculars hanging around his neck, standing on the bridge of a destroyer in a naval duffel-coat, with mountainous seas breaking across the foredeck, calmly ordering ‘Full ahead both’ into a voice tube as a torpedo wake glows white under the briny. But when I unearthed his records a few months ago his military career turned out to have been rather more prosaic. He seems to have volunteered for the navy straight out of school, giving his civilian occupation as ‘bank clerk’. The records show early training at a requisitioned holiday camp at Skegness, from which he emerged as a rating, followed by another training period at an airfield in Luton, as he hoped to become a navy pilot with the Fleet Air Arm.

This did not come off, possibly because, as he later told his sisters, he was grounded for ‘hedge-hopping’ and flying his aircraft beneath the arches of bridges. Perhaps it was actually for more humdrum reasons – only a very small proportion of those who wanted to become wartime pilots were successful. At any rate, in March 1941 he began a less glamorous naval life as a ‘Writer’ on board HMS Fernie, a largely administrative role aboard a destroyer assigned to escort shipping in the Channel. As it did for many people, my father’s war doubtless passed in bouts of intense fear and excitement, separated by very much longer periods of great tedium. By the following year he had been promoted to ‘Leading Writer’, in which capacity he was shuffled from one ship or shore base to another, either at home or abroad. In 1944 he is recorded as serving in the Persian Gulf on board a series of vessels, including converted Norwegian whaling ships and at the Royal Navy base in Basra, Iraq.

He emerged from the war with five medals, recognising service in home waters and the Indian Ocean. Children generally imagine all medals to have been won in much the way you gain a VC. In fact, most of them testify to more mundane activities. When I was about eight I remember approaching him as he sat slumped in an armchair reading the paper and asking whether he had ever been shipwrecked. ‘Six times!’ he replied, and reburied himself in the newsprint. He was really saying ‘Leave me alone!’ But I so wanted to believe him.

At the end of the war, huge numbers of men were demobilised and returned to civilian life. But Dad decided to swim in the other direction, and applied to be commissioned as a Royal Navy officer. In October 1945 he was appointed Temporary Acting Sub Lieutenant. A group photograph of sixty or so young officers gathered at the naval base at Gosport shows him in the third row, one of the few lieutenants with war service medals – an indication that his time in the ranks had resulted in his being older than many of his peers. Within a few years he had been promoted to Lieutenant and given the posting sought by every naval officer, command of his own vessel, a motor torpedo boat.