A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  Mr Freeman came to the house and he used to come a lot. I used to take the children to visit him [Freeman had rented a flat in Prince Albert Road near Regent’s Park] and that was the time too when he was attending to my visa and passport and he got everything done for me and he brought me the paperwork.

  I was in-between in this situation. I know personally because I lived with them that to me they were a very happy family and then when this happened it broke. My world had come to an end. The children, the children!

  I asked Cynthia if she knew why the marriage had broken up? By this time in our conversation, over forty years after the events in question, she was virtually in tears:

  I don’t know. I don’t know. All I can say is that I was so close to Mr and Mrs Freeman and I kept my place as a governess and respected the family. But when you take somebody as your friend and confide in that friend, and that friend is the one who is taking something away from you, where do you go? Where do you turn? What do you say to yourself? How shocked you are when that happens! All I can say is when Mrs Freeman told me that, she and I were crying together … that’s all that I can tell you. When I look at her even now, I feel for her. She’s never forgotten Mr Freeman. Never. Never! It’s still there. It’s still there.11

  On 9 March 1971 the appointment of John Freeman as chairman and chief executive of London Weekend Television was announced. His very first job was to move the executive suite of LWT from Old Burlington Street, Mayfair, into the main production offices at Station House, a grim twenty-storey office block in Wembley that overlooked a railway goods yard. No respecter of social status, this probably made no difference to him but it had a morale booster effect on the staff. When the former HM ambassador was seen queuing up in the canteen and saying simply, ‘This is where the work is done’, he was greeted with acclaim. Staff asked about his programme tastes? He was tactful but admitted he was no fan of high camp: ‘The one show I can’t stand is Come Dancing.’12 Within a few weeks he would be presenting LWT’s case to the ITA, on which his staff’s jobs depended.

  Freeman’s appointment was seen as a major coup for LWT as well as further proof of Frost’s powers of persuasion. Freeman was already hugely respected in television. He was charismatic, dignified and polite, qualities that in LWT had not been much in evidence. He was the sort of leader who inspires confidence. David Docherty, whose book Running the Show; 21 Years of London Weekend Television I gratefully acknowledge, said that Freeman behaved in his thirteen years at LWT like a hero played by James Stewart or Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s 1930s films like Mr Smith Goes to Washington, crossed with Lewis Elliot, the central figure in C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers. What he meant was that Freeman seemed a ‘profoundly humane character’ (Frank Capra) and a leader who ‘revelled in command, loved the arts of management, had the strength of will to carry through his ideas but also possessed a stubborn disregard for alternative views’ (C. P. Snow). James Stewart and Gary Cooper, of course, always got their girl, which in Freeman’s case needs to be in the plural.

  Journalists were keen to meet ‘the formidable Mr Freeman’, as Ivan Rowan called him in the Sunday Telegraph of 14 March 1971. His attempt to discover ‘who he really is’ was as unsuccessful as if the meeting had never taken place:

  It was like arriving at a house for a long deferred appointment, and being greeted by a tall, sandy-haired man with flat blue eyes and a voice as delicate and precise as a vicar’s. ‘I am afraid the real Mr Freeman was called away five minutes ago. I know he would have been delighted to see you. Is there any message?’

  Derrik Mercer of the Sunday Times got a bit closer, sitting opposite the new chief executive in his office: ‘Ruddy, freckled face, blond hair brushed to an immaculate smoothness, graceful hands that he is obviously very proud of, eyes watchful behind heavy rimmed glasses, he looks impressive enough. But what are his qualifications to revive a shaky television company?’13 He did not get an answer, any more than other journalists. ‘That’s a fair, even interesting question,’ responded Freeman unhelpfully. Former Prime Minister Harold Wilson fared no better. He came round to LWT for a television interview and hoped to catch up with his old colleague’s news over lunch. He was told: ‘Mr Freeman sends his apologies but he has gone out for a lunch appointment.’

  In early March, the ITA had handed LWT a searching questionnaire. It wanted written answers ‘covering all aspects of the company’s structure and operations: financial, managerial, creative and technical’. In effect this required a re-application for the franchise. It asked the company’s senior executives and board members to assemble at the ITA offices at eleven o’clock on 22 April for a grilling. It was the day of decision. Frost had been assured by Sir Brian Young that the ITA wanted LWT to survive, for the obvious reason that to fail was too terrible to contemplate for ITV; it would have necessitated major re-organisation. Further, the appointment of John Freeman gave the ITA a way out. But the result was not a foregone conclusion.

  LWT fielded a team of ten, headed by Freeman and including Murdoch, Lord Campbell and Lord Montague. According to Sir Brian Young, who was sitting across the table from LWT, Freeman was clearly in charge of his board. He answered most of the questions himself; he knew his facts, was clear about the direction in which he wanted to take the company, was committed to public service broadcasting and ‘filled the authority with confidence that their problem child was about to grow up’.

  Freeman’s opening statement was an assertion of ideals: ‘LWT still believes in the ideals it presented to the authority in its original application. Indeed we can claim to have fulfilled many and most of the intentions set out.’ It was also an admission of serious failings: ‘Our setbacks have derived from administrative, executive and commercial shortcomings, for which both board and management must accept a due share of responsibility.’14 The ITA was satisfied. It renewed the contract and expressed pleasure that uncertainty about the future of LWT had been removed. LWT would now enjoy the same security as the other ITV companies throughout the remaining contract period.

  It must have been a masterful performance by a man who six weeks before knew nothing about the television industry or running a company. Further, he had been out of the country for the previous six years and was in the midst of an awful marriage break-up. ‘He was,’ said the Daily Telegraph, ‘one of those rare men of parts who seem to be able to do anything better than anybody else.’ No wonder he became bored quickly; even the most demanding job was just too easy.

  Freeman was at his best leading a team to present evidence before a committee. His army chief-of-staff training came to the fore. For a start, he was a great believer in preparation or, as the army puts it, ‘prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance’. At LWT he would make a practice of assembling the executive directors in his office for a thorough dress rehearsal before facing the LWT board or the IBA. Then he would field all the questions himself before handing over to, say, the director of entertainment, in order to give him precious seconds to prepare his answer: prosaic but effective. Then, of course, his manner was anything but prosaic – a charismatic presence and a voice that was always polite but demanded to be heard.

  As often happens when a new manager takes over a team, a period of good fortune followed. LWT sold the hugely successful comedy series Doctor in the House and Doctor at Sea to the USA. The government halved the levy on advertising and thus restored confidence in the industry. By the end of the year, ITV’s overall revenue had reached its highest annual increase since 1964. This left Freeman to see off one predator threatening the company from the outside, Thames Television, and one challenger to his authority from the inside, Rupert Murdoch.

  Thames TV had wasted no time suggesting to Aidan Crawley that a merger of sorts should take place between the five-day-a-week TV supplier in the London area and the weekend supplier. Crawley was interested but Freeman saw this as the thin end of the wedge. At a working dinner at Crawley’s house, Freeman and his new programme control
ler Cyril Bennett went head to head with the Thames chairman Lord Shawcross (an old colleague of Freeman’s from the Attlee government); his managing director, Howard Thomas; and his director of programmes, Brian Tesler. Freeman did not mince his words. He complained that Thames had been traducing LWT and then, as a diplomatic gesture, offered a few crumbs of cooperation like sharing Outside Broadcast units. Shortly afterwards he persuaded the ITA to ask Thames to beef up its current affairs output, thus taking the burden off LWT, and show fewer high-rating US programmes, thus allowing LWT to replace them with its own buy-ins without overstepping the quota. After this decisive intervention, relations between LWT and the whole of ITV improved.

  Freeman said:

  It was my job to hold Murdoch in check, because to have allowed him to continue interfering in the company would have spelt simple and rapid disaster. We had a rather odd relationship over quite a long period and became, I hope, friends. I certainly became, and remain, fond of him, and I think he is a decent and much abused man. However, our relationship was based on the fact that I had to prevent him doing what he wanted to do until eventually, and quite inevitably, he decided to focus his energies elsewhere.15

  On another occasion, he said of Murdoch: ‘I trust Rupert. I don’t trust him to be nice, you know, but I trust he will do what he says he’s going to do.’16 Soon, Murdoch quit the board because he got involved in United States ventures and nominated Bert Hardy, the director of sales, to replace him. In 1979 he sold nearly all his shares in LWT at a profit. He always acknowledged that ‘undoubtedly, John Freeman saved the company’. David Frost switched allegiances too. He signed a contract with the BBC and sold his LWT shares in 1976.

  Freeman’s impact was making itself felt. At the regular IBA Policy Committee Meetings (in 1972 the Independent Television Authority became the Independent Broadcasting Authority when radio was added) the chairmen of all fifteen companies would sit round a table with the IBA top brass and, in the case of the main ITV companies, their directors of programmes too. This is where Brian Tesler got to know John Freeman:

  For four years at least, John and I sat next to each other, joining in the discussions of programme policy, strategy, and so on. [Tesler was then director of programmes for Thames TV.] Naturally, we got to know each other rather well. He had an agile and very clear brain and a magnificent way of expressing himself. I mean when John Freeman spoke, you listened. It sounded good, even if it possibly wasn’t right, it was convincing. And there was magnetism about the man that he never lost. And he looked so good! This tall, straight, very handsome man, with quiet confidence. You knew he was a man of great power and strength but I never saw him lose his temper, nor vilify anyone. With this agile brain, with a marvellous use of language … how could he not succeed?17

  One of Murdoch’s recruits to LWT had been an East End boy, Ron Miller, who became head of sales working under Bert Hardy. He and Freeman joined the company roughly at the same time and became good friends:

  I first met John a few days after he joined the company in an office in Old Burlington Street. There was a complete suite of offices empty as Rupert Murdoch had fired most of the executives. He was sat behind a desk and he rose as I walked in. The first thing that struck me was his physical presence. He was tall, very upright and he had a magnificent head of hair. And then, of course, there was the voice. I remember him from his Face to Face days. Before I did my National Service I simply made a date to watch every one of these shows. I was already in awe of him.18

  Not long afterwards, Freeman asked Miller to organise a drinks party in Old Burlington Street (where the sales team had remained in the heart of the advertising district) so he could meet them all. What happened became an instant LWT legend:

  Halfway through, Elizabeth Wagg, John’s secretary, came in. She said to him, ‘President Nixon is on the line.’ John turned to me and said, ‘Ron, would you mind if I take this call?’ I just laughed. When he had put the phone down he turned to the room and said, ‘It’s a pity there are no advertisers here.’

  Very soon Freeman announced how he intended to resolve the contradiction between the public service duty demanded by the ITA and the commercial raison d’être of ITV. He told advertisers in November 1972:

  The significant duty that LWT has to learn the hard way is that at weekends, against the relentless build-up of entertainment programming of BBC One, minority programmes at peak-time lose not only their own time period but the entire evening’s viewing. Our specialist programmes must be strategically placed with very great care. We will make these programmes because they are essential for our prestige and because they are important in their own right; however, we will quarantine them and ensure that high ratings programmes are not infected.19

  From then on, with the few exceptions such as Aquarius and later Weekend World, money was put into programmes that would earn high audiences and therefore could charge high advertising rates. Under the director of programmes, Cyril Bennett, whom Freeman described as ‘a sort of genius’, such home-grown programmes as Upstairs, Downstairs, Budgie, Please Sir! and On the Buses soon began to dent the BBC’s weekend ratings, and were networked. The World of Sport rivalled Match of the Day while the arts programme Aquarius was loved by the arts reviewers and Weekend World became a benchmark in analytical current affairs programming. For a while the ITA was satisfied. Other companies followed LWT’s definition of public service broadcasting the ITV way and soon John Freeman with Denis Foreman, the chairman of Granada, became the leading spokesmen for the companies on the IBA Policy Committee.

  The chief executive was no Grace Wyndham Goldie. He rarely aired his own views about LWT output and stuck to a management overview. For him a programme was a product that needed the right audience appeal and the right placing in order to attract the right revenue. He did occasionally express an opinion, such as a long and esoteric exchange of notes with the producer of Upstairs, Downstairs about whether or not butlers in Edwardian England wore moustaches.

  In June 1972, LWT moved from Wembley to a new building that became as celebrated as its chief executive. Kent House, as it is still known, occupies a site by the South Bank Centre on the Thames, the hub of the British media arts world. The facilities were state of the art; it was glossy and glamorous. Some called it Camelot. Keen to project this image, Freeman suggested that the new weekly arts programme presented by Melvyn Bragg should be called The South Bank Show.

  Freeman became worried about Cyril Bennett’s workload – ‘You may be interested that neither the Prime Minister nor the President of the United States carry your load of day-to-day detail’ – and urged him to delegate by appointing a head of light entertainment. Bennett had his eye on young Michael Grade, then running his father’s talent agency because Leslie Grade was convalescing in France after serious medical treatment. This required tact, not least because the three Grade brothers, Lew, Leslie and Bernard, were forces to be reckoned with throughout the British film and TV world. Freeman offered to visit him in France and ‘ask for his son’s hand in marriage’. This he did, to the surprise and pleasure of Leslie, who told his son he had respected Freeman for years. ‘Doesn’t that show the sheer class of the man!’ Ron Miller exclaimed to me. Michael Grade’s admiration for Freeman thereafter knew no bounds:

  Inspirational! He just had to turn up! It was enough to know he was in the building to feel safe. You felt his presence even when he wasn’t in the room. He had absolutely no enemies in the company. He had time for everybody, without being patronising.

  We all saw him as a quintessential English gentleman of his generation. He had immaculate manners and never displayed emotion: reserved and private, yes, but I don’t accept this ‘enigma’ description of John. His defining feature was a lack of ego. He had no need to impress anyone, and there was no point in flattering him. He was just John.

  He was of course very formidable. He was definitely not a man you would tell lies to.20

  Cyril Bennett’s next big appointment w
as the producer of The Frost Programme, John Birt, who came from Granada Television to beef up the current affairs output. Freeman said, ‘I became very high on him – he was extremely good news.’21 Birt was attracted to LWT because while it was now stable, indeed ‘on the up’, the exodus of talented programme makers in 1969 meant ‘it was still something of a greenfield site; in terms of current affairs the cupboard was bare’. Granada, on the other hand, ‘was stuffed with talent’. Birt started the mould-breaking Weekend World in 1972 and that was followed by The London Programme, both highly regarded by the serious-minded Brian Young, now director-general of the IBA.

  Freeman’s next task, in order reduce Cyril Bennett’s workload and to plan for his own succession, was to appoint a deputy. Although Brian Tesler was expecting to succeed Howard Thomas as managing director of Thames Television, there happened to be a break in his contract. Having ascertained that he could approach Tesler without impropriety, Freeman invited him over to his house in Kew. They walked round the garden, discovered they had a common birthday, a shared like of American crime fiction, and a dislike of Oxbridge intellectual snobbery; soon the deal was done. In May 1974, Tesler joined LWT as deputy chief executive on the understanding that he would succeed Freeman in two years if his probation worked out.