Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  I went to see Bill Bradshaw in his wheelchair-adapted flat in Waterloo. He was doing an office job which he was not enjoying and every spare moment was spent working on his linguistics PhD. ‘My typist is making life difficult,’ he complained. ‘She says she can do it faster on one of those word processor things.’ We went to the pub, where Bill drank a phenomenal amount of beer and smoked thirty cigarettes. Then we went for a phaal. He had always been quite good at eating.

  I visited Jon at his new flat. He told me that Katy, the belle of my schooldays, had won a prize for the best English First in the University of London. I didn’t doubt it. She was now at Oxford, being supervised by a divorced and remarried Catholic Marxist with money. It was not that Katy had an especially sparkling intellect, just a steely dedication to hard work, a canny awareness of the zeitgeist, and bulletproof ambition.

  I thought I would like to work in radio but had no idea how anyone might go about doing that. In the end it was, as it so often is, a contact that put me on the path.

  My aunt had just finished a short course in broadcasting techniques at an establishment near Harrow. She explained that they ran a highly regarded three-month residential course costing several thousand pounds. This was beyond me, but she said they were looking for someone with a bit of experience and technical nous, whose fees and room-and-board they would provide if that person would stay on to do a modicum of teaching and a fair bit of chair stacking during shorter courses throughout the year.

  This sounded ideal, but there was just one thing. My aunt was a nun and the course was run by the Catholic Church. As a boy, I had been schooled by nuns, gone to church, learned the ropes. But this was all a long time ago. I sent them a letter anyhow and was invited along for an interview.

  The journey into the outer suburbs on a musty slam-door train took me through Queen’s Park, Wembley, and Harrow. I admired the Victorian terraces and red-brick suburban station buildings as we passed. When I wasn’t gazing out of the window I was examining the seat moquette, a word coined in the thirties for the thick pile fabric used in upholstery. This one was hardwearing but unbeautiful.

  I have an enthusiasm for public transport visual design systems, from typography to maps to cushions, and I often compare one with another. I once thought of having a suit made using the red and yellow moquette of the London Routemaster bus but decided it would be too prickly. Some of the best moquettes in the world are those used since the 1930s on London’s underground trains, which were part of a sustained policy of integrated company design initiated by Frank Pick, the dynamic leader of what became London Underground. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Pick as ‘very shy’ and ‘brilliant but lonely’. He was also highly focused. It was he, who in 1913 commissioned the calligrapher Edward Johnston to design the now world-famous Underground ‘bullseye’ roundel, along with a new typeface that would unify the look of all Tube trains, stations, maps, posters, and travel information. His idea was that attractive design, high functioning and well administered, can reflect an organisation’s ethos and exert a profound effect on public impression. ‘The test of the goodness of a thing,’ said Pick, ‘is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it any better …’ He applied his ‘bold simplicity’ to everything from fabric design to the architecture of his new Tube stations, overseeing every feature down to the last fixture and fitting. The designer Noel Carrington thought his attention to detail made him the ‘ideal inspector general’. Coherence, standards, and underlying systematic rules meant everything to him. I imagined Frank Pick on his cloud looking down at the seat covers of my train and cursing it.

  The radio and television training centre was based in two huge 1920s houses in an affluent suburb a couple of miles from the end of the Bakerloo line. I was greeted at the door by a portly silver-haired man wearing a cravat and a signet ring. He said he was the dean. I said who I was. Exuding an aura of great suavity, he picked up the phone — a modern one, with buttons instead of a dial — and buzzed the person whose name I had been given.

  ‘There’s a sinister-looking young man here to see you,’ he said, looking at me archly over his half-moon spectacles.

  I was asked to wait, so I inspected the entrance hall. Ahead of me, a wide curled staircase led to two floors of accommodation, on my right was an office. Through a door to my left I could see a hotel-style sitting room with several armchairs. There were other doors but they were closed. From somewhere came the delicious smell of soup. After a minute a young woman with a beautiful smile appeared. She greeted me warmly and told me her name was Lea. This seemed a funny name for a woman. Lea was American. Perhaps this was why she seemed so effortlessly buoyant and upbeat. I liked her immediately. Of course I had no clue that this was my first meeting with my future wife. Who does? She told me she would give me a tour.

  Hidden away inside the building was a large lecture room, a suite of offices, a chapel with access for cameras and microphones, and a full-size sound studio with a large control cubicle on the other side of a soundproof glass. My nerdy traits were immediately excited. Most astonishing was a huge, fully operational TV studio equipped with three cameras, lighting grid, cycloramas, and a control gallery housing a desk bristling with faders, buttons, and tiny lights.

  I was interviewed by two of the staff before being taken to see the boss, Peter, a canon of Westminster Cathedral. He had something of the later Trevor Howard about him, his sideboard bristled with bottles, and his office clock had only one hand: ‘one-ish, two-ish, three-ish’, it said. After a bluff chat, Canon Peter saw me out and told me they would be in touch.

  Back at the flat there had been a rustling under the floorboards and we noticed tooth marks in an aubergine. Mice! Hearing a noise in the kitchen, Alice opened the cupboard door. ‘Argh! Tom,’ she called, ‘it’s not mice, it’s a huge rat.’ Cockroaches was one thing, rats another. The massage parlour had been overrun. The environmental people fixed the problem but I spent hours with a bucket of bleach, cleaning every last surface.

  On Sundays there was a huge market up the road. Crowds packed the stalls, bands played in the pubs, and canal boaters stopped for a chat at the lock. There was little I wanted to buy but it was nice to spend time with Alice. She was very good with other people and was my buffer against them. She was also by nature kind. One day near Baker Street she approached a tramp asleep beside his hat on a park bench. She lifted the hat and deposited a packet of cigarettes and a five-pound note.

  Wandering about under a dark arch at the market one weekend she drew my attention to some colourfully braided lengths of what looked like rope. ‘Aren’t these unusual,’ she said, lifting them up for me to examine. At once the ropes were whipped out of her hand. They were the dreadlocks of a man who had been bending forwards examining some bric-a-brac.

  Despite her social skills and her altruism, Alice had always had a fiery temper, and more than once I found myself in conversations with flying crockery. Like other Aspergers I shrink from conflict. When one evening I was hit on the head by a shoe I began to wonder how much of this I should be expected to put up with.

  A letter arrived from the radio and television training centre telling me I had been successful in my application. I decided I would live at the centre during the week and come home to Alice at the weekend. I handed in my notice and left for the distant suburbs.

  *

  The three-month radio and television training course covered everything from the way a television studio worked to how to survive a tricky media interview. A BBC producer called Helen Fry talked to us about features. She had worked on Plain Tales from the Raj, the radio programme I had admired. I was going to discuss it with her during the coffee break but I was put off by the press of other people and overcome by anxiety.

  We were given an introduction to drama by a very experienced producer, who took all of us through a short radio play. Some
students were chosen to act, others took turns directing, and I, of course, volunteered to do the sound effects. This involved little more than putting down some cups and saucers and pouring out the ‘tea’ — actually cold water. It irked me that such effects were often too loud or in some other way exaggerated, as if the sound effects person was concerned lest his or her day’s work go unappreciated. I carefully underplayed it.

  ‘Excellent sound effects,’ said the visiting producer. I had seldom been so flattered, for this was Piers Plowright, the man whose sound montage on death I had been so taken with. I wanted to tell him how much I loved his work and explain my conviction that a radio listener could detect the difference between hot and cold liquid being poured into a cup, but again I was unable to open a conversation or introduce myself.

  The director of a new television drama called EastEnders showed us how to produce a multi-camera studio programme. Whoever was directing had to make endless real-time decisions: cueing the actors, and instructing the vision mixer, engineer, cameras, sound operators, and who knows how many other people while sitting in a darkened control gallery in front of a bank of monitors.

  For some reason that nobody knows, the camera takes a particular liking to certain people and I found I was better in front of it than behind. I could talk to a lens more easily than I could a person, and I didn’t have to order other people about. Presenting a show called Book Review, I gave an excellent impression of myself, looking relaxed and competent while they fed into my earpiece the developing chaos in the gallery, as student directors and vision mixers got in a shouting muddle, floor managers wandered into shot, and everything that could go wrong did. The adrenaline under the eye of the camera kept me agile and I found I was able to concentrate on my script, take the director’s cues, watch the clock, and process the background hubbub, without too many problems.

  People with Asperger’s syndrome notice and remember distracting information that others ignore, and they can do this without it damaging their performance. This so-called, ‘non-selective attention’ was reported by UCL psychologists Anna Remington and John Swettenham, who asked a group of Aspergers to find the letters N and X in a ring of indifferent characters. Any letters that appeared outside the circle were irrelevant and should be ignored. The test was against the clock. They found that Aspergers processed more of the distracting information — the letters outside the circle — than did typical people, without this making them worse at the main job. In fact, they were better at it. Clearly there are times when distractibility is an advantage.

  The most permanently useful training I had on the course was in how to be interviewed. As with other Aspergers I can find it hard to master my thoughts when asked a question, particularly one about myself. When I was being grilled I would often give strange terse answers, as I did in life, or would trail off into inarticulate irrelevancies. Watching my lacklustre performances being played back was a brutal awakening.

  I learnt that although a media interview looks like a real conversation it is a mere imitation, with its own strange rules. Once I had understood this, I found the process easier, and with much hard work I learned how to pretend to be me, and to use the useful politicians’ trick of responding to questions rather than answering them. This technique was exemplified by General de Gaulle who once waved a sheet of paper at some journalists, saying, ‘Gentlemen, here are my answers, now what are your questions?’ Of course, you could take it too far. This interview training helped me decades later when I was obliged to do endless interviews to plug books I had written. The rules of mock exchange were clear, and I enjoyed the performing.

  When the course finished I stayed on in my bedroom ‘over the shop’. I did a bit of hospital radio and I was offered some reporting work with the BBC. It was nice to get a cheque stamped with their monogram — my first broadcast earnings. The rest of the time I was helping out on the short courses that ran throughout the year. These were often for foreign students, from Scandinavia, India, Europe, and several African countries. On one course it began snowing and some Ghanaian priests who had never seen snow put on their overcoats and went onto the lawn, where they danced like children.

  On another course a lot of senior English clergy, including a future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, arrived to have their interview skills polished up. One or two were on the ball. Others couldn’t remember the question or keep their earpiece in. Another time the genial and rather vague director of a publishing house that produced English translations of papal documents arrived. Lea helped him make a short film and I talked to him about the right sort of typography for his captions. Later I saw him coming out of the ladies’ toilet.

  Lecturing more philosophically about the media was a Dominican priest named Gerard Meath. I introduced myself to him and told him he had taught my father at Laxton School. He remembered both my dad and my uncle Ralph. I walked with him to the car park, where he hiked up his habit, revealing a pair of pink legs and brown sandals. ‘These medieval garments weren’t designed for the modern world,’ he announced, climbing into his car, which I remember as a Triumph Spitfire but probably wasn’t. Then, staring absently into the distance, he mused: ‘You know what, Tom, there’s nothing so stupid as a nun.’ With a sudden roar he was away, leaving me standing in a cloud of amusement and exhaust.

  Oddballs, it seemed, were attracted to the Church. Running one of the courses was a ‘mad professor’ called Leonard Chase, who had been at the BBC in the early days, working on the radio thriller Dick Barton – Special Agent and the first episodes of the TV police drama Z-Cars. He had been the person who suggested Valerie Singleton as a suitable presenter for Blue Peter and had finally been made the corporation’s head of training. He told me he had once produced a magic show for television, becoming so interested that he had taken up the hobby himself. He showed me a mysterious effect in which he pushed a borrowed pen through his jacket without leaving a hole. I was baffled until he revealed that the coat was woven from a tweed so loose that the fibres would part to allow a pen through, before closing up again. Leonard was a member of the Magic Circle and he invited me along as a guest. In time, and after a terrifying examination, I too became a member.

  Canon Peter, the radio and television training centre’s boss, was a whisky priest of the old school, whose phenomenal swearing was enough to curdle communion wine. He flew a 1935 glider, which he drove to airports in a long box on top of his Renault 4. He knew all the best hidden-away restaurants in London, though he was himself no chef. On the cook’s day off he offered to make dinner for Lea and me. This turned out to be three catering meat pies blackened to a cinder in the deep fat fryer, served with frozen vegetable cubes boiled to a pulp. The meal was accompanied by several bottles of excellent wine, most of which disappeared inside the canon.

  Lea and I began spending more time together. We went on a long walk and were followed by a Siamese cat. We lit a fire in one of the building’s old grates, producing a lot of brown smoke and not much heat. Lea sifted the chaff and grain of my character, kept what was worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blew the rest away. Little by little our relationship changed. Something had happened. I decided that I was going to have to talk to Alice.

  That weekend I went back to the flat. There was a steady drizzle, the pie shop and sausage factory were dark, and a blustery wind was holding a wet sheet of newspaper against the glass of the massage parlour: ‘More pressure on Kinnock,’ it said. I walked up the dusty stairs in darkness because the timer switch had failed. I let myself in and began the most horrible conversation of my life. ‘You’re being very good about this, you know,’ said Alice. But I felt I had stifled a baby. There was blood on my hands for a long time.

  *

  The Canon invited Lea and me to a proper dinner. Round the table were several people including a couple of senior BBC types. I was out of my depth, but Lea charmed them even after she had sent a pickled onion flying into the lap
of the Head of Religious Broadcasting. She mentioned that she had got herself a job offer as a production assistant with the BBC Drama department. The other senior BBC man leant forward, ‘Oh, you won’t be wanting to do that for very long. Come and see me when you’ve settled in and we’ll sort you out with something more suitable.’ I was shocked that this was the way it worked.

  I think it was at around this time that, while having my eyes checked, I became properly interested in the weird typographic characters that are used on the test chart. Like everyone, I had been having this same eye test since childhood and I noticed, again, how strange the letterforms were. Looking into things, I discovered that abstract shapes had traditionally been used, but that in 1862 a Dutch ophthalmologist, Herman Snellen, had developed his own alphabet, using capital letters, or, at least, what are designed to look like capital letters. In fact, Snellen’s shapes are not true letterforms at all and anything typeset in them would be next to illegible. Their purpose is not legibility but the testing of visual acuity while allowing the reader to identify easily each shape that he or she can see — a huge leap forward.

  Just ten letter shapes are used in the standard chart: C, D, E, F, L, N, O, P, T, and Z. Their idiosyncratic geometry makes the thickness of each letter stroke equal to the width of the white spaces in between, and each serif the same. The height and width of the letters are five times this measure. Though the test has been developed over the years its properties remain the same today, more than a hundred and fifty years after its first use.

  The Snellen letters have a systematic beauty, which I come back to often. But whenever I explain all this to opticians they seem bemused.

  I was discussing the Snellen chart with Lea, but her mind was elsewhere. Her visa was about to run out and she had to return to the States. We went and stood outside in the drizzly rain. She did not believe it would be easy to get permission to come back to Britain to work. There were tears. I suggested we could get married. She nodded. There were no stars, no candle-lit dinner, no gemstones, just the gravel of the wet drive.