A Very Private Celebrity (17 page)

Freeman immediately asked her to give up her career. ‘I have no right to ask you this, but it would be wonderful to find you here in Heath Mansions when I come home.' And so she ended her pioneering work at the BBC.

Was she disappointed?

Soon Freeman became an actual father. Matthew was born in June 1961 – John was present at the birth, which was rare in those days – and they married as soon as Catherine's divorce from Wheeler came through the following year, despite her Catholic scruples. Charles Wheeler married again soon after, to an Indian lady named Dip Singh,
with whom he had two daughters. He went on to become the longest-serving foreign correspondent in the history of the BBC and received a knighthood for his work. After his memorial service in Westminster Abbey in 2008, the bells were rung.

Freeman never did sign the exclusive contract the BBC had offered him. In the summer of 1960, he knew he would soon be editor of the
New Statesman
(not that he revealed this to the BBC) and, in any event, he wanted to cut back on his broadcasting commitments. It was probably no coincidence, therefore, that he then wrote two articles highly critical of the BBC. This was not exactly biting the hand that fed him, though it could well have felt like that at the BBC for he was still under contract for the last series of
Face to Face
.

In May 1960, Freeman was in hospital for a few weeks and therefore a ‘Captive Viewer'. This was his title for his
Listener
article:

Then he focused his attack on Lime Grove, criticising in the
New Statesman
the BBC's all-embracing rules of ‘impartiality' and ‘balance' for factual programmes:

Freeman was finding it difficult to reconcile his role as deputy editor of an opinionated left-wing political magazine with being a prominent public service broadcaster. He had already been criticised by the new director-general, Hugh Carlton Greene, for his
Panorama
description of France's war in Algeria as ‘colonial': ‘He is slipping into his bad habit of speaking as a deputy editor of the
New Statesman
.'

Freeman was then rebuked by the director of television broadcasting for writing in the
Daily Telegraph
that he strongly deplored the amount of lying that went on during a
This Is Your Life
programme.

Grace Wyndham Goldie's policy of employing guest stars with minds of their own was showing signs of wear and tear.

When Freeman was appointed editor of the
New Statesman
in January 1961, the time had come for him to end his primary career as a broadcaster. He continued to appear on both BBC TV and radio (as well as ITV), and made one more series of
Face to Face
, but another door was closing in his life as a new one opened.

Chapter 6

Television interviewer –
Face to Face

T
HE FIRST INTERVIEW
in
Face to Face
was broadcast live from the BBC TV studios in Shepherd's Bush in February 1959. The subject was Lord Birkett, the famous cross-examiner in murder trials of the 1920s and '30s.

The screen opens to reveal a sketch of Birkett, drawn earlier by the Polish artist Feliks Topolski, and the camera then moves to a very simple title sequence of cut-out cardboard (‘
Face to Face
, John Freeman interviews') before continuing to pan over more Topolski sketches.

Underneath runs the title music – the overture from an unfinished opera by Berlioz –
Les Francs-Juges
. (After the programme, Birkett wrote to the producer, Hugh Burnett, informing him that the opera
actually concerned the sinister tribunals of the Middle Ages in Westphalia, which saw condemned men disappear for ever. ‘What do you think the damages would be,' he asked, tongue in cheek, ‘if a powerful broadcasting corporation were to play this music to a television programme consisting of an interview with a celebrated judge?!') The music rises to a crescendo then fades, and the camera moves into a profile of Lord Birkett against a black background.

His voice is heard saying, ‘It's the strain of waiting that's so hard' – evidence that the programme is live and he does not know his microphone is on! – and then another camera takes an over-the-shoulder shot from behind John Freeman, before moving in on Birkett. Freeman begins: ‘Lord Birkett, you are known to the world, I suppose, as one of the greatest three or four criminal lawyers of this century…'

After a few minutes, the unique style of
Face to Face
was apparent. The studio setting was simply an armchair and a side table mounted on a plinth, with black drapes to isolate the interviewee. The camera remained focused on a close-up shot of the subject's face, showing, in Freeman's words, ‘every bead of sweat, every flicker of the eyelid, a dimension that had not existed in television before'. The camera, in fact, was a second interrogator, or, as Freeman put it, ‘the interviewer and the camera and the lights and the studio environment are all integrated into a single concentration on the individual'.

Freeman's face was rarely seen: ‘That would be a total distraction,' said Freeman, ‘and I strongly applauded the style.' The idea was one of Hugh Burnett's. He was a producer in talks television who had spent two years trying to persuade Grace Wyndham Goldie to accept the series, but far less time persuading John Freeman to present it:

So the interview unfolded. Freeman's speech was unhesitatingly firm and precise, his pace unrelenting, his manner persistent. Unlike TV interviews before that time, there was nothing deferential or reverential about his manner. Unlike TV interviews of today, there was nothing hectoring or impolite. Freeman told Anthony Clare in 1988 that his intention most of the time had been simply to ask ‘the sort of questions I thought an intelligent person, given the chance, might want to ask'. In the case of Birkett, that must have been true:

Over four million viewers watched that first
Face to Face
, and they loved it. Its reaction index (a BBC viewer panel evaluation) was 83 per cent – the highest of all the interviews that were shown over the next three years.
Face to Face
became history. It was the most famous interview series on British television, and the Topolski sketches and Berlioz signature tune became its brand label.

Face to Face
sold throughout the English-speaking world and, on its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, the BBC released a DVD box set of all thirty-five interviews. The series became a benchmark for later generations of TV interviewers, like Michael Parkinson: ‘People of our generation revered John Freeman as one of the foundation stones of early television. I watched him with a mixture of awe and admiration. He was a great man and the present generation who know not of him don't know what they are missing.'
3

Despite the world fame of many of the contributors to
Face to Face
– Carl Jung, Bertrand Russell, Martin Luther King etc. – it is known as ‘that interview series with John Freeman'. It is the work he is best known for, yet he disliked the celebrity status the series
conferred. In his
Who's Who
entry, he didn't even mention the BAFTA for Outstanding Television Personality he won for the series in 1960.

Kingsley Martin, the editor of the
New Statesman
, growled sourly: ‘John is the only man who has made himself celebrated by turning his arse on the public.' Undoubtedly, his anonymity contributed to his celebrity. He was a man of mystery and the public loves trying to uncover mysteries. Exposing the real person behind the celebrity was, of course, exactly what he was doing with his guests on
Face to Face
, but he gave absolutely nothing away about himself.

He carried this anonymity to extreme levels when other programmes or press articles tried to turn the tables on him. In 1961, the other famous interviewer of those days, Malcolm Muggeridge, did his best on Granada's
Appointment
. The
Guardian
TV reviewer Mary Crozier wrote: ‘The most curious thing was that John Freeman remained virtually the faceless man. Nothing came out that could not have been known without this interview. We were left with the impression that Mr Freeman was an almost alarmingly impersonal person.'
4

Perhaps Lord Birkett would have been more successful than Malcolm Muggeridge, but when Birkett suggested a reverse
Face to Face
to end the first series, he was given short shrift. Many journalists made attempts to try a
Face to Face
on Freeman, but none got further than Anthony Clare in 1988.

Freeman was prepared to talk about the programme, but not about himself. He had the gift of thinking up an interesting reply that did not answer the question. He never said what
sort
of man he was.

The interviewer for an article in
Tatler
, ‘The Grillers Grilled', got closer than most:

Interviewers got more out of Freeman when he was talking about his cats, who roamed around Heath Mansions when the press came to call. Indeed, the press probably turned to the cats in desperation, as ‘television's most penetrating interviewer' was full of insight about them: ‘Pushkin has all the male characteristics in that he's bossy, sometimes bad tempered, with a logical brain and an engineer's approach to life; Dulcie is flighty, silly on occasions, but very affectionate.'
5

The myth about
Face to Face
is that it was ‘trial by television' with Freeman as the ‘grand inquisitor'. The interviews with comedian Tony Hancock and TV entertainment celebrity Gilbert Harding were undoubtedly forensic in a highly personal way, and perhaps that is why they are among the best known, but they were the exception. Most of the others were unremarkable ‘the real person behind the public façade' interviews, and, in fact, only fourteen of them were ‘live' broadcasts.

Yet there
was
something inquisitorial about the interviews. Freeman often let the subject know what was coming with a semi-jocular opening question: ‘Are you going to come clean?' Then ‘his matchless voice, ultra-polite, devastatingly persistent', dominated the studio in the absence of any glimpse of its owner. He admitted that, for him, interviewing was ‘a psychological exercise':

The ambience, then, was inquisitorial but the substance only rarely justified the press term ‘trial by television'.

Freeman's second guest, in March 1959, was the renowned philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. He was eighty-seven and campaigning vigorously for nuclear disarmament. Before the recording, which took place at Russell's home, Hugh Burnett found an obituary that Russell had written about himself. Beaming widely, Russell read it out at the start of the interview:

Freeman took Russell through his life with probing but courteous questions and the old genius replied succinctly, sometimes with an air of mischief. He was well capable of avoiding Freeman's traps:

Two years after the recording, Russell was sent to prison for taking part in an anti-nuclear sit-down in London.

In May, the guest was the poet and critic Dame Edith Sitwell, the 71-year-old
grande dame
of English letters. This was an extraordinary encounter, partly because of her eccentric attire. With a headdress she called her ‘bird-king's hat', an ermine jacket, and huge, exotic rings on her fingers, she looked like what she said she was – ‘a throwback to ancient ancestors of mine' (an impression the Topolski caricatures did nothing to dispel). Her deathly white, sharp features stood out against the black background. Some of her answers made her sound less like a medieval ‘throwback' than a witch in a fairy story: