by Ray Connolly
A bachelor, he lives now in Chelsea in a small house which he went in for after a Sunday paper had paid him a phenomenal amount for his non-revelations of his years with Auntie. He’s quite convinced that no one bothered to read a word of it.
After working at the BBC through the great days of satire he moved to Columbia Pictures in the mid-sixties, and a couple of years later, having produced nothing, he became an independent producer. He now has a ‘very useful deal’ with the Robert Stigwood empire.
Were not his Frankie Howerd comedies a way of subsidising his venture into more serious films like National Health which he’s currently making at Woolwich, I asked.
‘Well, now, I’d hate to stop the Frankie Howerd things. The thing one used to enjoy so much on TW3 was the way one could translate current affairs material in vaudeville terms, and you could let red noses run riot around the political jokes.
‘National Health was a very successful play by Peter Nichols, which was performed originally by the National Theatre. I think it was the biggest success they’ve had. And it works on two levels — one is of the accurate portrayal of a hospital with bedpan humour and tragedy, and the other, a parallel in a fantasied story where doctors are acting out a kind of romantic Dr Kildare image of themselves. It’ll be interesting to see how effective it is as a film.’
But isn’t it an art movie?
‘Well I rather think Wardour Street are hoping that we’ll have our cake and eat it, if you see what I mean.’
After so much experience of the various forms of media, he’s extremely deft at dodging questions he doesn’t really want to answer — those concerning money, for instance. Is he rich, I want to know, but he backhands the query away and pleads innocence to any knowledge of such things as finance.
‘I leave all the money side to my partner in Virgin Films,’ (his major company) he announced, as though two gentlemen like us shouldn’t even be discussing such a subject. ‘Let’s just say I’m more comfortably off than I have been,’ he says. ‘Which is nice, because it means I can develop ideas and projects at a time when the large American film companies are reluctant to put up money for developments.
‘And besides I’ve never been very good at rogueage and vagabondage, and always been rather security minded. One always enjoyed the notion of having something to do with the theatre, but when I was younger I never thought I’d be able to achieve the trick of getting into it.’
He’s a very dapper man, even wearing a suit for breakfast. ‘In the army,’ he says, ‘they discovered that I had a size eleven bottom and a size four top, so one has to wear formal suits almost all the time. If I have a waist it’s somewhere up here’ — and he gesticulates to his mid ribs. ‘The other day I found I had a terrible headache and it wasn’t until I took my trousers off that I realised that it was because they were too tight.’
He delivers his lines in that deadpan manner of a Max Wall, so that one is never quite certain whether he’s being rude or not. And he is indeed a very curious shape, not unlike an enormous bale of hay, held loosely together round the middle with a length of binding twine. But then with a name like Ned Sherrin what would you expect?
POSTSCRIPT Witty and waspish Ned Sherrin is the BBC’s idea of an urbane, cultivated man-of-most trades, and can be regularly heard hosting those after-dinner conversations which Radio 4 broadcasts shortly after breakfast and around lunchtime. His writing partner Caryl Brahms died in 1982. Never one to shun self-publicity, Ned Sherrin recently published his autobiography titled A Small Thing Like An Earthquake.
october 1972
David Storey
There’s a kind of scrubbed puritanism about David Storey which traces itself directly back to his Yorkshire upbringing. ‘When I was eighteen I was accepted to read Geography at Reading University,’ he says. ‘But suddenly I saw the rest of my life ahead of me and it all seemed so morbidly predictable that it would lead only to being a retired school teacher. So I decided that I was going to be an artist. I thought that would be my salvation.’
He was wrong: writing was the salvation, and this month his fourth novel Pasmore was published. It is a moving, arid and sparse account of a crisis in the life of a man who has seemingly done everything expected of him and yet who finds himself on a kind of conveyer belt through life.
What struck me so forcibly was the way Storey identifies the cultural gap generated by parents who encourage their children to do well academically and professionally and then find that they can no longer communicate with them. At one very moving moment in the book the leading character’s father upbraids him with the lines: ‘I’d have done anything for you … you know that … if you’d cut me heart out you couldn’t have hurt me more…’
It must be a line that a lot of children can associate with their own family situations.
‘Well, it wasn’t so much my experience as a general experience that I found of children who are educated from the working class into the middle class. And I’ve always noticed in my contemporaries there’s a kind of duality of values — the working-class values which were rather puritanical which told them not to lift their noses from the grindstone, and the middle-class values which were much more circumspect.
‘The puritanism of the working class is work — manual work is good work, but mental work is somehow suspicious. And it seems that the working class educate their children for a class of society which they despise themselves. So you find a tremendous ambivalence.’
Storey’s own way out was to go to art college, and while he was there he signed on to play Rugby League with Wakefield Trinity. His signing-on fee was £1200 (a lot of money in Rugby League circles) with £400 down.
‘I agreed to play until I was thirty-two. It only involved two evenings training and the game on Saturday, so it was very good in that it allowed me to do other things at the same time. It was a strange situation to be living at home, a great hulking twelve and a half stone lad, and to see my dad come in from the pit absolutely shagged out — and looking as though he’d been in a concentration camp, while I was sitting there writing a poem or painting a picture.
‘I feel now that it’s deplorable that my dad was in the pit until he was sixty-four. The last seam he worked was only thirteen inches high. But I always felt my gun was spiked because when I started teaching in the East End, I earned the same for my first week’s work as he did for five-and-a half eight-hour shifts in the pit. And when I discovered what the dockers were getting in London, and what the newspaper technicians were getting, I was tremendously angry and in a way humiliated. I got a six-week holiday as a teacher, which to my dad seemed out of this world. It was something he always wanted his sons to have and yet I’m sure he despised it.’
There are three living Storey sons: an elder brother, trained as an educational psychiatrist, who still lives in Yorkshire, and a younger one who is now the vice-president of an American management agency.
After a year at Wakefield Art College David Storey won a scholarship to the Slade, but continued to play rugby, training at the university gym, and travelling up every weekend for the game. It wasn’t a particularly easy situation for him (Rugby League players have a rather suspicious attitude towards students and artists) and after a few years he packed it in, foregoing £800 of his signing-on fee.
He wrote his first published novel, This Sporting Life, while teaching in the East End. He’d written about eight before it, but this one was the first time he was really encouraged. All the same it was turned down fifteen times before being published.
‘I used to think to myself that if my dad could do an eight-hour shift down the pit then I could write for eight hours. And I suppose something of that is still with me.’
After This Sporting Life, for which he also wrote the screenplay, he had two further novels published. And then in the mid-sixties he began his ‘major novel’ which was to have been about 350,000 words long, but which, including massive re-writes and re-written re-writes, came to something like thr
ee and a half million words over a four-year period.
‘In the end I decided that it just wasn’t working. So I folded it in. It was too ambitious. Since then I’ve been extracting material from it which is making much shorter novels. Pasmore is one of them, and there’s another to be published next year which will be called A Temporary Life.
‘It’s rather like having a large painting that hasn’t worked and then doing smaller subsidiary pictures.’
What does he do with all the things he doesn’t finish?
‘Well,’ he says, ‘there’s a fireplace over there.’
Married with four children, Storey works from a large garden flat in Hampstead. He’s a quiet man, who moves about gently for his size, and speaks with the nicely measured tones of the West Riding.
He wrote his first play in 1958, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, during one school half-term, and then waited while it was turned down by the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare, most of the country’s principal original theatres, and twice both by the BBC and ITV. Eventually, the Royal Court had second thoughts and after transferring to the West End it won an Evening Standard award in 1967.
Did he never feel aggressive about so much rejection?
‘No,’ he said. ‘I think the work is obscure in some peculiar way. I suppose I felt irritated by both television channels turning me down twice. That was undignified.’ He hasn’t been turned down since by anyone, firstly because he hasn’t submitted any further plays for television and secondly he tends to reject his own material before submitting it.
Out of the success of his first play erupted several others, The Contractor, In Celebration and Home and a further play which is to be produced next year at the Court along with two newer ones.
‘I never had any tradition of going to the theatre before I wrote that first play. I suppose I had a working-class suspicion. But I like the Court. I’m on the artistic committee now, so I have to go. But I also go for enjoyment, too.’
He has not, he says, made a great deal of money out of his writing. Plays don’t make a lot unless they have an extended run in the West End or on Broadway and none of his has done that yet and novels rarely make much anyway. Admittedly, This Sporting Life was a critically successful film, but he knows for a fact that Tom Jones, the film, made more money at the London Pavilion alone than This Sporting Life did in the whole of the United Kingdom.
Wasn’t he ever tempted to knock off something commercial just for the money?
‘Well,’ he said in his quiet unhurried way, ‘it has occurred to me sometimes when I wake up in the night. But I know that when I sit down to it I just can’t write a word.’
POSTSCRIPT I cannot help suspecting that many of those millions of words David Storey claimed to have rejected might just possibly have turned up in his quarter of a million word long novel Saville, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1976. Although more sparing in his work in recent years, he kept up a prodigious output of plays between novels right through the early and mid-seventies, including The Changing Room, The Farm, Cromwell and Mother’s Day.
January 1973
David Bailey
If I were to make a television film which I wanted everyone to watch, I’d start off by carefully adding my ingredients of controversy.
Then, a few days before the film’s transmission, I’d give a few sneak previews to a selection of pressmen, read carefully and with some worry the comments of the intelligent television critics, and then allow my Machiavellian smile to stretch across my projected ratings as the silly Sunday papers threw up their inevitable headlines in horror — in between the inevitable bums and tits, that is. (Sorry if my language is contrary to good taste or likely to be offensive.)
I think that might be as far as I could reasonably expect my campaign to go, because it really would be too much like a marvellous dream if, in the name of some people’s ideas of decency, some worthy citizen took up cudgels against my little film … and managed to not only stop it being broadcast, but also to make it the talking point of the week, and possibly a test case in the question of television censorship.
This week a film about the famous Andy Warhol, by the equally famous David Bailey, was kept off our television screens because of some very clever thinking by the suddenly famous Mr Ross McWhirter.
Now, not even as cynical a man as I, could even begin to believe that Bailey could have baited so brilliant a trap for any one of the ever-increasing soldiers for the protection of public taste, but when I saw him I could not resist the temptation to tease him with the notion that he’d planned the whole thing to get his name back into the headlines.
‘No, I’m sorry I can’t give you a good story of how I planned it all,’ he said. ‘I’m not that clever, although I must be honest with you and say that it did cross my mind.’
He was talking in between sessions in the Vogue studios where he’s working at present.
‘Actually when I heard what had happened I was furious, but now it seems silly to be furious over something so stupid. Really I was a bit embarrassed when I saw the papers and all the headlines, and I know that when the film is shown (and he feels pretty sure that it will be screened) a lot of people are going to knock it.
‘I think all these do-gooders ought to go and protest about old age pensioners not being able to afford bus fares or something like that, rather than something as unimportant as my film.’
Why had he chosen to make a film about Warhol, I asked.
‘Well, why anything? Why ‘Coronation Street’? I’d known Andy for quite a while, and I thought a film on him would entertain people, amuse them and maybe teach them something. But mainly I wanted to entertain. We made the film in February last year, and it never entered my head until Tuesday that it might be banned.
‘You just can’t make a film about Andy without having a few transvestites. It would be like making a film about a jockey without having a bloody horse in the show. I think you’re very naïve if you get offended by something like my film.’
The Andy Warhol film is his second documentary for ATV — following one on Cecil Beaton, and preceding another on Visconti. He says he genuinely likes Warhol. ‘He’s great. It’s very difficult not to like him. He generates energy and passes it on to other people. He doesn’t seem to do anything himself — well, he doesn’t do anything, he just gets other people to do things.
‘Now I’m going to publish a book with pictures and a transcription of the interviews with him.’
I asked him what he thought of the film himself. ‘Well, I think it’s a kind of anti-documentary. It’s the sort of film that almost anybody could do, which is quite nice.
‘I’m not an intellectual, and I don’t pretend to be a pseudo-intellectual. But I don’t see why I can’t do a film just because I’m not an intellectual. Everybody should be able to do a film if they want to. There are primitive painters so why shouldn’t there be primitive documentary makers? I like people who do things, doers, not thinkers. I think it’s marvellous that people take holiday snapshots, because they’re actually doing something.
‘It seems to me, though, that people are always a bit annoyed if you do something in this country. It’s not the same in America. There they love success. Here they build you up just to knock you down.’
At the moment, however, he’s a little involved in a little to-do in America quite apart from the Andy Warhol episode, where some photographs he took of rock star Alice Cooper, with a baby and a million dollars, have run foul of the Treasury Division of the Secret Service.
Apparently, taking colour pictures of dollar bills is contrary to Public Law No. 8592.190353, and the album for which the pictures were intended is being held back while the American legal process gets to work.
‘It was very funny when we were taking the pictures. We had to fly in a million dollars from the States and these armed guards came to look after it. We were just throwing it up in the air and they were really freaking out at first, but later on they joine
d in, too.’
He talks for a great deal of the time in a half joking, slightly self-deprecating way, as though he’s quite enjoying the whole drama of the moment. Was he pleased to be back in the headlines, I asked.
No, he said, he’d hardly read the papers.
Didn’t he get a kick out of causing controversy, as he did on the occasion he used a naughty word on an Eamonn Andrews show years ago?
‘No. I was stupid then. I was just being childish and silly, and I was drunk anyway.’
Now approaching his mid-thirties, he’s a likeable, easy-going bloke, and it’s hard to remember that together with Donovan and Duffy, he transformed the concept of photography in this country ten years ago.
‘Before Bailey, if someone had wanted to be a photographer they would probably have joined the local newspaper,’ a younger photographer explained while I was watching Bailey work. ‘Now every art college in the country has a photographic department and two thousand kids graduate from them every year.’
But still a great deal of the best work is being done by the old guard of the sixties. After all these years Bailey is still working for Vogue. Why hasn’t a new generation come and pushed aside the old one?
‘Well, technically, we know a lot,’ says Bailey. ‘A lot of these kids coming out of college seem to have a mental block about photography. They come and say that such and such a picture isn’t very good because it’s out of focus, but I say that doesn’t matter if it looks good. And also I’m a professional. A lot of people are what I call camera holders, not photographers. I’m professional. If I get a rubbishy dress to photograph I don’t say I won’t do it. I say “Well, that’s a rubbishy dress, let’s try to make it look better” — although it’ll never be a great picture.
‘And then I do like women very much, and a girl knows that if she works with me then she’s going to look good, which gives her confidence. The girl’s the most important thing in a fashion picture because if the girl doesn’t look good, the garment won’t look good.’
