by Ray Connolly
‘Did you ever get drafted?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes. I arrived for my physical one morning in 1963 and they had us there naked. And we were all told to bend over and spread our cheeks. And I told the doctor there that if he touched me I’d shove my heel down his throat. He sent me to the psychiatrist, who began saying some derogatory things about my mother and my family, which meant, I suppose, that he was trying to plumb the depths of my neurosis.
‘So I got up and walked out, still naked. And walked out into the street, and across to the parking lot to get my car. And this little Marine comes after me and puts a coat around me, and I say don’t touch me or I’ll kill you, I’m a civilian. I was classified 1-Y which means that they should re-examine me every year but they never did.’
And now with two children (’that I know of), Brigitte Jane Fonda, aged seven, and Justin de Villers Fonda, five, he’s exempt from military service.
Having just finished his new film Idaho Transfer, a film about ecology, he now intends to make a picture called Earth, all about the place we live in. The trouble is he wants to show it for nothing, and to take some pictures from outer space of the planet earth …
POSTSCRIPT When one re-reads Peter Fonda’s account of how he and Dennis Hopper rampaged through Universal Studios, it perhaps isn’t too surprising that his film career has been somewhat patchy during the past decade. Captain America was a creation of the sixties, and Fonda caught perfectly the tone of angry youth which followed the campus riots of 1968. How much of what he said in this interview was unembellished by exaggeration I have no way of knowing. But my tongue was certainly in my ear, if you know what I mean.
March 1971
Michael Parkinson
To really appreciate Michael Parkinson to the fullest I think it helps if you’re from the north. A few years ago, when I was working on a Liverpool paper, he was producing and performing in an early evening local programme for Granada called Scene, which had all the equivalent competition beaten into a cocked hat for out-and-out bolshieness, creativity and ability to identify with the area served. It was great television.
Since then he’s moved on to more grandiose and more varied things, and now they know him in restaurants in London, too. But it’s still in the north where his base lies — and he leans on it like a staff.
Not for him the refined cyclical chatter of Television Centre, or the small talk and olives of the cocktail party circuit. He’s like a chiselled, craggy bit of grit, with a face that you can smile at because you know he’s one of us, and isn’t going to get all snooty.
Going to see a football match with him in the north is a bit like going with a filmstar, they tell me, because he’s so famous; and travelling up on the Pullman to Manchester in his company is like being with the son of the train driver. Porters, guards, barmen — the lot, they all know him, not in the pussy-footing way people get when they’re on barely familiar terms with well-known but unapproachable faces, but in the nod and a wave way that says that there’s no need for any ingratiation around Mike Parkinson. Granadaland stays close and faithful to its personalities.
Parkinson is, of course, also very well known throughout the rest of the country, mainly for his work with 24 Hours, his column in the Sunday Times and his excellent two years presenting Cinema on ITV which recently ended. But in June he sets out to conquer a particularly treacherous field of television — the late night chat show, which, while frequently making fascinating viewing, has a rather nasty knack of roasting its hosts. (Say goodnight Simon, Peter …)
Undaunted by the failures of others in this field, Parkinson thinks he can make a go of it. I’m certain he will.
He is, in the eyes of his father at least, first and foremost a Yorkshireman. Born in Barnsley, where his dad was a miner, (’I was probably conceived on the back row of the local cinema, which accounts for my love of the movies,’ he says) he was an only child who passed the scholarship and went to the local grammar school. There he learned to smoke and play cricket but he emerged at fifteen without much to show for himself academically. (‘More education would have ruined a fine mind,’ he says.)
‘They were rough old days when I was a lad, and my father still tells me tales of how for about three years he only ever saw me in bed because he was working down the pit from about four in the morning until nine at night. And for that he got paid hardly anything.
‘They gave him a certificate when he retired, of course, saying, “Thank you for getting dust on your lungs and coughing your bloody heart out for us for the last fifty years and getting silicosis.” Everybody who worked in the pits that long got that, of course. You just thank God he came out in one piece.
‘But my father challenged the system. I was from a generation that always followed their dads down the pit, but when I was about thirteen or fourteen he took me down to see what it was like, and he didn’t give me a Cook’s tour of white-washed corridors that you got when they took you from school. I went on the really hairy one where you’re crawling on your bloody hands and knees. And at the end of it he said: “Well, what d’you think?” and I said: “You wouldn’t get me down there for a hundred quid a shift.” And he said: “You’re right.”
‘It’s an obscene life for anyone. But he’s a great old man. He retired to live down here near us. (The Parksinsons live at Windsor.) There’s no point in retiring to a bloody pit village in the north. I mean, Christ — someone wrote in your paper that up there even the sparrows fly backwards to avoid getting dirt in their eyes.’
He always wanted to be a reporter so he joined the local paper for twenty-four shillings a week (ten shillings of which he gave back to the company for the privilege of working for them under the indenture system), but he reckons he stayed too long and was only saved by National Service, where he quickly learned that the best way to survive was to make the army work for him.
‘I did very well really. I was one of the two youngest captains in the British Army (the other now works for the Daily Express). I did journalism, was a press officer, had a flat in London, was billeted in a pub in Salisbury and went on the Suez operation, where I never fired a shot in anger. I reckoned the best thing to do was just to keep smiling and winking at the wogs. I was strictly a non-fighting soldier.’
On being demobbed he was offered his old job back at £3 2s 6d. a week, which compared badly with the £18 a week, everything found, he’d been picking up with the army, so he turned it down and worked nights for three months in a bottle factory along with two hundred women. ‘That was very instructive,’ he reckons.
Eventually, he moved back into papers from the Barnsley Chronicle, to the Guardian, to the Daily Express in London and then to Town and Topic magazines. He says, half jokingly, that he reckons that if he keeps moving fast enough they never find out about his weaknesses, but the truth is more likely that he’s an opportunist who wants to learn his craft thoroughly. ‘I’ve been in newspapers for twenty years now,’ he says. ‘You get a medal or an inscribed watch after twenty-five years, don’t you?’ He’s thirty-five.
It was while he was working in Manchester for the Guardian as a young man of twenty-four that he met his wife, Mary. He was on the top deck of a bus on the way to cover a council meeting in Doncaster when she got on and sat at the front. As he’d always been a bit shy about approaching girls he gave the chap he was with five bob to go and chat her up. It turned out she was a teacher who was going to the same building as they were to give keep-fit lessons to a group of fat ladies, and they got off with each other there and then.
A short time later they were married, and now have three sons, all aspirant footballers. ‘When you consider the number of failing and broken marriages that surround me in television I think we’re very lucky,’ he says. ‘My circumstances have changed beyond all recognition, and Mary has taken it — if not in her stride, no one could — but certainly comfortably. I can see that it must be hard for her sometimes when she thinks what a glamorous life I must be having.’
‘Then one night about a week before the baby was due I got a phone call from my father, and I quote him verbatim here. He just said: “Job’s done.” So I said: “What job’s that?” and he said: “I’ve got mother and child.” So I said: “What mother and child?” and he said: “I’ve got your Mary and put her into a nursing home at Wakefield.” So I said: “What on earth have you done that for?” and he said: “Well, suppose it’s a boy, if it’s born in Lancashire it can’t play for Yorkshire at cricket!”
‘What he failed to tell me was that it was a private nursing home and I had to fork out a hundred and fifty quid for use of forceps and all that nonsense.
‘Cricket’s always been his passion. He still thinks I’m a failure because I didn’t play for Yorkshire. I got a trial but I wasn’t good enough for them, and although I was offered terms by Hampshire, I was arrogant enough in those days to think if I couldn’t play for Yorkshire I didn’t want to play for anyone’
It was in the early sixties when Topic folded that he moved into television, at first as a producer of documentaries, local news and review programmes, then on educational work and finally into World in Action. And it was after a particularly hazardous spell in Cyprus and Zanzibar (’they locked me in a bar for forty-eight hours and then drove me twice around the cemetery before putting me on a British survey ship. I was drunk and terrified’) that he got his chance when, after being accidentally interviewed by ITN, his boss back in Manchester decided to make him a performer as well as a producer.
It is his ability to produce as well as perform which makes him so valuable. On Cinema he was given total freedom to choose his own subjects, film clips and to write his own scripts, and it is his all-round knowledge of the job which he thinks will help him to succeed in his own programme.
‘You know, all that about the mystique of performing is a load of muck,’ he scoffed. ‘I could go out into the street and take virtually the first half-dozen people I’d meet and turn them into performers. It’s a technique — like film acting. Most film actors couldn’t act their way out of a rice pudding.’
He appears a man of indefatigable energy. As a freelance producer/performer he operates in several different directions at the same time, a programme here, a column or article there, has found time to write two books on football and one on cricket and is writing a fourth, a big, lavish coffee table production on the history of the cinema Western. Novels don’t appeal to him. He thinks he’s frightened of finding out that he couldn’t do it.
‘I can’t understand those people who work at the gas works until 7 o’clock, go home, have their bread pudding and then go upstairs tapping it out until twelve,’ he says.
He does hope, however, to write a screenplay and has an idea that he’s working on at present. Yes, eventually he’d like to work less for more money.
About money he feels no shame in asking for what he thinks he’s worth, and consequently he’s doing pretty well.
‘It’s not that I like money, it’s just that I don’t like being exploited. And I’ve learned over the years that nobody ever pays you what you’re worth,’ he says.
POSTSCRIPT At least I sometimes got things right. As we all know now Parkinson went on to become synonymous with the British chat show, doing eleven years in all at the BBC as well as exporting his blunt Northern style (much parodied as the years went by) to Australia. Mary wasn’t to be patronised either and became a television presenter herself with an afternoon programme from Thames. At the time of writing they are regularly to be seen performing a husband and wife double act on TV-AM, the only successes of the new station. Parkinson is now vastly rich and has a large share in a publishing company, which publishes anthologies of articles written by fellow northerners he knew before he became one of the most famous faces in Britain.
November 1971
Garnett And Loach
Tony Gamett and Ken Loach are like two provocative fists in a spiked glove, poking and pricking at society’s blindnesses and complacencies. They make films about waste, the waste of human beings, their minds and their talents and their hopes. They made Kes, and looked at the hopeless dead ends facing a boy in a secondary modern school. They also made Cathy Come Home.
Last week their latest film, Family Life, was shown at the London Film Festival. This time they’ve turned their attention on the wastelands of Britain’s mental hospitals in a harrowing story of a young girl driven into madness by a system which is concerned only with curing what are judged to be the symptoms of her sickness.
When it opens to the general public at the Academy in January, I shall be surprised if it does not meet with angry protest from some branches of the National Health Service. It is certain to become a major talking point.
‘One of the main reasons for making a film like this is to generate discussion,’ says producer Tony Garnett. ‘And the most we can hope for is that schizophrenia does become a subject for public discussion.’
Briefly the story of Family Life is of a girl not strong enough to stand up to the demands for conformity made upon her by her family. Disturbed by her behaviour, they consult their GP and she is admitted to the experimental ward of a large mental hospital where the psychiatrist in charge follows the R.D. Laing line of not assuming schizophrenia to be a biochemical or neurophysiological fact, but works on the assumption that it might be a symptom of social distress within the family.
That particular psychiatrist is, however, removed and the girl is introduced into the main body of the hospital and to the use of electro-convulsive therapy, the treatment preferred by some of those who believe schizophrenia to be primarily of a physical nature.
Playing the role of devil’s advocate, I put it to Locah and Garnett that the girl’s experiences in the care of the National Health Service after the departure of the Laingite psychiatrist were exaggerated: ‘that they really couldn’t be so unsympathetic as not to even bother to ask her any more questions about herself’.
‘But great sympathy was shown in the film,’ said Garnett. ‘Within difficult circumstances and terribly low budget allocations most of the staff are trying to do their best under tremendous strain and overwork. There are no villains in that sense. We don’t show nurses who ill-treat or doctors who don’t want to know. It isn’t a matter of ill-treatment but of attitudes towards patients. And it’s still true that it’s normal for treatment to start from the most perfunctory of diagnostic interviews.
‘How else can it be otherwise with that many people being referred and those few people there to help them?’
Says Loach: ‘In all fairness, the film does show that there are a number of different points of view within the National Health Service. We do not hint that there are a whole range of graduations of opinion but we thought it would be more useful and more profitable in terms of the discussion to see two diametrically opposed positions.’
Ken Loach, the director of the two, has a slightly donnish, more gentle manner than his colleague. Garnett is tremendously articulate, aggressive, nervous and dogmatic. Both from working-class backgrounds in the Midlands they met when Loach cast Garnett in a play for the BBC.
They began their careers as actors (Loach with a degree in law from Oxford and Garnett having taken psychology at University College, London) but moved over to production at the BBC. Garnett thinks he wasn’t very good as an actor; Loach applied to become an assistant director when he found that he couldn’t get work acting and was spending most of his time as a supply teacher.
They began to work together on a regular basis when Garnett produced the Wednesday Play and Loach directed Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction. After Garnett formed Kestrel Films they teamed up again for the cinema to make Kes and The Bo
dy, before turning to Family Life.
Of their working relationship Garnett says: ‘We’re not married to each other, you know. There’s no automatic assumption that we will work together. It just happens that we have done on a few things, and will be doing on some other things because we get on well and want to do the same kind of subjects. But if he suddenly became a Tory, or I did, that would be the end.’
All of their films are heavy with social implications, but my suggestion that they might have some crusading zeal met with a scant four-letter brush-off from Garnett.
Says Loach: ‘I don’t think people exist outside of their social situation. You can’t abstract people from their environment. It always baffles me when people ask why I don’t direct a comedy or a thriller. I think they would be much more artificial fields in which to work. The great expanse of people is really very interesting.’
Now they want to work both for the cinema and television. They like particularly the fact that television has such an enormous audience, and since it is seen by so many people at once, it is possible to make a statement which immediately becomes something of a national event.
Family Life is based upon a play by David Mercer which they made when they were working for the BBC. When it was shown in 1967 there was a considerable clash of expert opinion.
They see the whole question of mental health in the context of politics and economics: ‘It is,’ says Garnett, ‘a question of what society wants. And I think it’s very unhelpful for psychiatrists to be classed in the role of “mind police”, which is what they are.
‘If you behave in a way which is inconvenient to others — and the range of behaviour which is tolerated in society is getting narrower and narrower — then the “mind police” are brought in, your crime is diagnosed and you’re given a sentence which is called “insight”, and then the sooner you learn how to behave acceptably again, the sooner you’re called “cured”, and the sooner you can get back to work, can’t you? Because that’s what it’s all about — productivity.
