The stars outranked everyone in the world. Continually in search of one star after another, I linked the narrative by driving around in one of the first examples of the Mercedes 500 drop-head coupe. It was expensive to hire and we were lucky I didn’t ding it. In Nashville I had driven a borrowed brand-new Chevrolet pick-up truck whose owner had been assured that it would be returned to him in one piece. It was, but the rear end was a different shape, because during a night shoot in the woods I had backed it into the steel stanchion of a letter box. We had some high-grade assets lined up in Nashville and the film should have clicked. Chet Atkins gave me a guitar lesson, Tammy Wynette gave me personal advice on the creative consolations of heartbreak and Mark Knopfler composed the melody for a lyric I had written. The song was performed at the Grand Old Opry by an up-and-coming female singer. Resplendent in a pastel-blue cowboy suit with silver trim, Porter Wagoner, acting as MC, said, ‘Pretty girl, pretty song.’ My bliss was complete, but the film was a flop in the British ratings, because only a small part of the British television audience cared anything at all about American country music. Here was a harsh reminder that the presenter depends on the subject, and that the best setting for my kind of documentary should be full of stars; real ones, internationally famous; faces you had seen on television or, even better, at the movies.
My own activities were thus abetting the celebrity culture of which I had become suspicious: an anomaly that had begun to nag. But that was the way it was, and in that respect Hollywood was the location without equal. In Hollywood the famous faces know how to lead their strange lives. The strangeness was their answer to a violently artificial condition, by which people became symbols of themselves. In their wigs and facelifts and elevator shoes, they understood each other even if nobody else did. Kirstie Alley was a delight to talk to but she believed in Scientology. Perhaps it was her protection against the kind of reporters who had no means of talking about her talent but were always ready to talk about her increasing weight. Shirley MacLaine, who had been given both the beauty and the talent when her brother Warren Beatty had been given only the beauty, was as smart as a whip but she believed that flying saucers made the journey across the universe specifically to land in her garden. What they all really believed in, because they had to, was the indispensable efficacy of the special air they breathed, the modified atmosphere of their stellar context. Deprived of that, they went out like lights.
26. WHAT BECOMES OF THE BROKEN-HEARTED?
It was what Diana died of. She should have been in show business, where there is a protocol for survival after your life has been eaten hollow by dreams come true. But she was on her own. I was working late in my London apartment when I got the news, and for several days afterwards I couldn’t stop crying. Such an outburst of grief had never happened to me before in my life. I spent a couple of days at the office but I was useless. Behind the closed door of my cubicle I lay on my little z-bed and sobbed. Outside the door, Wendy Gay fended off callers from every media organization in Britain and Australia, all wanting my opinion. My opinion of what? The wrath of God? I went to ground in Cambridge and still couldn’t stop crying. My family, stricken too but still upright, were very nice to their cot case. My wife, whose tenderness was a lesson in generosity, was good at cutting the incoming phone calls short. Finally a call came through from Tina Brown at the New Yorker. I owed her too much to give her the freeze, so I took the call. She wanted me to write a memoir of Diana. I said I couldn’t. Tina, always the master psychologist, asked me what else I would be doing in the next few days. I took the point, got a car to the office and wrote a piece called ‘Requiem’. It was a kind of poem, its every paragraph starting with the word ‘No’. I was still crying while I worked on it but it was something to do.
During this time, there had been a national emotional outpouring which reached its focal point of expression as a field of flowers in London. Later it became fashionable to claim that one had never joined in, but I can claim no such thing, although I still believe that the Royal Family should not have been dragooned into a populist gesture by the very newspapers which had done so much to make Diana’s life a lethal fantasy. Charles looked concussed but anyone with any sense realized that his anguish was without limit. The truth was that nobody really knew what they were doing because nobody was ready for it. This will be the hardest thing to explain to the next generation. Nobody knew that she would die. Only from the fake wisdom of hindsight can her life be seen as leading up to that event. Her own expectations, like anybody else’s, were quite otherwise. She had a future in front of her, and all kinds of qualities to make it fruitful. Perhaps she would have found, in time – time which we all need – a peaceful balance into which her corroding neuroses might have melted away. And now her future had been cancelled. One among millions, I coped with a sense of loss whose intensity defied explanation. A psychologist might have said that I was weeping the tears that I had never wept for my own family tragedy, the death of my father when I was young. But that same psychologist would have done better to say that I had seen my mother’s life ruined in a single moment, and never since had I been able to tolerate the spectacle of a vital young woman being stopped by misfortune from achieving what she might have done. Either way, the psychologist wasn’t available, and all I had, apart from the kindness of my wife and children, was my own resources. They seemed to me to have broken down completely. But I got my article written, so perhaps they had not.
Some commentators said that what I had written was embarrassing, but when the piece came out in a special issue of the magazine it got the biggest postbag I ever received for anything. There were hundreds of letters, all saying that they felt the same, and I knew that there were countless more people who would never read a magazine with so many words in it and so few pictures, but who had likewise been surprised by the same grief. This solidarity of response among people from all walks of life, and from everywhere in the world, is the thing I remember best. Of the funeral in the Abbey I remember only fleeting impressions. I thought that the way Tony Blair read the lesson, with an ornately bogus display of pious emphasis, was enough to prove that he was an actor to the core of his nature. I thought that Elton John did a good job of singing a bad song. I thought the Earl Spencer’s speech bordered on sedition but was well spoken. But mainly I thought nothing. I just sat there, in my seat on the aisle, halfway along the central block at the left-hand end. Then, as the ceremony wound to a close, this thing happened that I knew I would remember until my own turn came to die. Down the aisle towards me came the Guardsmen carrying the coffin on their shoulders. I thought they would go right past me on the way to the front door. But just across from me on the left, a side aisle had been left between the rows of seats. The side aisle led to a little door in the stone wall. Right beside me, the Guardsmen turned into the side aisle and carried the coffin through the door, with only a few inches between the coffin lid and the roof of the corridor they had entered. The soft crunch of their spit-polished boots on the flagstones became a whispered conversation of lingering echoes as she went away into the dark.
27. AS TIME RAN OUT
It was said that when people wept at Diana’s death they were weeping for their own mortality. If they did, why should they not have done? To treat your life as if it will last is an illusion. If chance doesn’t stop you early, decrepitude will get you later on. Even when I was young I could hear the clock tick. Now, with my sixtieth year coming up, I could hear it boom. I was pledged to work out my time at Watchmaker, but as the formats, one by one, got to where there was no more I could do that was new, I had begun to look beyond, and sometimes with longing. I made the first promise to my wife that some day soon I would get out of television. She looked sceptical, but I meant it. There were still, however, several things I had to do first. The company had to be built up beyond one asset, if only to keep faith with our backers. Jonathan Ross, whose gifts I admired, had just hit the wall with his own production company, which had made all the cl
assic mistakes that start with getting the office furniture designed by a friend instead of just buying it off the peg. Jonathan had his suits designed too, apparently by a team of satirical tailors. He put a lot of emphasis on personal appearance, almost as if he had no talent. But it all cost a lot of money, and at that stage he had blown his budget. We tried to offer him a home with us. He liked the look of our office. When Wendy Gay went bopping by he must have thought that he had dreamed her up. Several times we took him out to dinner but the deal was never sealed. Eventually it became clear that he was enjoying our company at dinner far more than the idea of being beholden to anyone except himself. He must have been right, because later on he became a BBC star of such magnitude that they paid him more money every two months than I ever earned in my entire television career. I bear no grudge, but sometimes it does make me wish that I, too, had been born with a speech impediment. All I had was an Australian accent.
Collaring extra assets was proving less easy than it sounded. As a friend of Nigella Lawson, I had watched her getting nowhere with book shows and often wondered why she wasn’t being given the formats that would make her a star. But neither Richard nor Elaine thought that Nigella had a chance: too posh a voice, the network would never go for it. The poshness was exactly what I loved, and I thought the public would love it too, but I was outvoted. I have to admit I didn’t realize that one of the conditions for her finally reaching stellar status was that she would have to have a frying pan in her hand. Trying to promote Nigella without the frying pan was like recommending Gabriella Sabatini without the tennis racket. But as Nigella, with me in the passenger seat, scooted around Shepherd’s Bush at the wheel of her rattletrap Mercedes 190 sports car – it was a pit, like her handbag – I knew she would make it somehow. It just wouldn’t be with Watchmaker.
We had better luck with Jeremy Clarkson. Richard and Elaine thought of him first but I took one look at him on air and knew that he couldn’t miss. He was too big, too burly and he was full of bluster, but he could write it and say it. He was that rarest thing in England, the articulate bloke. I thought he was tremendous and I was very proud that he made his first couple of series under our logo. I liked him a lot. He eventually decided that he didn’t like me one bit, apparently because he thought that I had made some remark that insulted his family. I can’t imagine doing any such thing to anybody, but you can’t expect everybody to love you. He went on to become, in the next decade, almost the biggest television star on earth, partly because, like Nigella and her frying pan, he had got himself identified with a universal activity. Cars are an object of fascination in every country, and especially in any country that doesn’t have any. There are Clarkson fans in the upper regions of Nepal. Thus it was that the Watchmaker office became the launching pad for a globe-girdling career that left mine looking the size of a game of marbles: a clear case of television as a new kind of British Empire. I didn’t resent his success at all and I still watch his programmes with a professional admiration for how he can pack so much into a paragraph, although few of his opinions are congruent with my own, and for his central premise I have an ineradicable objection. I think that to encourage ordinary citizens to drive fast cars on ordinary roads is the exact equivalent of handing real guns to schoolboys, and that’s that. But it’s a free country, and young petrol-heads who watch him in Libya probably say the same.
Nor would I have had any comeback if somebody had accused me of doing more than my fair share to encourage the ambitions of the boy racers. When the rights to broadcast the F1 carnival were switched from BBC to ITV, the network wanted a big studio programme to mark the event, and my well-known amateur affiliation to the sport got me the job of host. I would rather that the cup had passed from me, because I knew there would be trouble: but it was too fat a contract for Watchmaker to turn down. At the command of Bernie Ecclestone, all the drivers were in the studio. All except one. Michael Schumacher underlined his status as top dog by refusing to turn up in person. He appeared only as a satellite image on the back wall. When I spun around in my swivel chair and interviewed this banana-faced apparition, I thought I could hear, behind me, the first soft explosions of a rich crop of raspberries blown by the other drivers. For the ruthless exploitation of supremacy, Schumacher left even Ayrton Senna nowhere. Right up until the moment when he was killed at Imola, Senna had behaved as if the road ahead belonged exclusively to him. Schumi felt the same, in a German accent. He was just quieter about it, and more polite. I often wonder if the camaraderie of all the other drivers was not based on their common annoyance of Schumi’s supercilious cool. Perhaps he played the same role as Zeppo Marx, who was disliked by the other Marx Brothers because he was good with money.
Along with the thrill and the glamour, money mattered to the drivers, and you couldn’t blame them. The better they did, the more cash they had to lay out for protection against an intrusive world. A world champion needed a castle with high walls. Damon Hill’s castle was still in Ireland when we did a special about him. We filmed him at home with his family and he impressed me straight away with his sensitivity and sanity. Somehow he would make it all balance up: the artificially illuminated public life, and the domestic peace that made it bearable. That he was brave went without question, but not even a man as brave as he was could afford a gamble that might weaken his base. When he left Williams he could have gone to McLaren but he would have been paid only to win. Another team, with a slower car, would pay him a guaranteed wedge, win or lose. He had a choice to make.
He was still making it when we went with him to watch him race in Hungary. After the race he had to make a quick trip to Bulgaria for the sponsor. I was his passenger when he drove to the airport, with only half an hour to get there. It was a challenge and time was running out. While I sat there holding on to my seatbelt like a lifeline as he followed the leaning police escort motorcyclists into the turns, he started giving me the low-down on the politics. How he could drive that fast and still speak rationally was a mystery to me. We were doing a hundred miles an hour nearly all the time but I suppose for him it was half speed. On the private jet he told me more. It all sounded a bit like the politics of television: do this now so you can do that later, guard your base, build up a bank so you can quit while you’re ahead. The main difference was the velocity. I liked Damon very much, perhaps partly because he could focus on what he was doing without falling prey to a circumscription of his interests. (He asked me whether Carlos Saura’s film Carmen was as good as he had heard, and I was glad to be able to tell him that it most certainly was.) In his world of machinery, he himself had not become a machine. The finished movie drew an audience far exceeding the total number of petrol-heads. I was pleased about that because I felt that we had captured at least something of a human personality. I never saw him angry even once, not even with his own team when they cost him a win by muffing a pit-stop. Later on, though, when he moved his castle to England, one of the tabloids published an aerial map of the layout that might as well have had arrows on it telling the thieves and kidnappers where they could get in. He got angry then.
As the millennium year approached, heralded by dire warnings of mass computer malfunction and imminent heat-death, the old British Empire was lowering the flag in its last few outposts. Our Postcard from Hong Kong felt like part of the ceremony. The day of the handover was not far off and Chris Patten, the last governor, had a lot to deal with, including the irritating task of shooing the blowflies of the tabloid press away from his beautiful daughters; but he found time to deal with us. An hour in his company was enough to tell you that Britain was in trouble if it couldn’t find a way of making a man like that Prime Minister. After a tennis match in which I had to do little pretending in order to lose miserably, we settled down on the veranda to film one of the best interviews I ever did. Eloquence, historical sweep, charm, wit: he had it all. He also had a family of clever women with a collective talent for keeping him down to earth, a condition with which I was familiar. Together, the P
attens had turned the official residence into the best kind of country house, much more a literary salon than a hunting lodge. In the evening, justifiably celebrated names came in for drinks after dinner and spread themselves around in the cushioned couches as if this was a second home. Jung Chang was one of them. I thought that her Wild Swans was one of the great political books of modern times and told her so. She didn’t mind hearing it, but she was possibly less impressed with my opinion that China, with any luck, would change Hong Kong less than Hong Kong would change China. Patten, however, flatteringly thought that I might be right. He wanted to know why Hong Kong mattered to me so much and I told him the reason: that my father was buried there. I went out to Sai Wan Bay to visit my father’s grave, as I always did when I was in Hong Kong. He had given his life in the fight against the totalitarians and soon they would be here again. But nothing shook my confidence that this time it would be different. The Chinese leaders on the mainland had an unchanging system but they were now living in a changed world, where PR mattered even to them. In that way, and in my time, the development of global communications had altered the flow of history. In the main part of the movie I did all the standard things to bring out the city’s always teeming, shouting, hyperactively productive character. I argued with the mad woman driver of a sampan, I got lost in the underground labyrinth of a suburb-sized nightclub in Kowloon, I visited the gold-plated house of the nutty plutocrat and his doting wife. The doting wife gave us a ten-minute piece to camera on how to prepare shark’s fin soup (‘First you boil the fin for two days . . .’) which was probably the single most boring stretch of film in the world until Baz Luhrmann directed the closing scenes of Australia. In a restaurant on the Peak, the exquisite actress Maggie Cheung showed me how to spit out chicken bones in a polite manner. (Don’t believe her air of gloom in In the Mood for Love: the real-life Maggie is a spiritual descendant of Carole Lombard.) But I didn’t bother to face the camera to ask the mandatory question about meeting the challenge as time ran out in the city of contrasts. I didn’t ask: will all this come to an end? Somehow I knew it wouldn’t. The mainlanders, if they wanted to, could do to Hong Kong what they did to Tibet. But they wouldn’t want to. Instead of changing it, they would see the advantage in letting it alone. I said that last line on the deck of a junk as the sun went down towards the sea. It was setting on my screen career. Not yet, but soon, I would have said all I had to say as a presenter of television documentaries. It was just too expensive a form in which to be pressed for time. I ached to express my opinions as chapters instead of paragraphs.