FACE TO FACE WITH A TV CLASSIC

HERE’S never been a shortage of goldie- oldie TV programmes on our screens – but none are quite so revealing as the BBC’s Face To Face series, which originally was broadcast between 1959 and 1962. The series ran for 35 pulsating episodes in what at the time must have seemed like a revolutionary move on the part of the Beeb.

And what’s fascinating for us in 2020 is how it remains revolutionary – not least because it shines a light on the often trite, celeb- fest, sofa- style interviews of today.

Most of the Face To Face interviews are now available on the BBC website or on iPlayer, and they have proved hugely popular, especially perhaps with older viewers for whom many of those interviewed, such as Carl Gustav Jung, Dame Edith Sitwell, Tony Hancock, Adam Faith, Sir Stirling Moss, Evelyn Waugh, John Osborne, Cecil Beaton, Albert Finney and Danny Blanchflower, were household names.

Each episode begins with an excerpt from the overture to Berlioz’s uncompleted opera, Les Francs- Juges, plus a series of caricatures of that week’s subject, drawn by Feliks Topolski, the Polish- born artist who moved to Britain after being commissioned to record George V’s silver jubilee.

Then, it’s 30 uninterrupted minutes of questions and answers, with the camera focused almost entirely at the same angle on the interviewee. Just occasionally, it pulls back and you get a glimpse of the back of the head and shoulders of the interviewer.

This, in itself, is extraordinary because the man asking the questions was John Freeman, who at the time was almost as well- known and certainly just as distinguished as any of the people sitting opposite him. dwell a little on this point…” And it worked, garnering some four million viewers.

His guest on September 18 1960 was the TV personality Gilbert Harding, whom some newspapers had described as the “rudest man in Britain”. But a very different side to him was revealed when Freeman asked him if he had ever seen a corpse. Harding, referring to his mother who had died six years previously, said he had and began to weep. And he admitted his notorious temper was “indefensible”.

He went on to say: “I am profoundly lonely… and would very much like to be dead.” Harding died a few weeks after Face To Face, collapsing outside Broadcasting House as he was about to climb into a taxi. He was just 53.

The interview on February 7 1960 with comedian Tony Hancock the star of Hancock’s Half Hour, a show first broadcast on radio on 1954 and on TV from 1956, proved to be controversial. Hancock was a great admirer of Freeman and answered all his questions frankly and honestly – but later it was reported that the intererview had in some ways contributed d to Hancock’s self- loathing, which resulted lted in him taking his own life eight years ars later while in Australia.

ANCOCK’S brother, Roger, said that agreeing to the interview “was the biggest mistake he ever made. I think it all started from that really… selfanalysis was his killer.”

Then there was Evelyn Waugh, the celebrated author of, among other novels, Decline And Fall, and Brideshead Revisited, on June 26 1960. But you wonder why he bothered, such was his obvious disdain for many of the perfectly reasonable questions.

Before the interview began, Waugh tried to unnerve Freeman by reminding him that his name was pronounced “war” and not “woff”, which of course Freeman knew.

Once the interview began, Waugh sat in the armchair with a big fat cigar and a big fat ego. Later, his biographer, Selena Hastings, described Waugh as assuming a “pose of world- weary boredom”.

The same cannot be said for the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, the black civil rights leader, who was interviewed on 29 October 1961 at the age of 32, seven years before his assassination. King spoke movingly but

CONTRASTS: Evelyn Waugh’s disdain for Freeman’s questions made for edgy viewing, while last Friday’s Graham Norton interview with Arsène Wenger was all cheerful chat without anger about how as a six six- year year- old his two best friends were white and how one day their mothers stopped him crossing the road to play because of the colour of his skin.

Later in the interview he remembers shopping with his mother and being slapped by a white woman, who told him: “You are the n***** who stepped on my foot.”

Freeman asked him how his own mother reacted. “She told me I should never feel less than someone else.”

Toward the end of the interview, Freeman asked King if he was ever tempted to leave America. King replied that despite its shortcomings, America is “home to me” and has a “marvellous democratic ideal” and he wanted “to help it fulfil that ideal”.

Face To Face was revived in 1989 with Jeremy Isaacs as its host but it was never quite the same. And perhaps the last of the serious interviewers was Sir Michael Parkinson, whose Saturday night slots were compulsive viewing in the 1970s and 80s.

And what of Freeman? The great man died in 2014 less than two months before his 100th birthday. Perhaps fittingly, he outlived all of his interviewees except for Albert Finney and Sir Stirling Moss.