Up close and not so personal with Paxman
Yes, the great inquisitor’s autobiography touches on his depression, his violent father, his broken heart and ‘something pretty like’ a breakdown – but so fleetingly you want to scream...
His publishers describe Jeremy Paxman’s memoirs as ‘candid’, and so they are, as long as he is avoiding the subject of himself. He doesn’t touch on his family life, for instance, and never mentions his partner or their three children. Anyone coming fresh to the book would finish it thinking that its author was a solitary bachelor.
He skates over his interior life. Occasionally, he might offer the briefest of glimpses, but then he scurries on, ready with a funny anecdote or forthright opinion.
In his foreword, he gives a short, one-paragraph list of his likes and dislikes: strong swimmer, easily bored, enjoys flyfishing and bird-watching, loves dogs but allergic to cats, dislikes shopping, and so forth.
Towards the end of this list, he writes: ‘I would rather ride a bike than drive a car. I spent several years seeing a therapist, and several more on anti-depressants. Occasionally I sit on the loo and shoot squirrels out of the bathroom window.’ Blink, and you would have missed the extraordinary admission in that middle sentence. And that’s all we hear of those years with the therapist and the antidepressants: he never mentions them again.
Of course, this is what has given him his enigmatic quality, and what makes him quite so mesmerising on television. It’s why so many of us would sit through Newsnight, even on the dullest of days, just so long as it was Paxman who was presenting it.
Reticence is his signature, and it’s a quality rare in TV, a medium which was custom-made for the show-off and the slimeball. Like Sherlock Holmes, with a gesture or a sigh he can quickly suggest some darker turmoil, some inner hurt, some profound weltschmerz, but then he just as quickly returns to his weary cross-questioning of the next suspect.
Later on in the book, having described his time working in war zones for programmes such as Panorama, he touches on the moment he decided to give it all up for life in a studio. ‘In my dreams, men with guns in Africa, Ireland, Latin America and the Middle East got all muddled up in my head,’ he writes, then adding, almost as an afterthought: ‘I didn’t exactly have a breakdown. But it was pretty like one.’ Once again, that’s all he says on the subject. But what did it feel like? How did he get through it? Does he still suffer those nightmares? His lips are sealed.
These heartfelt moments appear, then disappear, in a flash. Another example: towards the end, he devotes several pages to a lyrical description of the joys of fly-fishing, eloquently showing how, in his words ,‘ to become absorbed in the natural world frees your mind’. Tucked between the water voles and the wagtails, the swallows and the kingfishers, he drops in the following observation, prompted by the act of buying a rod for his godson: ‘Fishing is dull by comparison with chasing girls, but when you’ve grown up a bit, you realise that fishing doesn’t break your heart.’ Again, that is all he says. Most of the book is narrated with his customary world-weariness, almost always laced with humour. Other memoirs by TV bigwigs go on about the glamour and the importance of it all, but Paxman’s emphasise the boredom and the silliness. The business of filming documentaries is, he says, ‘staggeringly dull’, newsreading is ‘what in primary school is called “reading aloud”’, and he recalls the ‘crushing tedium’ of his years on breakfast TV. He is particularly – and hilariously – down on newsreaders. ‘Of course, you need a skill or two to be a successful newsreader on television – mainly the ability to knot your tie, put your trousers on the right way round, and to sound as if you vaguely know what you’re talking about.’ Most of the events in his teenage years end in disappointment, and many of them begin with it, too. After public school, which he ‘hated’, he went to live on a kibbutz in Israel, but, sure enough, it turned out to be ‘a tremendous disappointment’. He says he found his student days at Cambridge ‘wonderful’, but then quotes an
At times, he can be irritatingly tight-lipped, not just about himself, but about others, too
email from a contemporary. It recalls him ‘perched on the parapet in your long regulation coat like one of Dylan Thomas’s forlorn, angst-racked cormorants. You would usually send us all away, but sometimes you would look at me and say, “It is completely and utterly meaningless, isn’t it?” ’
The book is at its best when this Eeyoreish quality joins forces with his laconic sense of humour, which is particularly to the fore in the footnotes and the picture captions. A photograph of Paxo lying back, eyes shut, his legs up on the Newsnight desk, is captioned: ‘It is sometimes hard to convey the frenetic urgency of the news business.’ A full-page reproduction of a reader’s letter is captioned: ‘It is always a pleasure to hear from viewers.’ The letter says, in full: ‘Sir, I think you are an ignorant lout, Yours etc Dr P J Ward.’
His footnotes tend to be rather like hecklers, undermining or reinforcing the more sober comments on the page above. At one stage, he opines in the text that ‘One of the more important lessons of life is that there is nothing particularly unusual about the people who occupy unusual roles – politicians, bishops, generals or trade union bosses*’ The asterisk leads to a footnote below: ‘*Indeed, the most striking thing about some of them is how spectacularly unimpressive they are.’
Paxman is, as you might imagine, spectacularly unimpressed by a great many people, himself included. He now regrets many of the waspish interview questions that made him so famous. He regards his opening question to Gordon Brown – ‘Why don’t people like you?’ – as ‘the unkindest question I ever asked… Did I feel s **** y asking it? Yes. Do I wish I hadn’t asked it? Yes.’
The interviewees he most admires are those who liked the rough-and-tumble. ‘The most enjoyable person to interview was Boris Johnson, mainly because his brain is quite the opposite of his body – nimble and sinewy. Who else would answer a challenge to name his own party’s spokesman on international development with the remark, “What a girlie-swot question”?’
At times, he can be irritatingly tight-lipped, not just about himself, but about others, too. Princess Diana has him to lunch à deux at Kensington Palace, but all he says of their meeting is that ‘the experience was never repeated’. A few years later, he stays with Prince Charles at Sandringham. ‘We turned out not to have much in common, though seeing some of my fellow guests simpering to their host was rather revealing.’ This is all he says about it. At this point, you want someone to step in and say: ‘Come on! Come on! What exactly was wrong with Prince Charles? And why won’t you name those simperers?’ But if Paxman won’t motivate himself, then who on Earth will? The book peters out towards the end, and loses its edge. Having already told us that ‘most people are decent human beings’, he repeats the news on page 195 – ‘if you let them, most people will be nice’ – and then again on page 248 – ‘most people are immensely nice’. The penultimate chapter is just a ragbag of questions he is often asked – ‘Do you know all the answers on University Challenge?’ – together with his increasingly grumpy answers – ‘Of course not.’ Right at the very end, he returns to the subject of his father, who overshadows his memoir, in much the same way as Bruce Springsteen’s father overshadows his, and for much the same reason. Paxman Snr was a disappointed man, who drifted from job to job, and took his frustration out on his own children, thrashing the young Jeremy with ‘sticks, shoes, cricket stumps, cricket bats or the flat of his hand’. Jeremy Paxman has been criticised for revealing this, but where can you tell the truth of what has happened to you, if not in an autobiography? In later life, his father disappeared to Australia. After he had been away a dozen years, Jeremy sought him out, and they effected some sort of reconciliation. ‘I certainly forgave him, but true understanding eluded me,’ he writes. He says, early on, that his father ‘never really fitted in’. Later, he writes of himself that ‘I never felt I truly belonged anywhere’. Unease is clearly in his blood, as is a certain opacity.