Nobody flinched. Everyone went at it like a fanatic, and I still bless them all. Two assistant producers spent months working on a set of themes. Bea had all kinds of ideas about experts to consult. The Professor of Media Communications at the University of This, the Professor of Communications Media at the University of That. Endless lists were compiled and countless documents were drafted. Compilers and drafters all took it well when I insisted that the enormous beast would find its plot-line in modern history, and should have a strict chronological narration put together in voice-over, with no current face appearing except one, and even my face should show up only briefly at the top and tail of each episode. Every other face in the enormous plot-line, hundreds and hundreds of them, should be a famous face from the twentieth century, doing its famous thing while I told the story. It was simple. It was just very hard to write, and I put the complete script, running to eight hour-long episodes, through eight separate and distinct drafts before we had something we could read over the assembled footage, which took a long time to select, collect and edit. Without electronic editing, which by now had well and truly arrived, the thing would have been impossible: the reason there was no precedent for it. Fame in the Twentieth Century was thus entirely dependent on the state of the technology, a pre-echo of the emergence, later on, of the World Wide Web. The Web was already getting started but had not yet revealed its full potential. To say that ‘it’s all in the timing’ is essentially meaningless. The timing is all in the engineering. When the machinery is there, you can do it, and I’m proud to say that we did it.
I have to blow my own trumpet for Fame in the Twentieth Century because there is nobody else left to do so. It was the television project dearest to my heart, it took more than a year out of my life, and it disappeared as if it had never existed. Nor, for copyright reasons, will it ever come back, even in the smallest part. For that very reason, I will keep short my account of its fate. Some of my part in it might have been done better. My talking-head pieces at the top and tail of each episode were shot in studio in a single day, with me sitting in front of the great, glowing word FAME in ruby neon, an idea I had got from Elvis Presley’s last big special. A director, whose name I have been careful to forget – I need hardly say that his name was there in a hundred per cent title at the end of every episode, as if he had conceived the whole thing – shot the short pieces with elaborate camera movements, although the effort might have been better put into the lighting. I thought there was something wrong with it but feebly let the director do the directing. I would have done better to take Richard aside to tell him that we should think again, because I was the one with his head on the screen and the head looked more than usually like an egg. The lighting had the effect of blending the little hair I had remaining on each side of my head into the dark background, thus producing a cranium that seemed to come to a point. Some back-lighting would have helped, but there wasn’t any. So the tops and tails, though they sounded, in my ears, sufficiently fluent and authoritative, looked like those moments in Star Trek when the weird head of the alien starship commander occupies the video screen on the bridge of the Enterprise. ‘Surrender your ship, Captain Kirk. We, the Egg People, have you in our power.’
As for the main body of the show, I still don’t think I made a mistake about the general approach – it was certainly the most careful stretch of extended writing that I ever did for television – but I might have made a crucial mistake politically. Bea, though she served my conception of the format with her full commitment, never abandoned her conviction that we should have talked to experts on screen. It might have gone over better upstairs, which was where our inexorable problem lay. The management just never got behind the show, even though it had cost them a lot of money. The price for copyright footage kept on going up all the time as the agencies who controlled it got a better idea of the goldmine they were sitting on, but somehow we contrived to buy the rights on the basis that all the material could be screened four times. The American PBS network, who put in a million dollars, screened the whole thing the full four times to their sparse audience. The Australians, who put in another million, screened it twice. But the BBC, who paid the bulk of its enormous cost, screened it exactly once, during the week, and without even a repeat at the weekends. On its weeknight it was given suicide scheduling against ITV’s Inspector Morse, the biggest ratings hit of the day – my own family never missed an episode – but we still peaked at seven million viewers and averaged about five million for the whole run. Such figures would be a sensation today. Nevertheless the series was regarded as a failure.
I’m afraid it was pre-judged as a failure, simply because of its format. Alan Yentob was a dedicated enemy of the presenter-led documentary. Ever since the deserved success of a programme he had produced about the Ford Cortina, it had become BBC orthodoxy that a documentary on any subject should have no central face, but simply narrate itself, with a voice-over recited by an actor, preferably from a script written by the producer. There was something to be said for this approach, but the cost of making it a dogma was that the outgoing generation of over-qualified writer-presenters was the last to practise the form, and a new generation was not recruited. No more would Robert Kee, who really knew something about Ireland, head up a series that would tell you about Ireland. Some producer who knew not much more about Ireland than what he read in the Guardian would tell you about Ireland. There would be no new John Betjeman until Jonathan Meades came along half a lifetime later. Eventually it was discovered that for some subjects a narrator in vision was indispensable, especially if the subject was not as inherently telegenic as a Ford Cortina. Indeed Alan Yentob himself, in a later incarnation as head of BBC Arts, rediscovered the necessity at the turn of the millennium, and in the absence of other candidates was forced to appoint himself in the role of anchor man for the arts series Image. In his post as Head of Arts, Alan Yentob had searched high and low and found that only Alan Yentob could handle the task. Having hired himself at a suitable salary, he did some excellent programmes – the one about the Soane Museum was especially fine – but I often wondered, while watching him in action, if he ever thought back to the days when his decisions had made life difficult for those of us who were doing the same thing.
Still, there is no point complaining. The series on fame got made, and quite a lot of people saw it. (As Richard never failed to remind me when I showed too much concern with the ratings, a million people was a city, five million people was a country, and there was no other form of writing I could practise that would ever come near reaching that many people so directly, with their attention on nothing else.) There was even a book of the series, written by me with all the care I could summon. It got one very laudatory review, from Neil Kinnock of all people, but it didn’t sell very well in the UK, although eventually it was put into paperback as my one and only Penguin. In America it hardly sold at all, which made me sorry for my publisher, Harry Evans at Random House. Harry Evans and Tina Brown, the most radiant celebrity couple in New York, threw a launch party for the book at their house in Sutton Place. All of fashionable New York was there to hear a modest speech from me. Modesty is always a mistake in America. I should have said that it was the greatest book in the world and that anybody who didn’t read it would get warts. But the book wouldn’t have taken off no matter how I promoted it, because it was essentially a book of opinions about modern history, and my qualifications for having such opinions were not clear. In America, opinions are accepted only from licensed opinion-makers. Looking back, I can now see that the fame book was one of the precursors for a heftier work that I would write in the next decade, Cultural Amnesia; and that the central thesis of the series, about the connection between celebrity and politics, was simply ahead of its time. But to say that you are ahead of your time is just a consoling way of saying you have failed. The worst aspect of Fame in the Twentieth Century’s gradual but terminal dive towards death, however, was that there was never any question of its resurrection
. If I didn’t own the rights to the footage, then the thing was gone. More than a year and a half of work had vanished. I resolved never to be in such a situation again if I could help it.
22. BACK TO BASICS
It felt, far and away, like the biggest setback of my career, but I was the only one who noticed. It’s the only bearable thing about having a flop in show business. By definition, most people don’t see it. Even in the office, life went on. The weekly show kept getting more assured, and the End of the Year show was now a recognized part of the festive season. Everyone who didn’t go out for the evening – in effect, that meant anyone who wasn’t too young to understand it – tuned in to watch our annual fantasy. Though the bulk of the show was mainly news footage talked in and out with a script by me and Bostock, there were guests at the end. We played the beauty card ruthlessly. Fake awards were handed out, and there was always a glamour girl to read the names and open the envelopes. Jerry Hall, Elle McPherson, Louise Lombard: they all took a turn. There were production numbers. Tom Jones presented his pelvis while belting out ‘It’s Not Unusual’ in that raging baritone he could have used to sing the title role in Don Giovanni. It was a butch moment, but standing right there beside him was Kiri te Kanawa, all aflutter to be on screen with the rock star. Kylie Minogue bounced up and down in a delirious fit of song and dance. I didn’t have to do much acting to convey the impression that I loved them all. Each was my favourite. I liked Jerry for her gameness, her general determination to be not just a stunningly statuesque blonde in a couture frock. With her catwalk stardom coming to an end, she was determined to have a professional life apart from being Mrs Jagger, and appearing on our show was part of her break-out plan.
I was surprised when, during a supper in Soho with Mick Jagger and his admirable parents, he seemed scornful of Jerry’s extramural activities. When I asked him, foolishly, if he thought she had done well in my show – never ask a question if you might not like the answer – he said, ‘Didn’t watch it, Clive.’ For a while I thought less of him for that, but later on I heard that ructions were taking place. So all I had been hearing was noises off at the edge of a battle.
Unless you are actually closely acquainted with a star of Mick Jagger’s magnitude – and I wasn’t – a casual meeting will tell you nothing. Most likely it will tell you even less. The truth is that someone as famous as Mick Jagger is living his life well if he even continues in one piece. Even when considering how big the Stones still are now, it is hard to credit how very big they were then. History wasn’t allowed to happen unless they were there. In Prague after the Velvet Revolution, I chanced to be backstage when the Stones gave the first rock concert that the audience had heard in many years. Most of them had the words by heart and they sang along. ‘Icon GEDNO saddest FACTION . . .’ It was the sound of their freedom, once stolen, now restored. Mick Jagger was the bearer of the torch. The audience didn’t know that their heroes, several of whom had no idea of which city they were in, were already in the limo and on the way to the airport before the last of the applause had died. The Stones had a whole world to look after. Jerry was married to a tribune of Planet Earth, so she did pretty well too. She was a bonus for the show, sweet and sassy, although of course not a show-business pro like Kylie.
In our house, Kylie was a great favourite, especially with my younger daughter, who had grown up with the Kylie hits pumped into her head through earphones. If it wasn’t Abba it was Kylie. Nobody who hasn’t met Kylie can quite realize how little she is. She could dance on your hand, but the astonishing thing is how good her dancing is. She rehearsed the routine for our show at the Pineapple Studios in Covent Garden and I went down there to help her block out the moves and rehearse her lines. She worked like a cattle dog. On the day, she had the whole thing pat and looked terrific in every shot. We taped the post-midnight production numbers in the afternoon so as to leave time for editing. With Kylie we didn’t need a single retake except when she had to stand beside Elle McPherson. Elle, you probably won’t need telling, is very tall. But already you have guessed the problem. It was hard to get them into the same shot.
My literary friends smiled tolerantly about my dance number with Kylie, but my nose-to-neck badinage with Elle was not forgiven. Nobody could expect his reputation as a poet and literary critic to survive intact when he appeared on screen in a clinch with a young woman who looked as if she had arrived by shell-shaped elevator in the penthouse of Vulcan. Things were, if possible, made even worse when Louise Lombard took her turn as the young lady who opened the envelopes. She was not only a lyric poem to look at, she was genuinely funny. Later on she built another television career in America because the British scene didn’t know how to use her. I simply loved having her around and I still think we should have brought her back on a regular basis, but it was thought better to ring the changes in what was meant to be a subsidiary role. (Actually the thing to do, when someone has a hit in a subsidiary role, is to keep them on and make the role bigger, which is exactly what happened ten years later with Martin Sheen in The West Wing: but the lesson is always being lost because the plans stretch too far ahead.) Within the framework we had set for ourselves, I always had a say in the casting; and I had powers of veto, so I have to take the blame for the only real mistake we made. It didn’t show, because it wasn’t a case of casting the wrong person, it was a case of not casting the right one. I had seen Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Darling Buds of May and I made the classic mistake of thinking that the performance I saw on screen was the only one she could do. So we didn’t book her. What an error.
But generally the End of the Year show was getting to the point where we couldn’t improve it, so already I was getting restless, and starting to wonder when we might shut it down. In five years you can make an impression but still get out clean. In ten years, you’re stuck, and it takes another ten years to shake the memory. We weren’t going to do any better than when we brought on Pavarotti as our after-midnight main man. This time we had to fly him in from Italy on a private jet, and when he showed up at the studio he turned out to be even bigger than last time. The expression ‘on his last legs’ was not inappropriate, because the weight of his upper works had finally wrought irreversible damage to his knees. By that time, when he sang the role of Cavaradossi in Tosca, he had to sit down for the firing squad. This development was unfortunate because we had a big white set with a grand staircase we wanted him to walk down when he made his entrance. His management team didn’t even need to see the studio floor-plan before they announced that their star wouldn’t be walking down anything. He would be walking on from the side. We readjusted the scheme.
We were always ready to rejig the layout for the star, even when the requirements seemed irrational. Diana Ross, when she was our star guest, had a contract that said she wouldn’t even walk diagonally without a week’s notice. She was as difficult as could be but I didn’t blame her. She was coming out of a culture that had spent three hundred years being screwed by Whitey and she was sensible in wanting to take control. And also, she was who she was. I thought that the 1966 Ready Steady Go! Tamla Special, hosted by Dusty Springfield, was the greatest single TV music show ever screened, and now one of its brightest stars, Diana Ross, was living and breathing right there beside me: the fabulous face was singing her fabulous songs, or at any rate miming to playback. I was knocked out, along with the public.
Jason Donovan was equally difficult but with perhaps a touch less reason to believe that the results would be worth it from our angle. The year that he appeared, we had a cyclorama of a rather subtle tint somewhere between aubergine and egg-plant, if those aren’t the same thing. Jason Donovan turned up in his standard fetchingly casual attire, the trousers of which proved to be coloured somewhere between aubergine and egg-plant. By a million to one coincidence, they exactly matched the cyclorama. The result, to the camera, was that he spent a whole hour of our first rehearsal period minus his legs. Wearing his regulation stitch-on cheerful smile, the rest of him fl
oated around the studio thirty inches above his shoes, which uncannily matched his progress as he swerved about mouthing the pious banalities of his chosen song. It looked like a horror movie, and Elaine, who was in charge that year, moved from the control room out into the studio to make direct contact with the apparition. With her powers of charm cranked up to the max, she asked him whether he would consider changing his pants. He wouldn’t change his pants. They were his lucky pants, containing the secret of his mojo. It was in these very pants, he explained, that he had first sung to an adoring public and realized that he had a duty to their love. Elaine smiled nicely, marched back to the control room, and did her dance of anger. The dance was of small radius – she merely placed her elfin weight alternately on each foot while tossing her head and muttering things like ‘Really, is it worth it?’ through gritted teeth – but to anyone familiar with it, this was the full-scale version. Then she went out there again and told the superstar that there was no option: the pants would have to be changed. Jason thought about it for a bit and declared that he would not change the pants. It was a question of integrity. It was a question of his art. So we changed the cyclorama. It took half an hour but there were other things we could do while it was happening, such as slitting our wrists.