Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

Since he transferred from the BBC to LWT a month ago, Simon Dee has been feeling increasingly unwanted. ‘I found myself not where I wanted to be, not on the television network I wanted, not on the day that I wanted, not with the guests that I wanted ... and in a general state of mental decay.’

  His BBC show, Dee Time, first broadcast in April 1967, made him one of the most famous men in Britain. Originally spotted when starring in an advertisement for Smith’s Crisps, for three years he embodied the sixties dream, hosting his own chat show (‘It’s Siiiiiiimon Deeeee!’), dashing up and down the King’s Road in an Aston Martin, hosting the Miss World competition, presenting an award to the Beatles and numbering Michael Caine (‘Mike’) and Roger Moore (‘Rog’) among his famous friends. Every Saturday evening, up to eighteen million viewers regularly tuned in to Dee Time.

  But as his fame grew, so too did his sense of entitlement. He became more and more difficult with his colleagues, his bosses, his studio audiences. Before long, he insisted on choosing his guests, and threatened to walk out whenever he didn’t get his way. When the time came to renew his contract, he strode into the office of the Head of BBC Light Entertainment and demanded more money. But Billy Cotton called his bluff, offering him 20 per cent less ‘to test his loyalty’.

  He failed the test, and left for London Weekend Television, but the audience for his new show – transmitted at 11 p.m. on Sunday nights – rarely reaches a million. He is unhappy and increasingly paranoid. He has always been prone to constructing clandestine explanations for humdrum events, but his sense of a conspiracy is escalating. He complains that he has spotted men in black hunched behind hedgerows, taking photographs of him; he is also convinced his telephone is bugged. Some blame his paranoia on marijuana, but he argues that, on the contrary, it is marijuana that keeps him sane.

  Dee greets his first guest in the green room. (Oddly enough, Dee too auditioned for James Bond; he tells friends he was rejected simply because he was too tall.) His first impression of Lazenby is that he looks nothing like he did as James Bond; he now sports a beard and long hair, and is dressed like a cowboy. But, ever the pro, Dee masks his surprise.

  The interview begins very slowly. Lazenby is perhaps a little distant, but Dee sees no real cause for alarm. Then, out of nowhere, Lazenby dips into his pocket, pulls out a piece of paper, turns to the camera and shouts: ‘I would like to draw everybody’s attention to the fact that the following senators were involved in a plot to kill President Kennedy!’

  He starts reciting a long list of names. Dee attempts to steer the interview onto another topic by bringing in Diana Rigg. ‘That’s very interesting, George. What does Diana make of all that then? Isn’t she lovely!’

  But Lazenby is furious at the interruption, and continues to read his list of murderous senators in a louder and louder voice. An enthusiast for conspiracies, Dee nevertheless realises that naming individual senators as conspirators in a presidential assassination is taking things too far. Across Lazenby’s shoulder, he sees the studio floor manager making furious ‘wind up’ signals to him, but Lazenby proves unstoppable.

  Dee attempts to distance himself from Lazenby’s rants by saying, ‘I really don’t know anything about this subject, folks,’ and finally says, ‘Fascinating stuff, George. Thank you. And we’ll be talking to two more fascinating people, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in just two minutes!’ This is the signal for an advertising break.

  The show is recorded a few hours before transmission, so Dee imagines that any offending passages will be edited out. But for some reason they are not. On Monday morning, the newspapers are full of it.

  Dee is summoned by Stella Richman, Managing Director of LWT. ‘Who said you could talk about Kennedy?’

  ‘I didn’t talk about Kennedy. Lazenby did, and it happens to be his right as a guest to talk about anything he likes.’

  Richman behaves, in Dee’s opinion, ‘like some demented puppet’, accusing him of plotting the incident. ‘If you ever mention Kennedy on air again I shall tear up your contract. Now leave!’

  Dee is affronted. ‘It really was an amazing moment. Here was this female terrier telling me that she had the right to tell me who I could or couldn’t book on my show and what I was supposed to say to them! And if I disagreed with her then I was out of a job!’

  The incident fuels Dee’s already highly developed sense of conspiracy. Has he fallen into a carefully laid trap? Conspiracy piles upon conspiracy: he suspects Lazenby was put up to it by his old enemy Ronan O’Rahilly, who also talked Lazenby out of renewing his James Bond contract (‘All that Bond stuff’s on the wane, man. Look at Easy Rider and things, that’s the way to go’).

  But Dee remains bullish. ‘I don’t give a damn. Last night, for this so-called disastrous programme, I had the highest viewing figures ever for a Sunday-night show. I’m supposed to feel ashamed of that? ... So George made a fool of himself, not me. He died the death, baby, not me! It doesn’t worry me, baby! I’m running my show, not anybody else.’

  It is the beginning of the end for both host and guest. Soon afterwards, it is announced that this first series of The Simon Dee Show on LWT will also be the last.164 Dee blames this on his opposition to Britain entering the EEC.

  SIMON DEE

  TALKS OF HEAVEN AND HELL WITH

  MICHAEL RAMSEY

  Studio 5B, London Weekend Television

  June 5th 1970

  The meteoric career of Simon Dee, King of the Chat Show, is on the point of disintegration. Over the past few months he has rubbed everyone up the wrong way.165 His paranoia has produced the enemies of which he had once only dreamed.

  Tonight’s show is to be his last. The only remaining topic for discussion is his severance pay. ‘The company is in no mood to be generous with compensation,’ reports the Sunday Telegraph.

  Dee casts around for explanations of his downfall beyond his opposition to Britain’s entry into the Common Market, and finds one in the looming presence of his rival chat-show host, David Frost: Frost on Sunday is broadcast in the prime evening slot of 7.25, whereas The Simon Dee Show goes out much later, and at no set time. Dee’s guests are seldom advertised in advance, whereas Frost’s always are. Moreover, Frost is given the heavyweight guests, while Dee has to make do with novelty acts: one of his recent shows featured Vincent Price poaching a haddock in a dishwasher.

  Whenever Dee tries to make his show more interesting, he always seems to slip up. He detects David Frost’s fingerprints on every banana skin. ‘I think he may have been rather worried that I might be better at it than he was. That he’d be beaten at his own game. Of course, he wasn’t about to allow that.’ Frost is a director of LWT, while Dee is the new boy, given his slot only after having fallen out with the BBC. When the two men pass each other in the corridor, no one ever sees them speak.

  On screen, Dee remains as easy-going as ever, the epitome of Sixties Casual. But his end is nigh. Off screen he is more tense and difficult than ever. Only for his very last show is he permitted the sort of heavyweight guest he claims always to have wanted: the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Dr Ramsey and Simon Dee sit opposite each other in leather armchairs, Ramsey in his purple cassock, Dee in his electric-blue suit with matching silk cravat. To the viewers, it looks like a clash between ancient and modern: the venerable Establishment figure, a devoted advocate of silence,166 versus the slick and with-it young chat-show host.

  And so, for the first few minutes of their conversation, it seems. Dee tries to get Ramsey onto the subject of sex, and succeeds. Ramsey says that he regrets ‘the modern obsession, concentration and attention on nudity and sex. There’s a kind of openness and frankness that is good and wholesome. But it’s absolutely wrong and unnecessary to have this obsession.’

  But when Dee decides to quiz him on other aspects of the permissive society, Ramsey shows himself more in tune with the times than Dee expected, and praises elements of the hippy culture. Dee questions him about ‘the people who want peace, and because o
f their behaviour, and the fact that they don’t fit into any particular slot, are rejected’. But Ramsey comes out in support of the counter-culture: ‘The people are fed up with our civilisation, and the rot that’s in it. They try to escape from it by going into another world.’

  Dee affects surprise at these opinions, but Ramsey has, in fact, always been a liberal. Ten years ago, he defined the ‘three outstanding moral issues’ as the urgent need for disarmament, for radical changes in race relations, and for rich countries to help the poor. In the House of Lords, he has voted for liberalising the laws against homosexuality. He has called for military action against the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia, and was a vociferous critic of General Pinochet in Chile. In 1967, when the proprietor of Time magazine made a jingoistic remark about the Vietnam war in his presence, Ramsey was outraged by his lack of compassion for suffering innocents, and showed him the door.167

  Dee asks what he imagines to be a ‘cheeky’ question. ‘A colleague of yours in the Anglican Church, another bishop, was recently quoted as saying that he imagined heaven to be the kind of place where Mozart is permanently being played in the background by a kind of otherworldly orchestra and that delicious foie gras is permanently available on tap. Do you agree with him? Is that your vision of heaven too?’

  Some of the team consider this a marvellously irreverent question. ‘You should have seen the look on Ramsey’s face!’ says one. ‘He just wasn’t expecting to be asked that!’

  In fact, Ramsey has a profound belief in heaven, enriched by his deep knowledge not only of Western Christianity – he was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge – but also of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. If there is a look of astonishment on Ramsey’s face, it is probably at the glibness of the question. ‘He bubbled with ecstasy over the beatific vision. He had a real sense of joining with angels and archangels here and now in worship,’ comments someone who hears him talk of heaven.

  The Archbishop’s definition of hell is simple. ‘Hell,’ he says, ‘is stewing in one’s own juice.’ As it turns out, this is to be Dee’s occupation for the next thirty-nine years.

  A month after the show is broadcast, a courier from LWT arrives at Dee’s Chelsea house with a briefcase containing £9,000, the remainder of what he is owed. ‘And that was it, more or less. I sort of died after that. It was the end of me.’168

  Simon Dee is not seen on British television for another thirty-three years. In 2003, when Channel 4 offers him a one-off special, he suggests they invite some of his famous friends from the sixties. But they all refuse. ‘Did you tell him that it was me, that it was my big comeback show?’ he asks. The answer is yes. Dee says nothing, but looks disappointed.

  Brewer’s Dictionary of Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics defines ‘Simon Dee Syndrome’ as applying to ‘someone who is remembered for having been forgotten’.

  MICHAEL RAMSEY

  IS PUNISHED BY

  GEOFFREY FISHER

  The Headmaster’s Study, Repton School, Derbyshire

  May 1919

  Michael Ramsey is unhappy at prep school. ‘I never were more utterly miserable,’ he writes to his mother in a letter home dated ‘Tuesday Evening just after tea’. ‘... I cannot bear it any longer ... I am just crying like anythinke. Come at once never mind anything else. I am utterly miserable.’

  In 1918 he wins a scholarship to Repton, where, preferring books to sport, he is only a little more cheerful, and remains an outsider. His headmaster – distant, forceful, coolly efficient – is a young clergyman called Geoffrey Fisher. Ramsey nicknames him ‘the little snipe’. In turn, Fisher marks Ramsey down as eccentric, bookish and scruffy; he notes with disapproval his habit of endlessly hitching up his trousers with his elbows.

  As Ramsey grows older, he discovers a talent for debating, and develops an interest in politics. Like his parents, who voted Labour in the 1918 general election, he has a horror of jingoism and militarism; aged fifteen, he energetically opposes a debating motion to send British troops to fight Bolshevism in Russia. But he goes too far; when an assistant master speaks in support of the motion, Ramsey turns on him, and is excessively caustic, a punishable offence. There follows what Ramsey calls ‘some unpleasantness’: he is told to report to Geoffrey Fisher, who makes him learn and recite fifty lines of Greek from the play Medea.

  He soon gets into further trouble for refusing to parade with the Officer Training Corps. He then enters into a battle of wills with Fisher – a battle which, perhaps surprisingly, he wins. Finding a loophole in the school rules, the pupil forces the headmaster to admit that military training cannot be regarded as compulsory, and, armed with a letter of support from his father, he is excused. When he leaves Repton at the end of 1922, his final report from Fisher is notably grudging in its praise: ‘A boy with force of character who, in spite of certain uncouthnesses, has done good service on his own lines.’

  Michael Ramsey goes into the Church, and swiftly gains promotion. The paths of the two men cross again when Fisher, now Bishop of Chester, agrees to take Ramsey on as his examining chaplain. For his part, Ramsey never quite manages to shake off his fear of his old headmaster. The two men are very different: Fisher, a leading Freemason, is brisk, efficient, bossy, conservative, a stickler for correct dress, and a keen advocate of gaiters at Matins; Ramsey is dreamy, liberal,169 humorous, vague, scholarly, easily bored,170 with a tendency to walk around with his shoelaces undone.

  In 1945, Fisher is appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding another old Repton headmaster, William Temple. When the time comes for his own retirement, Fisher considers his former pupil entirely unsuited to succeed him, and advises the Prime Minister accordingly. ‘Dr F is violently, even brutally opposed to Dr Ramsey,’ notes Harold Macmillan in his diary.

  Ramsey delights in telling friends the story. ‘He said, “Oh, Prime Minister, I shall be retiring shortly, and I don’t think the Archbishop of York, Dr Ramsey, would be entirely suitable as my successor.” And Macmillan asked, “Why is that?” So Fisher said, “He was a boy under me at Repton, and I don’t think he’d be very suitable.” So Macmillan said, “Oh, Dr Ramsey would be suitable.” And Fisher said, “Dr Coggan, the Bishop of Bradford, would be very suitable.” So Macmillan said, “Well, Archbishop, you may have been Michael Ramsey’s headmaster, but you’re not mine, and I intend to appoint Dr Ramsey. Good afternoon.”’171

  Michael Ramsey is duly installed as Archbishop of Canterbury. His relationship with the retired Fisher remains prickly. When Fisher accepts a peerage, Ramsey, a great one for nicknames, dubs him ‘the Baron’. In turn, Fisher refuses to go quietly into retirement. He insists that he still be addressed as ‘Your Grace’, and from his new home in Trent, Dorset, floods Lambeth Palace with letters complaining about his successor’s decisions.

  ‘The Trent postmark always fills me with a feeling of doom,’ Ramsey confides to friends, claiming that Fisher’s letters always go straight into the wastepaper basket. A humorous man, he likes to picture Lady Fisher running down the street after her husband, trying to prevent him reaching the pillarbox. ‘Yes, she tried to stop him. She used to run after him down the street, but all to no avail!’

  When the new Archbishop of Canterbury returns one day from modelling for his waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s, his staff find him extremely cheerful. ‘They ran out of wax and had to melt down Geoffrey Fisher!’ he exclaims jubilantly.

  In 1974, when the time comes for his own retirement, Ramsey makes a witty speech at a dinner in his honour at New College. In it, he tells of a recent dream: he was in heaven, at a sherry party thrown for all the former Archbishops of Canterbury. One by one, they came up to talk to him. He met and embraced Anselm, the eleventh-century Archbishop, warming to him as a man who is ‘primarily a don, who tried to say his prayers, and who cared nothing for the pomp and glory of his position. And just as Anselm and I seemed to be getting on so well together, who should come up to us but the Baron. “Now then, boys,” said Fisher, “time to get back to work!
”’

  Yet his reveries about Fisher, though comical, operate as a form of defence, and spring from schoolboy fears. Secretaries at Lambeth Palace report that whenever one of Fisher’s stern letters of admonishment arrives in his in-tray, Fisher goes into a tailspin of agony, and is unable to make any decisions for the rest of the day. Sometimes they try to hide the letters from him. Years later, when Robert Runcie is Archbishop of Canterbury, he is told by officials at Lambeth Palace that they finally hid an Epstein bust of Fisher ‘because Michael trembled like a leaf every time he saw it’.

  GEOFFREY FISHER

  IS PHOTOGRAPHED BY

  ROALD DAHL

  Repton School, Derbyshire

  Summer 1931

  Geoffrey Fisher is in retirement in Dorset when he is contacted by one of his most illustrious old pupils from Repton, Roald Dahl. Less than a month ago, Dahl’s seven-year-old daughter Olivia died suddenly of encephalitis; Dahl is distraught, and needs consoling.

  Fisher invites Dahl down, and the two men talk. What passes between them? We have only Dahl’s account to go by. Apparently, Fisher tells him that Olivia is in heaven. But for Dahl, this is not enough. He wants to know that her dog, Rowley, will join her there when he dies, but Fisher refuses to give him this assurance.

  ‘His whole face closed up,’ Dahl tells his other children, eight years later. ‘I wanted to ask him how he could be so absolutely sure that other creatures did not get the same special treatment as us, but the look of disapproval that had settled around his mouth stopped me. I sat there wondering if this great and famous churchman really knew what he was talking about and whether he knew anything at all about God or heaven, and if he didn’t, then who in the world did? And from that moment on, my darlings, I’m afraid I began to wonder whether there really was a God or not.’