I bought this BBC box set almost three years ago after I watched a few of the interviews staying with friends in France. It was when I stopped using shampoo.
Robert and I went back to London via Agen and Bordeaux where I had my hair cut and resolved to stop using shampoo. It has been a success, but I do rinse my hair daily under a shower. Back to Face to Face presented by John Freeman between 1959 and 1962. First a bit about John Freeman; not your usual vapid, chataholic, media stereotype. Born in 1915, went to Westminster and Brasenose, enlisted in the Coldstream Guards in the war. Then, 1945-1955 served as Labour MP for Watford. He was our High Commissioner in India, our ambassador to the United States and Chairman of London Weekend Television, among many other rather distinguished jobs, any one of which would be career-defining for most of us.
Unlike chat-show hosts of today he eschewed the camera in his interviews. You see only the back of his head while the cameras focus on his interviewees. There are thirty-four of them and I am only about a third of the way through.
There was a photograph in The Times last Saturday of the Crown Prince of Jordan at his Passing Out parade. He must be at least the third generation of his family to go to Sandhurst. In December 1959 King Hussein of Jordan was interviewed face to face by John Freeman. Freeman’s questions are more intrusive than a head of state in the Middle East was accustomed to. His Sandhurst training stood the king in good stead and he answered unhesitatingly. His two bodyguards in the studio were not so cool – they reached for their guns as Freeman asked the king about his marital plans.
The king inherited from his grandfather under difficult circumstances. Freeman asked him to describe his grandfather’s assassination when he was standing behind him aged fifteen. Freeman did not mention that the crown skipped a generation because his father was schizophrenic. There was a real risk that the king might be assassinated and a camera man asked for instructions if that were to happen. “Pan the camera down” said John Freeman.
Sometimes the interviews seem obscure but they are all interesting. I watched some of them with huge pleasure when I was in Yorkshire last week. A bonus feature is that the subjects are sketched by Felix Topolski. He went to Chiswick with John Freeman to meet King Hussein who was staying there with an English friend; a chance for Freeman to meet his subject informally before the on-camera grilling. He is much more daring in his questioning than an obsequious lackey today.
Martin Luther King flew to London to be interviewed and stayed with the Topolskis. Not all the subjects are interviewed in the studio. Freeman went to Switzerland to talk to Carl Jung at his house on Lake Zürich. Compton Mackenzie is interviewed sitting up in bed.
Your piece on Freeman reminds me how strongly I would like to see Rattigan’s satire or riff on Face to Face: he called it Heart to Heart (BBC, 1962). According to Steven Fielding in his book on TV drama, State of Play, Rattigan’s TV piece posited that television often really did not interrogate, expose and defenestrate its subjects or victims. Actually, his play argues, slippery characters just poker-faced and forked-tongued their way out of the scrutiny. So the camera is not all that X-ray after all. Doesn’t modern politics tell us exactly that? Apparently Rattigan of the BBC ended up apologising to Freeman for the naughtiness of parodying the interview show. Isn’t life blissful?
BTW: Ralph Richardson played Mann (the Freeman role). Kenneth More played the politician (and presumably revealed a potential not usually associated with the Bader/Lightoller straight bat type he was famous for). But what a combination!
BTW, #2: The other day, I was in the riverside church at Marlow on Thames and saw a lovely series of memorials to the Wethered family, including by marriage, Captain James Makepeace Thackeray Ritchie of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, killed in action in May 1940.
When I was reading Rattigan’s biography I wrote a post about Heart to Heart (4th June 2017) that you missed.
https://christopherbellew.com/heart-to-heart/
Damn. I wrote “Rattigan of the BBC..” It shd be “Rattigan or the BBC…” Why does one only see typos when the piece has gone to press, as it were? Predictive text doesn’t help, either.
I am doubly chastened. Not only did I forget that you blogged about Heart to Heart, I had concomitantly forgotten that it was through one of your matchless posts (whose delay by even an hour or two makes for a lessened morning) that I was set to thinking about the play.
BTW: Kenneth More may not have thought much of his own work in Heart to Heart. He was a success in several Rattigan’s, and talks about them a bit in his autobiography, More or Less. But there is no mention of the TV play. That is odd because More admired Rattigan greatly and was grateful for Rattigan’s having stuck by him as his pick for playing the sexy young pilot in the first stage version of The Deep Blue Sea. What’s more, as it were, the actor also said the subsequent film was spoiled by not having kept sufficient of the playwright’s original (and by starring Vivien Leighton, who couldn’t play a plain girl to save her life).
The late e mail was because yesterday and this morning I was in digital detox in a cottage near Lyme Regis. I sent the e mail courtesy of South West Trains as soon as I got on board at Axminster. My hostess went swimming in the sea before breakfast. I went to watch but felt no need to emulate her. Walking out of the waves she looked like Ursula Andress in Dr No.
King Hussein was indeed at Sandhurst and sent at least six of his children there. Princess Iman came through in my time; King Abdullah attended her commissioning parade with most of his siblings. They are a close family and it’s good to see the next generation following the Sandhurst tradition.
Hussein was already King when he was at Sandhurst, presenting some unusual protocol issues though not ones to concern the drill sergeants. He was addressed as ‘Mr King Hussein Sir’ and when in trouble would be told ‘You’re the worst little king we’ve ever had’.