Help! Dad’s a Leftie intellectual – and it’s making my life hell
The brilliant polymath Jonathan Miller brought up his family in a gilded enclave, surrounded by London’s literati. But his right-on principles meant sending his children to a local comp where, as his son reveals in a stinging memoir, he was mercilessly bu
The year is 1975 and I’m aged 11, listening to the rhythmic clatter of manual typewriters coming from open windows along Gloucester Crescent.
This goes on all day, every day of the week: the sound of grown-ups working from home. When you hear all the typewriters going at the same time, you could easily think they’re having a big typing competition.
But listen more carefully, and each one sounds different. Some go so fast you think the typewriter is going to fall to pieces. There are also one or two where the typing is so slow, you wonder why they bother at all.
Mum says these are the ‘tortured ones’, and Dad’s definitely one of those.
I know this because I’ve heard him say, whenever he can’t think of anything to write, the best way out would be to kill himself.
I think a big part of Dad’s problem is that, when he stops typing, he has to sit and listen to the sound of all the other typewriters. Knowing that everyone else is having no trouble at all must drive him nuts.
To The outside world, Gloucester Crescent — in Camden, North London — was a community that seemed to operate as if it were a closed society. It became the focus of much mockery in the media. But it was my home.
My parents, Rachel and Jonathan Miller, bought it in the Sixties for £7,000. At the time, Dad was doing a comedy show in the West end called Beyond The Fringe with Alan Bennett and two other friends called Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
The houses in the Crescent — and in Regent’s Park Terrace, which joins it at one end — soon started to fill with either Mum and Dad’s friends or people just like them.
over the next three decades, great friendships were forged and professional rivalries were fuelled as the celebrated occupants allowed their lives to become entwined.
Relationships occasionally became strained when they either wanted to sleep together or kill each other.
My closest friends had parents much like mine: most had been educated at the same small collection of public schools and knew each other well from either oxford or Cambridge and then through their work.
You’d often hear them complaining about someone or other being upper-class or a Tory. If you ask me, I think they were all a bit confused.
They didn’t realise that most people probably thought they were all upper-class. I once heard an old recording of Dad talking on the radio, and he sounded even posher than Prince Charles.
For the most part, the Crescent parents were Left-leaning, idealistic as well as anti-establishment, and had a strong distaste for the old-school approach to authority and power. That’s why they decided to give their children a radically different childhood from their own.
So we were sent to state schools, where we could mix with children from every walk of life. And because our parents’ childhoods had been too strict and organised, we were encouraged to be free spirits — which meant we were left to do what we wanted.
DAD couldn’t be more different from Mum, who, for starters,
doesn’t think the whole world is against her.
In his world there are two kinds of people — the ones he likes, who are good, and the ones he hates, who are bad. The good ones are people like his close friends and the drunks who come to the door and anyone who votes Labour.
Since Dad finds it easier to hate people than to like them, there are quite a few on his bad list, which includes people such as Idi Amin, hitler and his generals, the upper classes — because they ‘hate Jews’ and vote Conservative — and all theatre critics.
he used to like Peter Sellers. But Sellers once called him up and asked him to fly all the way to hollywood to talk about making a film. he even sent him an aeroplane ticket.
Dad got on the plane, flew all the way there and waited in his hotel — but Sellers never showed up. So Dad got on the plane and came home and told Mum the man was a ‘little s***’.
My father also hates television. he hates it more than he hates the people on his long list of those he hates most.
everything on TV is ‘rubbish’, and he claims it’s stopped us reading. But he has to take some of the blame: whenever my brother, sister or I open a book, he always tells us we’re reading the wrong one.
When Dad discovered I was reading The Catcher In The Rye, for instance, he said if I was interested in American literature I should read The Grapes of Wrath. he then asked, every five minutes, if I’d read it. The thing is, I wasn’t interested in American literature, but I did have to read The Catcher In The Rye for my o-levels.
Dad did this with every book we ever read, so the three of us just stopped reading altogether.
Much of the time he’s far too busy with work and his big ideas to think about family life and lets Mum — who’s a hard-working GP — deal with all that. If it was left to Dad, we’d stay up past midnight, never get to school on time and probably starve.
he’s always writing, travelling, directing plays and operas and having to go on the telly. Before I was born, he was a doctor, but he gave that up and never stops telling us how much he wishes he hadn’t.
Unless Dad’s friends come over
for l lunch or supper, family meals are h his idea of hell.
What Wh he really wants is a family who, who if they can’t talk about something some intelligent, sit in silence and let him do the talking so he can lecture us about Charles Darwin Darw or what the Germans did to everyone ev in the war.
ONE day we all went to Scotland to vi visit Dad, who was making a film ther there. In a nearby village called Arch Archiestown, Mum pointed to a big house and asked us: ‘Do you think we should get Dad to buy it for us as a holiday home?’
This was exciting, though we’d all heard his speeches about how ghastly everyone is in the countryside. When we went to collect him in our Morris Traveller, he had his angry face on.
‘Are you out of your bloody mind?’ he said as he squashed into the front seat, knees pressed against the dashboard. He started on a long list of reasons why buying a house anywhere outside London was a terrible idea.
Then he added: ‘ You do know everyone’s either a Tory or an anti-Semite?’
Mum laughed. She pointed out that we needed a holiday home because it wouldn’t be long before our family was banned from every hotel in the country. The horrid owner of the Rothes Glen Hotel, where we were staying, was already cross about us being rowdy and sliding down the banisters. And I knew Dad was worried he’d get a bill for repainting the dining-room ceiling after we flooded the bathroom above it.
In the end, my parents bought the house. It was so big that Mum hired a housekeeper and gardener.
Dad never really seems to enjoy family holidays. I think it’s the idea of being stuck in a house with children, with no chance of intellectual conversation.
But he did eventually find something fun to do: he set up a microscope and a set of tools for dissecting animals on the kitchen table. now, every time we drive anywhere, he makes us look out for anything dead on the road.
As soon as we see something, Mum jams on the brakes and Dad jumps out and peels it off the road. When we get home, he nails its arms and legs to a bread board and we gather around the table and he starts to dissect it.
A LOCAL newspaper has started announcing our arrival in Scotland. They always write the same thing: ‘ Television personality Jonathan Miller and his family have arrived in Archiestown for their summer holiday.’
Dad once showed it to Mum and said: ‘Is that all they can say? What about: “Leading theatre director Jonathan Miller is taking a break from doing Chekhov to come and waste his time in Scotland”?’
One time, coming back from a visit to an old castle, we had to stop for petrol. The man who filled the tank stuck his head right into our car and said: ‘You were super on Parky. That’ll be a fiver.’
As we drove off, Dad said to Mum: ‘Why does it always have to be the Parkinson show? That man really should see my Alice In Wonderland [film].’
AFTER years of doing plays, Dad has started directing operas as well. What surprises everyone is that he doesn’t play a musical instrument and can’t even read music. I don’t think I’ve ever heard
him sing along to anything other than country music, and he can only do the twanging and whining noises.
Despite all that beautiful opera music, he still says his life is terrible and that he wishes he could be a doctor again so that people would take him seriously.
I think it’s the critics that ruin everything for Dad. If rehearsals are going well, he comes home at the end of the day and says: ‘I think this is probably the best thing I’ve ever done’.
But it only takes one bad review and this dark cloud comes over the house and his life is over and he’s calling his agent to tell him to cancel everything he’s going to do in the future.
He comes out of it eventually, so it’s a good thing his agent has learned to ignore him.
I GO to Pimlico School, which one of Mum and Dad’s friends told them was the best comprehensive in London.
I soon discovered that there were two types of gangs there, and they each had their own particular methods.
The white gangs never hit you — they knew that threatening you was so much worse. They’d push you into a dark corner, stand within an inch of your face and tell you that they knew where you lived and how you got to school.
They wanted you to know that at any point, when you were least expecting it, something terrible would happen.
I lived in fear of this for my whole time at Pimlico.
The black gangs were somehow better. They only wanted one thing, and that was an instant moment of entertainment so they could prove who was boss. once they’d finished beating you up, they’d laugh and walk off.
By my fifth year, it felt like the school had lost control of the more violent kids. My constant state of fear started to wear me down: everything seemed hopeless, and I stopped learning anything.
The problem in my French class, for instance, was that the teacher didn’t know how to control the small gang of violent boys who sat at the back and threw anything that wasn’t fixed to the floor. I didn’t get to speak a single word of French in two years.
one morning, when I was 14, I broke down. It started with me telling Mum and Dad that I wasn’t sure how much more I could take — and Dad nervously laughing it off, saying he was sure I’d be fine.
As he tried to reassure me with one of his ‘It’ll be all right’ smiles, I could feel the tears welling up.
When Mum reminded me that I needed to set off, I snapped and told them that this time they had to take me seriously. The next thing I knew, I was curled up in the corner of the kitchen, crying uncontrollably and begging them not to send me back to school.
To begin with, they didn’t seem to know how to respond — they stood there looking at each other and then back at this sobbing mass on the floor.
It was Mum who finally knelt down and tried to console me, but I could tell Dad was just as confused and upset.
That day, they made a few calls, but everyone said the same thing: I was too old to change schools now, but could try again when I was 16. Two years away.
DAD was so chuffed when the BBC asked him to do a science series called The Body In Question. He said that after all these years of doing ‘fatuous and loathsome’ work, he was finally being asked to do something serious.
According to him, everything he’s done has amounted to nothing — and he often falls into a depression. Mum says it often starts in the middle of the night, when he wakes her up to tell her that his life has been worthless.
Anyway, once Dad started making The Body In Question, as well as writing the book of the series, it quickly became clear that he’d taken on far too much.
Before long, he was telling Mum the only way out was to kill himself.
But he kept going, and one day Dad and his film crew came to gloucester Crescent. He wanted to interview me about the few times I’d been ill with a dangerously high temperature and had waking nightmares in which my hands felt enormous.
By November 1978, the filming was all over. Every Monday night, for the next 13 weeks, people all over the country were glued to their televisions as Dad took them on a journey through the human body.
My own appearance in the series turned out not to have been the smartest idea. Maybe when I agreed to be interviewed, I’d imagined the gangs would all be out mugging people on Monday nights or watching The Sweeney. But I was wrong: everyone was watching The Body In Question.
For weeks afterwards, bullies would stop me in the school corridors, waving their hands around and shouting: ‘oi, Miller, you t****r, let me tell you about my hands — it’s my hands, they’re huge!’
Then they’d turn their thumping great hands into fists and hit me as hard as they could.
LIKE my friend Conrad, who also lives in the Crescent and goes to Pimlico School, I’d finally had enough. What we wanted was to go to the sort of school our parents had been to, and not to feel frightened any more.
So we decided to take matters in hand: we’d apply for places in the sixth form at Westminster School. There was just one problem — the entrance exam. once I’d been good at exams, but at Pimlico my results had been getting worse and worse.
Still, even though Mum and Dad knew this inconvenient fact, they brushed it under the carpet. No one tried to find out what the Westminster exam would involve or how to prepare for it. No one suggested I sit practice papers or find a tutor to get me up to speed.
In any case, for Mum, Dad and their friends, an entrance exam for a school is a ‘competition’, and that means there will be winners and losers, which in their world is unfair. They want everything to be equal and for everyone to have access to the same opportunities.
Trouble is, the idea of a fairer world wasn’t really working at Pimlico, where we kept being beaten up for being ‘posh’.
The entrance exam was held at