The day’s work was sealed by a few beers with Arthur at Soho’s most notorious drinking club, the Colony Room. Nothing about the Colony Room was more notorious than its proprietress, the notorious Muriel Belcher. She had a lot of notorious clients, most notoriously the painter Francis Bacon, but they were all outdone for notoriety by Muriel’s face, which was a study in unrelenting hatred. I somehow got the idea that she hated me in particular. Perhaps she remembered me for the day in the early sixties when I had been in there in the role of gooseberry at a meeting between Robert Hughes and Colin MacInnes. I had distinguished myself on that occasion by my unfortunate trick of increasing the volume of my voice as it lost coherence. But she had seen plenty of drunks who did the same thing. No, this, surely, was a whole new loathing. I was probably putting too specific a value on her general manner. I thought she had a way, when I was ordering my round, of looking at me as if I were the suppurating corpse of a crushed toad. But she would have done the same for anybody. She looked that way even at Francis Bacon himself, who was often to be seen hulking notoriously beside the bar. He looked like what he was, a mad painter, and Muriel looked as if he had painted her. It was a frightening symbiosis, but it made me feel part of the action.
There was more action later, when Arthur left to catch his train back north and I headed off unsteadily to the Pillars of Hercules. At the Pillars, Ian Hamilton held his usual position at the bar, all set to receive incoming manuscripts and shred them in the presence of their perpetrators. Often I had a manuscript ready to receive this treatment, but now I had more confidence than usual, because I was at the end of a day’s work that was, incontrovertibly, work. If I had done the work reasonably well, I was all set for the trip to Manchester every second Wednesday morning on the Midland Pullman. From the culinary angle, the Midland Pullman was the most luxurious thing that had yet happened to me in my life, with the possible exception of a few nights out with my future wife and her friends in a little restaurant near Santa Croce in Florence, in the days when I was too green to know that the pimps and hookers who infested the place were eating like royalty, and that those tiny slices of beef were as good and real as meat can get. Even today I am not much of a one for caring about food, as long as it isn’t trying to kill me. Sequestered in my apartment while working on a book or a long essay, I am not quite the kind of slob I might have been if I didn’t care at all what I ate. I take pride in my timing. When heating the contents of a can of stewed steak, I keep a watchful eye on the saucepan to make sure I stir the stew at the exact moment when the first bubbles appear. Sometimes I wander off, start fiddling with a sentence, and notice only from the thick smoke and the smell of a crashed oil truck that something has gone awry. But usually I remember to stay near the hob. I try to keep an aesthetic measure to my simple needs. When cutting the corner of the plastic bag of the boil-in-the-bag piece of cod in white sauce, I try to cut it in a clean straight line so that no sauce gets on the scissors. The women at home don’t let me eat cod – something about the world’s stock being dangerously depleted, apparently by me personally – so when I eat cod in my apartment it tastes like a stolen truffle. But I couldn’t care less about presentation. The stew goes into a bowl and the cod goes onto a plate, often with some green stuff added – spinach, beans, broccoli or those sweet little peas from a can – so as to stave off scurvy. The resulting visual arrangement is a legitimate cause for pride, in my view, but I don’t call it presentation. On the rare occasions when, usually for business reasons, I am trapped in an up-market restaurant, I have been known to gaze at the exquisitely arranged main course – usually a small edifice of sprigs, shavings and sprouts in the middle of the plate – and wonder aloud when the food is coming. I have never been back to any restaurant where three waiters lift the silver dish covers simultaneously at a murmured signal. They look like a brass band and you’ll be eating their sheet music.
Later on, as we move further into a context of financial adequacy, I might return to this theme, but suffice it for now to say that breakfast on the Midland Pullman was a nice change from the Angus Steak House, even though the same notched tomatoes were a feature. In those days it was still true that the secret of eating well in Britain was to have breakfast three times a day. The Midland Pullman breakfast was what the British Indians of today have learned to call an English. Nothing that could make you fat was left out. Even the bread was fried. The black pudding was an ice-hockey puck soaked in the same fat that had drowned the bacon. The sausage, when cut, bled a thick, rich crude oil. The fried eggs were scorched brown around the edges like flying saucers after a battle in space. It was all brought to your table by waiters who expected to live and die in the service of British Rail. Later on I was to see the same dedication in the Qantas stewards of the airline’s glory days: swervingly tactile Judy Garland fans who brought a deep love of choreography to the task of treading on the passenger’s feet, they would present the next bottle of chardonnay as if it were a newborn baby to which they themselves had given birth. If a Midland Pullman waiter was troubled by the spectre of lingering class divisions, he didn’t show it. You were called ‘Sir’ when asked if the massed calories already supplied were sufficient to fuel your next heart attack, or would you like an additional plate of fried bread?
Having washed it all down with a couple of beers, I would arrive in Manchester several pounds heavier than when I left London. Under my beard, my first double chin was arriving with the same inevitability as my temples were retreating, but I was still young and dumb enough to feel fighting fit. I had my script ready and I was ready to deliver it. I had kept the rule of having two beers only. They would wear off by the time we went for the tape. I hadn’t forgotten the consequences of going on stage drunk at Hampstead – I still haven’t forgotten – and I can truthfully say that I was always careful, even in my most dissipated years, never again to get tight before the show. The thought that what I did after the show might be damaging me anyway, with a steadily more devastating effect, had not yet occurred to me – partly because, no doubt, of the thoughtlessness induced by the steady massacre of the brain cells. But there were enough brain cells left over at that stage for their owner to figure out that a certain precision of delivery might be a useful characteristic to cultivate, with benefit for the reputation. And indeed I soon became pretty good at hitting the words in a visual ten-second countdown from the floor manager, and at reciting the long paragraphs without a stumble. In the dressing room before rehearsal, I went through my tongue-twister drills. ‘Unique New York,’ I intoned. ‘Red leather, yellow leather.’ There was a useful couplet from Edith Sitwell. ‘Pot and pan and copper kettle/ Put upon their proper mettle.’ If my tongue felt thick I cooled my head in cold water.
In the studio I could go for hours without a fluff. This ability was doubly important because in a clip show like Cinema a fluff could have large consequences. The clips were arranged sequentially on a single roll and were played in on time no matter what, because there were no editing facilities to clear out dead air. If a fluff screwed the cue, the clip roll had to be rewound to the start in real time. A presenter who mangled his words could be there for days on end. Hitting all the marks, I got a reputation as the One-Take Kid. Actually, in the long term, this was a dangerous reputation to have, because, after instant-start tape machines and electronic editing came in, a presenter who never wasted any time was simply setting himself up for putting too much work into the day. But at that time it was not only good manners to get it right first crack, it was a requirement. As I told Arthur over drinks in the Grapes afterwards, I was quite proud of meeting the demands. He smiled tolerantly, which was very nice of him. So I told him again. At dinner, I told the beautiful teleprompter girl the same thing. Under her angora twinset, her magnificent breasts stirred with emotion as she leaned forward and murmured something that was to live long in my memory. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever gone off anyone so fast.’ But if I had trouble accepting the fact that I was a married man with a fa
mily – a thousand years later I am still struggling with the concept – there was at least a glimmer of awareness that my working life was acquiring a sense of order.
7. SQUARE-EYED IN DARKNESS
The opportunity of restoring it to chaos soon arose. At the Observer, Terry Kilmartin was printing my book reviews with sufficient frequency to attract the attention of the editor, David Astor, whose position at the paper was made no less influential by the fact that his family owned it. The paper was looking for a critic who could give the TV column the same sort of currency as the film column. When Penelope Gilliatt wrote the film column, people read it even if they never went to the cinema. The Observer bigwigs naturally assumed that the paper’s intelligent, upper-crust readership couldn’t possibly be watching television regularly. How, then, to make the TV column into a talking point like the film column? They decided that they were looking for a TV critic with a similarly identifiable prose style. Actually they already had a stylist on the job, Maurice Richardson. But Richardson was getting to the end of his career. Early on he had been a substantial name, author of a little classic of humour, The Exploits of Engelbrecht. Richardson was never as prolific as Paul Jennings, but he was in the same camp as a colloquial fantasist, and at his best he was of the same rank. Unfortunately he had developed idleness into an art form. He had got to the stage where making a minimum effort shows up in one’s prose as a repetitive bag of tricks. He took on a book review mainly with an eye to selling the book afterwards, and had grown so dependent on the book-reviewer’s classic perk that he would raid Terry’s office at lunchtime for books he could sell even when he wasn’t going to review them. His long voyage was ending in a slow shipwreck. I had already seen a few similar cases around Fleet Street and was starting to wonder how I could avoid the same fate for myself. The recurring picture of decrepitude seemed always to be connected with alcohol. There was a conclusion to be drawn from that, but the prospect of drawing it was so depressing that it drove me to the pub, where Terry would assure me that it was a bit early to start worrying about the end of my career. Terry, who found the English social consciousness tedious, enjoyed the company of off-trail vagabonds. By the way he laughed in disbelief, I could tell that he found my naked ambition refreshing, especially because I seemed less ambitious for anything in particular than for everything at once. As for me, I had found yet another father figure.
But this father figure gave me no clue that the job of TV critic was about to fall vacant, and that I might be up for it. Instead, I was invited to lunch by two of the paper’s senior staff, Richard Findlater and Helen Dawson. The lunch took place at Bianchi’s, the most written-up media restaurant of the period. The word ‘media’ might not yet have arrived in the language as a singular noun, but the actual thing, regarded as a collectivity, most definitely had arrived in the social fabric, although its personnel had not yet taken to writing mainly about each other. If you ate in Bianchi’s you were part of the new communications meritocracy. Until recently I had been part of the communications underclass which ate at Jimmy the Greek’s. Still haunted by the identical cockroaches that had blocked the way to the toilet during my first year in London, Jimmy’s was on the same block in Soho as Bianchi’s. In fact its distance from Bianchi’s could be measured only vertically, because Jimmy’s was in the basement and Bianchi’s was on the first floor, practically in a straight line upwards. The distance was about fifteen feet but it could seem like fifteen miles to a young man with aspirations. People could lose their hair and gain an extra stomach as they made the climb. (Only Melvyn Bragg ever arrived at the top looking the same as when he left the bottom. In fact he looked younger. Eventually he arrived in the House of Lords looking as if he had just finished a game of conkers. Nobody has ever been able to figure out how he does this.) Breathless from the climb, I was pointed to the table by the front window where Findlater and Dawson were sitting. On the way I stopped to satisfy the curiosity of Nick Tomalin, who was holding court at a table of his Sunday Times cronies. Ever the investigative journalist, he asked me how I had got in. I told him that I had no idea. His tilted glance sparkled with suspicion through his thick glasses as I moved on. It was my first experience of table-hopping, a practice that I later came to disapprove of. But apart from murder, bank robbery and rape there has never been much I disapproved of that I didn’t try out first, and I was aglow with that wanted feeling as I joined my hosts. The padrona, known only but universally as Elena, had just brought them a carafe of wine. Included in the round of introductions, she told me that she never missed an episode of Cinema, collected my book reviews in a special folder, and had not realized that my body, now visible at full length without the restrictions imposed by the small screen, would have such an athletic appearance, although she should have guessed it from the strength of my features, so unusually definite for one of such sensitivity. It was easy to see why she was the designated den mother of a thousand male misfits all thirsty for flattery. Her face glowed with maternal concern. I thought I detected the same fond look in the eyes of Helen Dawson, but for some reason her smile had developed a curl of the top lip. Findlater stared into the far distance, perhaps remembering what it had been like to be young, clueless, and still thrilled to have set foot on the road ahead. He was all too aware that the road ahead led around the block and, unless you were lucky, back down to Jimmy’s.
Sharp cop, vague cop. It took me a while to figure out what these two were after. Unnervingly familiar with my monthly Listener TV pieces, they asked me why I treated the mass-entertainment programmes at the same length as the important stuff. I told them what I thought: that the mass entertainment was even more important, because a popular programme actually embodied social values, whereas prestige programmes merely examined them. By then this was a theme that I had worked out in detail, and I spared my hosts none of the nuances as the wine started to do its work. As I banged on, Findlater’s eyes glazed over like the devilled kidneys he and I both chose for a main course. Later on I was to realize that his eyes were usually that way: I had merely failed to notice. There had been a time when Findlater, as a theatre critic, was level-pegging with Kenneth Tynan, but an era had passed, and now Findlater was one of those figures who haunted the corridors as they worked out their time. His very availability for this mission to size me up was in itself a bad sign, because Helen Dawson, lunching off a leaf of lettuce, was clearly the brains of the outfit. Her tongue was keen to match. Even when she approved of what I said, she spoke as if I were trying to sell her a used car, and she met any loose opinion with plain scorn. Her level of aggression was rare for a woman in an English context, and would have been rare for a leopard in an African context.
Not long later, that must have been one of the qualities that made her appealing to John Osborne, who was unusual among playwrights in his propensity for staging a scene in real life. Indeed he got to the point where he would rather do it there than in the theatre. After he married Helen Dawson, their conversations must have been like the plays he might have written instead. They lived in a large country house, which no doubt gave Osborne plenty of extra rooms in which to conceal himself. In Bianchi’s I was at the future Mrs Osborne’s mercy. Feeling as if I were somewhere in the middle of Act Two of Look Back in Anger, I nevertheless pressed on, as if stimulated by her sour interjections. The penny dropped when she asked me if I thought I could keep up a weekly schedule. Writing once a month in the Listener, she informed me, I might be able to scrape a thousand words together from intermittent viewing, but writing once a week would be a full-time job. At last it occurred to me that a full-time job was on offer. Suddenly I became taciturn. It was because I was stunned and frightened, but it must have looked as if I was indifferent. Not for the last time in my life, it didn’t hurt to let the bait drift by instead of lunging at it. Findlater came momentarily into focus. ‘What can we do to persuade you to come to us?’ Mentally I replied that a large salary would help. Then I heard myself saying it. ‘A large salary would help
.’
Helen Dawson liked that. It was her kind of talk. ‘How about an ordinary salary?’ At least that’s how I remember what she said. She might have said, ‘Don’t be a prick.’ Whatever she said, I felt emboldened to explain that my stint on Cinema would not be something I would willingly give up if Granada renewed my contract after the first series, so I would be letting myself in for working night and day. It was clever of me not to say that I was already working night and day. In fact it was more than clever: it was an outright suppression of the truth. More accurately, it was a lie. But with my remaining powers of reason, I thought it might be better to secure the offer first and then figure out what to do next, rather than pointing out the impossibilities in advance. The sharp cop must have known that she was being hustled, but perhaps she was pleased to meet a whippersnapper who was ready for anything. Findlater, who had snapped his last whip long ago, was calling for the bill. The effect of waving to the waitress took all the energy he had left. His companion’s parting shot was something about how refreshing it was to meet an Aussie so patently on the make. She even pronounced ‘Aussie’ correctly, which was an unusual skill among English journalists in those days. But her sardonic bent carried the virtue of honesty. The job, she said, was mine for the taking. Suddenly I was looking at the furniture of Bianchi’s as if I had become part of it. In the distance, the suspicion framed by Nick Tomalin’s horn-rims had become a certainty. He was smiling at an angle.