A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  They had joined the Labour government in 1945 with a burning enthusiasm, but, after five years in power, the millennium had not arrived. The split in the party, which had helped to bring it down in 1951, still existed. Now television offered a new form of expression, not of party politics, but of the driving force that had sent them into politics in the first place. They delighted in its technicalities and wanted to explore its possibilities. They found no problem working long hours, travelling abroad and contributing generously as part of a team. They were informed about current affairs, showed an understanding of the difficulties of government and were more interested in elucidation than dispute.4

  All in all, Grace Wyndham Goldie was delighted. They were superior in every way to the ‘dirty-mac brigade’ of journalists, which she despised. The problem, of course, was of perceived political bias. Where were the former leading lights of the Conservative Party?

  Winston Churchill, for one, asked this question in May 1953, when Aidan Crawley was in India with his wife Virginia Cowles, filming what became the six-part television series India’s Challenge. Grace Wyndham Goldie was able to report that Crawley was no longer a Labour MP, nor was he a prospective Labour candidate, so the obligation for ‘balance’ did not apply.

  However, Conservative pressure mounted and Grace shared the BBC’s anxiety. The trouble, she reported, was that ‘television in itself did not interest the Conservatives’. Many former Tory MPs were businessmen who earned much higher salaries than the BBC could ever offer. Furthermore, while they were prepared to air their views, they did not seem to be interested in the role of expositor or moderator. One Conservative councillor (on the London county council for Lewisham) did present himself: Christopher Chataway spent three years as a Goldie boy before becoming a Conservative MP.

  The first reporter for the new-look Panorama (one or two models had failed before) was Woodrow Wyatt. His film test had been a disaster: ‘I looked like a stuffed pig and recoiled from this revelation of myself as someone I should hate to hear or see.’ Catherine Dove, the first woman on the Panorama production team, said he reminded her more of Toad of Toad Hall. However, he persisted and filmed a twenty-minute report on Malta for the opening edition, although he was not sure what to do when he got to Malta:

  Ignorant of television, I decided on a direct approach. I stood on a promontory with the sea behind me. ‘To my right,’ I yelled, ‘are Africa and Egypt. On my left are Sicily and Italy. In front of me is Cyprus. Behind me is Gibraltar. That is why, for centuries, Malta has been of strategic importance to anyone who wants to control the Mediterranean.’5

  So began the longest-running and most prestigious of TV factual programmes. It was not, strictly speaking, ‘current affairs’; more, in the words of its first producer Michael Peacock, ‘a reflection of everyday life – ships, jazz, people, ploughing, theatre, industry, art, books, buildings, or bulldozers’. A ‘window on the world’, as it called itself in those early days, its mission was to introduce serious subjects to a popular audience – the heart of public service broadcasting.

  Wyatt’s ‘piece to camera’ in Malta was, surprisingly, a bit of a breakthrough, because most foreign factual coverage on television in the early 1950s had been confined to the programme Newsreel – and that had consisted mostly of silent film shot by a cameraman, to which a commentary would be added back home and then voiced out of vision, rather like a TV version of the cinema’s Look at Life. Grace Wyndham Goldie said that in those early days of Newsreel she used to throw onto the cutting-room floor chocolate-box pictures of cherry orchards in flower, or girls in local costume, or flocks of bleating lambs, because they offered nothing ‘to a study, say, of the relationship between Yugoslavia and the USSR’. The cameraman might not have been briefed at all on the story – if one had even been decided – before he set out for foreign parts. No doubt this is partly why Grace was experimenting at the time with Viewfinder, which saw Aidan Crawley and Christopher Mayhew send back ‘illustrated reports on world affairs’. Meanwhile, Newsreel passed from the film department to the TV and radio news department – from the former, which knew nothing about content, to the latter, which knew nothing about the visual requirements of television. The news department – dubbed by the next director-general, Hugh Carleton Greene, as ‘the Kremlin of the BBC’ – was under the reactionary ‘dictatorship’ of Tahu Hole, the head of news. His enemy was the visual, so on BBC television news, nothing moved. The only things television news was allowed to add to a radio broadcast were a clock, the BBC coat of arms, a few captions and some still photographs. Such was the dread of the cult of personality that, up until September 1955 (three weeks before ITV began), TV newsreaders like Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall were neither seen nor identified. In 1954, the Star newspaper called TV news ‘about as impressive visually as the fatstock prices’.

  All this is one way of saying that Grace Wyndham Goldie and Panorama were kicking against an open door. In the mid-1950s, broadcasting was still in the age of radio. The night ITV began transmitting, just three days after Woodrow Wyatt’s Panorama, the BBC Light Programme station scooped an audience of eight million, with the death of Grace Archer on, of course, the ever-running soap opera The Archers. The radio reviewer of The Guardian summed it up the next morning:

  She dwelt unseen amid the Light

  Among the Archer clan,

  And breathed her last the very night

  That ITV began.

  She was well loved and millions knew

  That Grace had ceased to be.

  Now she is in her grave, but oh,

  She’s scooped the ITV.

  One of Panorama’s most important running stories in those early days was the exposure by Woodrow Wyatt of communist vote rigging, first in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) and then in the Electrical Trades Union (ETU). John Freeman took over from Wyatt and it was his interview with the communist president of the ETU in 1960 that became one of the most controversial in the history of Panorama.

  In 1957, Wyatt obtained masses of confidential documents from the one remaining full-time, non-communist official in the ETU, Jock Byrne, which proved that, since the war, the communist membership had falsified election returns. By December 1957, he had compiled a devastating report, with the help of Norman MacKenzie. The director-general of the BBC gave his approval for the exposure on Panorama. This was a brave move, because the TV studios depended on the ETU to get their programmes on air. Wyatt had to resort to what has now become accepted practice:

  I had no alternative but to talk to a number of witnesses from the ETU with their faces hidden from the cameras. The fear in their voices made the more convincing their description of how they had watched communist officials falsifying the election returns and disqualifying votes for Les Cannon [the non-communist candidate]. I invited the ETU communist leaders Foulkes and Haxell to come to answer the charges. They refused.6

  ‘In last week’s sizzling Panorama,’ wrote Maurice Wiggins in the Sunday Times:

  Mr Woodrow Wyatt’s interviews gained a huge increment of drama from the fact that several of them were not seen. In its strange, chilling way, this was one of the most dramatic things I have ever seen. In your quiet, insulated room you felt the weight and swirl of:

  The dangerous flood

  Of history, that never sleeps nor dies,

  And, held one moment, burns the hand.

  The next year Wyatt left Panorama to return to politics. It fell to John Freeman to complete what Wyatt had begun. Following another Panorama report, in which non-communist local officials made further allegations about ETU vote rigging, on 22 February 1960, Frank Foulkes, the communist president, finally came in to the Panorama studio. The interviewer was John Freeman.

  It almost didn’t happen. Four days before the live transmission, Freeman and Peacock met with Foulkes in Broadcasting House to discuss the terms of the interview. Foulkes refuted the allegations of the previous Monday’s Panorama and demanded a ‘conversation�
�� rather than a ‘cross examination’ in the studio follow-up, otherwise he would not appear. Freeman insisted that ‘on no account must he be placed in a position of being unable to ask the questions he wanted to put to Mr Foulkes’, as Peacock reported to Leonard Miall. He added that Foulkes would not accept Freeman’s terms because ‘he would have everything to lose and nothing to gain’. It had been ‘a difficult and sticky meeting’.7

  Eventually, to the surprise of the Panorama office, Foulkes did agree ‘to unrestricted questioning and answering’. The result was embarrassing to watch:

  FREEMAN: You do realise, don’t you, that these charges concern you personally? If they are not charges of administrative inefficiency then they amount to charges of fraud, perhaps of criminal conspiracy. What do you feel about that?

  FOULKES: I don’t want anybody to … I don’t want anybody to … prove my innocence. I am quite able to stand up to any charge of criminal conspiracy.

  FREEMAN: You have a very simple remedy. You can go to the courts tomorrow morning and issue writs for libel against me, against the BBC, against all the papers that have attacked you and against the four gentlemen who appeared in last week’s programme.8

  Peacock saw it unfold from the gallery:

  I almost felt sorry for Frank Foulkes because he was destroyed. John was supremely hard. There was no playing about. He went straight in. In theory the interview was to enable Foulkes to deny the allegations, but actually he ended up un-denying. He just gave in.

  Any really competent, heavyweight interviewer could have done the interview. But John, well, he wasn’t cold so much as impersonal and with this authority, this charisma. You couldn’t actually deny his voice.9

  Mary Crozier of The Guardian was mesmerised:

  Freeman’s inquisitorial manner was necessary to the occasion. This had to be a hard interview, and it was. Freeman kept hammering his nails on the head. Foulkes’s melancholy eyes and worried expression gave the viewer a portrait to engage the eye as fully as the mind. Rarely has television done an interview of such interest.10

  The next day, the interview made headlines in the Daily Mail: ‘ETU in the dock: Why don’t you sue us all? Challenge on television to union chief Foulkes.’

  It instantly became a cause célèbre. A group of Labour MPs wrote to The Times accusing Freeman of being ‘a self-appointed prosecutor coercing Foulkes by challenge to prove his innocence’. A counter-group of eminent journalists and politicians, like Malcolm Muggeridge, Francis Williams, Woodrow Wyatt, Christopher Chataway and Lord Boothby, retaliated:

  To deny to the TV interviewer the right of questioning, which, subject to the laws of libel and contempt, is conceded almost without query by the newspaper journalist, is unnaturally to limit the freedom of television to serve the public, whether as a purveyor of news and ideas, or as a watchdog.11

  Strictly speaking, it was not trial by television, for television has no legal authority. It took high-court action before the ballot rigging in the ETU was confirmed, and both Haxell (the general secretary) and Foulkes were removed.

  John Freeman began his broadcasting career – as he did his journalism for the New Statesman – when he was still a Member of Parliament. He was an infrequent contributor from 1951 to the long-running Week in Westminster and At Home and Abroad, both discussion programmes on the BBC Radio Home Service. He also broadcast on the BBC World Service – his first paid contribution being an ‘unscripted discussion’ with Wilfred Pickles for London Calling Europe, answering the question ‘What is socialism?’ The date was 5 October 1952.

  Following a six-week tour of eastern Europe in the summer of 1956 (see Chapter 7), Freeman became something of an expert on communism and delivered his ‘Impressions of Warsaw’ and ‘The Iron Curtain’ on At Home and Abroad.

  A more adventurous programme was Radio Link, which connected speakers ‘live’ in studios around Europe. He took part in the opening programme on 5 July 1956, when the subject was Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress, held the previous February in Moscow. The other speakers were Raymond Aron in Paris and Thomas Barman in Warsaw; Robert McKenzie was the chairman. Afterwards Freeman wrote to the producer: ‘Next time I shall be very much less scared of this hellish technique of headphones’ – a curious admission for one with apparently steely nerves.

  Freeman enjoyed radio and was keen for more work. If he had been asked why he worked hard to establish a broadcasting reputation, he would have retorted, no doubt, that he needed the money. But there was more to it than that. Freeman was never interested in financial enrichment for its own sake, nor was he interested in social status or being an intellectual snob. Provided the subject interested him, he was keen to find out more about it and shape it into the report, interview or discussion form that the broadcast media required, whether for Panorama or schools radio. His interests were wide. Themes emerged: foreign affairs, particularly the United States, eastern Europe and South Africa; anything to do with crime and punishment and the law; the human mind, from brainwashing to beliefs; the stage and cinema. To BBC staff, he was always polite – even to his paymasters, as the many notes in his files indicate. Perhaps this was no more than was to be expected, but Freeman had been a senior soldier and government minister and was considerably older than most of the staff he dealt with.

  From 1956, Freeman combined radio broadcasts with television appearances. His most regular programme before Panorama was Press Conference – a format taken from American television, in which three or four journalists questioned a public figure in the news. After his first two appearances, the producer Felicia Elwell spread the word:

  He has taken part in a couple of Press Conferences and he seems to me to be an exceptionally able broadcaster who is very interested in popular exposition and any possible broadcasting for children. He has a good and sympathetic delivery and would be a very good person to add to the current affairs team.12

  Freeman soon graduated to ‘leading panel member’ (his fee went up from 17 to 20 guineas) and it is easy to see why. His striking looks, authoritative manner and complete command of language made him the centre of attention whenever the camera allowed.

  Watching Press Conference today, over half a century later, it is notable how cerebral and reasoned the arguments were. A good example was the appearance of Sir John Wolfenden on 6 September 1957, answering to his Report on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. Apart from recommending that homosexual acts between consenting adults should no longer be illegal, the report recommended a crackdown on prostitutes soliciting in public and on pimps living off immoral earnings, but not a ban on prostitution itself. Freeman opened the 25-minute discussion by questioning Wolfenden about prostitution:

  FREEMAN: The criticism in a good many quarters is that you [the committee] tuck prostitution itself out of sight, sweep away scandals, so that you have been humbugs about it. Is that fair?

  WOLFENDEN [PUFFING ON HIS PIPE AND IN PARAPHRASE]: Not trying to abolish prostitution … Our concern is with crime, with offences against the law, not with sin.

  FREEMAN: You are begging the question. It’s your recommendations that determine what is crime. Now, how do you distinguish between crime and sin?

  WOLFENDEN [IN PARAPHRASE]: We are concerned with public order and decency and protection and the safeguarding of those who need it. We’re not concerned with private and personal responsibility. Is that a fair distinction?

  FREEMAN: Yes, I think so.13

  Between 1955 and 1960, Freeman’s portfolio widened to include: schools programmes (television and radio); religious programmes like Meeting Point (television); Woman’s Hour (radio); Frankly Speaking, Commentary, Call from London and This is Britain (all World Service); Home and Abroad (Home Service); and, of course, his first forays in the television talks department, like Panorama, Press Conference and Face to Face (see Chapter 6).

  Even television light entertainment pursued him, with offers to appear on What’s My Line? and Ask Me Anothe
r. These he declined, although he did accept the role of host on the Chan Canasta show. The truth was, unlike other Goldie boys, Freeman was keen to get away from politics. ‘Find something you like doing and get someone to pay you for it,’ he told his stepdaughter Lizi. He obviously succeeded.

  The Chan Canasta show – in which Chan (his stage name) carried out feats of ‘mental magic’, displaying phenomenal memory and some telepathy – was of personal interest to Freeman, but it came to a bad end. Perceptive viewers told Freeman they could tell that the BBC production team was collaborating with Chan behind Freeman’s back. Obviously, his credibility was at issue, and, as Freeman was a man of firm principle in his public life, he refused to host any further shows until a contract of trust was agreed; then he ended his association as soon as he could.

  Occasionally, Freeman worked for the opposition. In its early years, ITV ran a popular discussion programme on Sunday afternoons called Free Speech. The regular panellists were the historian A. J. P. Taylor, independently minded politicians like Bob Boothby and Michael Foot, and the trade unionist W. J. Brown, who was known as ‘the rustic philosopher’.

  The chairman, Edgar Lustgarten, and the producer, John Irwin, were both freelancers, which is significant because the whole team had originally been employed by BBC TV, making exactly the same programme but calling it In the News. In 1952, it had been hugely popular, with an audience of about 50 per cent of all TV owners. Nevertheless, early in 1955, the BBC gave in to the politicians who wanted more orthodox spokesmen and women to argue party politics. An early suggestion from the Conservatives was Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher), who the BBC rejected because no one had heard of her. So, led by Taylor and Lustgarten, the iconoclastic team of In the News resigned before they were pushed, and took their programme to the Associated Broadcasting Company, later ATV. Tom Driberg had been a contributor, and now he introduced Freeman as an occasional contributor to Free Speech.