But I loved everything else about Biarritz, and precisely because it was so predictable. Despite its grand name, resonant in cultural history, it was as small-time as the pair of warped espadrilles that the pretty girl finds in her cupboard in Mr Hulot’s Holiday, my nomination for the title of best film comedy ever made. I was Mr Hulot reborn, with the difference that I had got the girl, and right at the start of the movie. Sunning themselves almost naked on the sea wall, there were pretty odalisques to whom less time had happened, but the woman I had married could still remind me, when she stood in the shallows outlined in her floppy hat against the oncoming twilight, of our first day together on Bronte Beach in Sydney, back there when she was hearing some of my jokes for the first time. For all too many men, and I am one of them, the realization can be a long time dawning that you won’t really get to meet that beautiful young woman you just saw in the art gallery, because you already met her many years ago, and now you are getting old. With enough power and money you might conceivably persuade the beautiful young woman to become yours, and it will all be new again, but only for a while. It’s the oldest story in the world, and what makes it a mockery is that you have missed the point: in a marriage you can’t constantly regain the sense of discovery, you can only learn to value what has already been discovered. If it all depends on novelty, a marriage is doomed anyway: it can only work if you both enjoy the subtle shades of the time-worn.
And there were our children, surprising every day, getting bigger each year but always finding new ways of doing the same old things. On the few days of sunshine they added to their collections of pebbles and shells. Where the rocks met the beach below the esplanade, I still built a driftwood house on the same spot every summer, perhaps out of the same bits of timber. The topping out of a driftwood house was always signalled by my stretching a big beach towel over its rafters, to protect its potential occupants from the sun. As if a field gun had been fired at the clouds, the rain would instantly begin to fall. But the children knew what they had to do. In the year that Uncle Martin was there, they could perch on high stools in a bar and watch him play Space Invaders. But in any other year they had to go to the Musée de la Mer and pretend all over again to be spellbound by the exhibits. While I sat alone under the awning of our favourite cafe on the Rue Gambetta and started on a new book, my wife was shopping in Bayonne along with the other wives, and the children were in the Musée de la Mer checking out the current living arrangements of the same old starfish. Even at home in England, the whole family still calls a threatening sky ‘a potential Musée de la Mer situation’. At one point we skipped the Biarritz trip for about a decade, having succumbed to the vain illusion that happiness might lie elsewhere, in a climate more reliable. But eventually we went back, because the Biarritz climate was reliable: reliably variable. When a family holds together, its members will develop a language to enjoy even the boredom. When a family breaks up, no amount of excitement will compensate. In my time, I have seen an awful lot of good men make the big decision, and I’ve heard an awful lot of small change hit the floor. But the small change is precious. Perhaps I’m a miser.
Staying married to one person is undoubtedly a lot less expensive than getting married to someone else, but it still has to be paid for, and although we were by then well off, it was never easy street. Nor, however, was the cash flow any longer the chief consideration. My price as a television face meant that I could go on publishing books with low financial yield, such as Other Passports, the book of my collected poems that Cape bought out in 1986, and that Picador turned into a paperback the year after. For a poetry book it did well, and the paperback even got into the spinners at the airport, which made me feel better about life as I passed through the terminal on the way to being filmed doing undignified things in some destination not notable for valuing the fruits of the intellect. When you’re hauling yourself out of the mud after take six of failing to ride the yak, it helps if you can remind yourself that you have recently published your collected poems. (‘His occasional flashes of sensitivity may be surprising to many who have seen him making an arsehole of himself on TV’ – Times Literary Supplement.) But the satisfaction was all spiritual. Unusually for a book of its type, Other Passports went on selling steadily for seventeen years, but when it finally went out of print I did a few calculations and worked out that the total return for the book would have kept my family alive for about a week and a half.
The best thing about my rate of remuneration on television, however, was that it was transferable. On television, recognizability is hard currency, and by now I could think of swapping channels if the need arose. It seemed to arise when Michael Grade, chief executive at LWT, went to the BBC. As soon as Michael parked his dynamic form behind his new desk, where his scarlet braces were nicely set off by the shine of the mahogany, Richard was one of the first people that he called. We piled into Richard’s BMW and headed for BBC Television Centre as if being simultaneously wooed by the Sirens and chased by the Furies: not, as it turned out, a bad analogy for our situation, because we were leaving a scene that could have turned bad and heading towards another that would prove to be fraught with danger. For the moment, though, and as always, impulse was what drove us. Michael was the man: near him, things happened. Wherever he was, he kept an open door, and if he liked your idea you could get it on the air. At LWT, though I had achieved such prominence that my face was hanging in the corridor to the canteen along with Reg Varney from On the Buses, my position had ceased to be secure from the moment that John Birt was given an executive post from which he could think of second-guessing Grade. On a personal level I had always liked John Birt, and I like him still. I suspect that the man inside the Armani suit can remember what we both looked like back in the days of Nice Time in the 1960s. Writing a few not very successful sketches for that show, I had been impressed by how the young producer John Birt’s sideboards were even plumper than mine: and mine looked like two squirrels taped to the side of my head. Birt had a pair of dead badgers. But now, time having happened, he was the man in control, and though his temperament was still disarming, his language was becoming incomprehensible. He had already gone a long way towards perfecting a version of management-speak that not even other managers could understand. Using some formula previously unknown to science, he calculated that there could be a more efficient utilization of fixed capital resource flow, or something, if my weekly main-channel show Clive James on Television were to be scrapped. The advertising department caught him with these computations still in his hand and told him that the show made more money, weight for weight, than anything else being produced on the South Bank, so he should leave his big idea alone. Richard wasn’t supposed to be aware that the big idea had even been mooted, but somebody told him, he told me, and I immediately suggested that we should hit the silk. It’s a good rule in show business to spot the moment when the suits upstairs no longer regard you as an asset, and move on straight away. Stick around to be merely put up with and your bargaining power is draining away even if you still look like a fixture. Just because that old coffee machine has always been in the reception area doesn’t mean that it’s part of the furniture. In fact the moment it becomes ‘much loved’ it’s already doomed, because the guy who moves in at the top with a mandate for change will always change what he can if he can’t change what he should.
In less time than it took to think all that, we had completed our transition to Television Centre and were sitting down with Michael for a meeting in his huge new office. Instantly the air was full of flying superlatives: little twittering ghosts of dreams and wishes, like Tinkerbell and all her tiny classmates running wild on sports day. Bred from the playpen to be full of jokes and pithy maxims of showbiz legend, Michael is the most marvellous company even though you can never be sure, while he is talking to you, that he still holds the same post he held when he walked into the room. But there he was, apparently nailed into position, and he wanted us. He wanted us so much, he said, that his BBC2 p
rogramme controller was ready with a proposition fit to revolutionize arts television. Enter the man in question, looking like the fashionably dressed proprietor of a luxury car showroom in Beirut. Needless to say, his fame preceded him, because the most PR-conscious media executive of recent times had been preceded by his fame since the day of his birth, when he emerged from the womb into a light-storm of photoflash and an uproar of shouted questions about what he planned to do next. It was Alan Yentob.
11. DEALING WITH GENIUS
Over the course of the next ten years I accumulated overwhelming evidence to suggest that this moment, when Alan Yentob, on being announced, actually appeared, must have been one of the few instances of his ever being on time in his life, so it was a mark of the honour being done to us by both him and Michael. At this stage of his dazzling career, Yentob spent a lot of time with Stanley Kubrick, and at any succeeding stage there was always some comparably important international star who could not exist without Alan’s companionship and advice. Undoubtedly these prominenti all derived spiritual benefit from their association with Britain’s leading arts impresario. But the downside was that anyone else was cast into the role of walk-on, or, rather, wait-outside. As a truly gifted producer of programmes, Alan had never looked at his watch while getting things done, and therefore he’d had some excuse for behaving as if nobody else owned a watch either. Up until the moment of his elevation to executive prominence, which proved to be the beginning of a new era in BBC history – his hagiographers were dead right about that – manically inspired programme-makers like him always had sober-sided executives in charge of them. Actually to promote the manically inspired programme-maker to the status of executive marked a new phase in cultural administration. From the moment that Alan’s reign as a decision-maker began, the producers who had to report to him found him difficult to reach. All they ever heard was rumours. He was off in the South Pacific, spear-fishing with Marlon Brando. He was on Sam Spiegel’s yacht somewhere near Sardinia, doing a deal with Zeffirelli for an all-dwarf production of La Forza del Destino. Or he was in his office, but he wasn’t opening the door. Waiting in the corridor, producers who had not previously had beards grew them. People died out there, and their bones bleached on the carpet. It was a tribute to Alan’s PR skills that if any of these stories reached the press they only served to reinforce his image as a genius. Let me hasten to say that the image was close to the truth. That was just the trouble. As an executive, he was more of an artist than the artists. There are intellectuals who dream of that arrangement as a desirable ideal, and that’s what’s wrong with them.
Such was the judgement that I formed over the course of time about the Beeb’s leading creative mind, but even then, at this meeting where he and Michael were purportedly offering us the moon, Alan had a way of conveying that he could have been talking to Orson Welles instead. Richard, who actually knew Orson Welles, bristled. Richard could be quite scary when he bristled because he ditched the diplomacy. It wasn’t that he had forgotten how to be diplomatic. It was more that he had deliberately chosen to be blunt. Between them, Michael and Alan were offering us the job of anchoring a brand-new nightly round-up to be called The Late Show, which would transmit live and review everything artistic going on in London that night. When Michael said that Outside Broadcast Units would be laid on so that the show could be there for the curtain calls at Covent Garden and interview the stars, Richard said that it was the kind of suggestion that could only be made by someone who had never actually produced a television programme. It was a measure of Michael’s confidence that he was able to field this perfectly accurate assessment without bristling in his turn. And Alan, I had to admit, wasn’t bad at taking the message that he wouldn’t be getting what he wanted. I had spent some time building up a position, under Richard’s protection, where I could make judicious plans and did not have to react to random events. I didn’t want to give all that up just to meet the challenge – that bad word again – of improvising repartee in order to help a chancy programme sound coherent. The road ahead would roll indefinitely, with never time for rest, thought or proper writing. Kick, bollock and scramble in perpetuity? No thanks. We wanted to do more of what we already knew how to do, pushing it forward only on the basis of established achievement. Michael was ready to settle for that. Alan seemed not bothered at all. He was a hard man to disappoint. His day was too full of riches. It transpired that he had to leave because he had ‘an appointment with Stanley’. In the car, Richard showed his age by guessing that Alan had meant Stanley Baxter. It was I who guessed that it had to be Stanley Kubrick. Baxter, after all, could be reached by telephone. To get anywhere near Kubrick, you had to be Alan Yentob.
So we had started off by not giving our new employers what they wanted. What we wanted was a developed version of our weekly studio show, spaced out, between seasons, with more Postcard specials, to be shot at the increased rate of two a year. Generously, Michael ensured that the BBC’s contracts department would minimize the obstacles when my agent Norman North came to them with his price for the package. Michael’s open-door policy paid off in our favour when we walked in to sign the papers, because within a week he walked through the same door in the opposite direction. None other than John Birt had arrived at the BBC and Michael had decided that there wasn’t enough oxygen for both of them, especially since he could understand scarcely a word of what John said. As twin chief executives, they would have been roped together on the north face of the Eiger while one of them mumbled something about facilitating ongoing contact with a variable interface and the other shouted, ‘Bugger this!’ So our protector was gone.
We flourished anyway, more or less. At this point I could start writing a whole volume of analysis about the sociology of the modern media, but the main reason why there is always room for a good book on that subject is that nobody sane would want to read it. The first and only thing to say about the BBC is that I managed to get some of my best work done while I was there. The same applies to ITV. So the executives couldn’t have been as bad as I thought. On either side of the porous divide between commercial and public-service broadcasting, the administrative layer was composed mainly of clever people. When they got in each other’s way on the bridge, the effects were felt by those of us down in the engine room, but the effects would have been far worse if the executives had been uniformly dumb. There’s a crucial difference between a man like Alan Yentob and the executives in the television system of the kind of country he looks as if he might otherwise have been president of. The crucial difference is about fifty points of IQ. If you’re making programmes for a man like that and he screws you around, he isn’t doing it because he’s stupid, he’s doing it because he’s at least as smart as you are, but in a way you don’t like. Hence the vital importance of a free market, so that you can go and work for someone else who will screw you around in a different way, but closer to your desires. Throughout my television career I crossed from one side to the other and back again solely out of the imperative to get things done. If my price went up all the time, it was only because I had been around longer. But I wouldn’t have been around at all if there had been only one system to choose from. As in every other aspect of liberal democracy, the freedom is what counts, and I have never ceased to be grateful for living out my life under no compulsions except those imposed from within my numb skull. Therefore, on the subject of the suits upstairs, I am short of invective, because I am insufficiently fuelled by recrimination. When I say that there were people I could have killed, I’m just saying it.
Though Richard took pride in running a cost-effective production unit, it could not manage the managers, so logistics almost always took too much time. But they only seemed endless: it took only a year to get our office running in the BBC’s shiny new HQ in White City. Until then we had to make do with a temporary office in the basement of a BBC annexe called Kensington House, on the wrong side of Shepherd’s Bush. (Actually both sides of Shepherd’s Bush were the wrong side in those
days, but the area had been slowly colonized by young media types who could not yet afford to live in Notting Hill, and eventually, when one of these, Nigella Lawson, sprang to overnight fame, suddenly Shepherd’s Bush was St Tropez.) Kensington House was a dump full of stuff that the world had forgotten, but the basement was a dump full of stuff that Kensington House had forgotten. After a week of unpacking files, shifting furniture about and failing to get the equipment we had ordered, our arrival was consecrated by a systems failure in the toilet on the ground floor. We were directly underneath and tried not to take it as symbolic when we had to watch the effluent seep down the walls. Anyway, there was no time to brood. The weekly show needed a rethink because by now there were just enough communications satellites up there to offer the prospect of bringing guests in through space instead of by taxi.
Satellite interviews would suit the look of the show, which had come on a bit since its early days. There had always been a stack of TV monitors on the set, each of them showing a different image to give the sense of busy multiplicity and global scope. Directors and designers wanted to jazz up this techno effect by adding bits of girder, but my own instinct was that if the message was about technology, then the technology should convey the message. Design, I announced, was just design, and British television had always suffered greatly from the notion that design could yield spectacle, so that if you had Elaine Paige singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ it would be more spectacular, instead of less, if she sang it while standing at the intersection of two enormous white polystyrene pathways to nowhere while dry ice fumes were being pumped up her skirt. Designers didn’t like hearing any of this and they loathed me for even thinking it. When I at last learned to keep my mouth shut on the subject, they loathed me for the way my lip curled. They reacted in exactly the way directors did when I said I didn’t like any shot that drew attention to itself. Occasionally the bad blood simmered for a while, but eventually I would get my way, although I would have soon been overruled if the results had been less convincing. A show is a collaborative venture; in a collaborative venture nobody’s opinion should prevail except by the tacit consent of all; and that consent can be won only if the opinion’s proponent makes the show the hero. If his motive is self-glorification, morale will soon collapse.