Barry Norman
Presenter of the BBC’S flagship film review show whose laid-back style endeared him to viewers
BARRY NORMAN, the journalist and broadcaster, who has died aged 83, was Britain’s best-known film pundit, and presented Film…, the BBC’S popular television series about new cinema releases, for a quarter of a century. Renowned for his laid-back insouciance, Norman presided over the most watched cinema review on television, ranging from appraisals of the latest films to interviews with the stars and details of current box-office hits. Norman took over in 1972, first alternating with Joan Bakewell and Frederick Raphael in the presenter’s chair before taking charge on his own in 1973.
With his gossipy, jaunty, informal but informed style, he maintained a baggy-eyed but youthful exuberance on screen – female admirers anointed him the “thinking woman’s crumpet” – and he laced astute criticism with deadpan asides.
While Norman’s firm belief that “heavy, pretentious criticism keeps more people out of the cinema than has ever attracted them in” kept his own approach amusing and anecdotal, he was always authoritative and never failed to take the subject of his criticism seriously.
He kept his personal preferences to himself, explaining that his responsibility “boiled down to being totally honest to the picture and the viewer”. “I won’t recommend anything,” he added, “that I don’t think is worthwhile.”
By the late 1970s, Norman’s witty and sardonic banter had earned him a place in the nation’s viewing affections, with journalists queuing to applaud his craggy and faintly rumpled pin-up persona – “attractive in a boy-next-door manner” enthused Avril Groom in The Daily Telegraph, adding that if Melvyn Bragg was the thinking woman’s heart-throb, Norman was her court jester, Shakespearean-style.
The ravishing Michelle Pfeiffer (“probably the most beautiful woman in cinema,” Norman declared) flirted back when he interviewed her in the 1990s, and he reportedly turned down the 1950s sex kitten Brigitte Bardot when she invited him back to her hotel room for a game of poker.
He certainly enjoyed the flowering of his own celebrity, with a guest appearance on The Morecambe and Wise Show at Christmas 1977, being sent up by Spitting Image (although he hated his “grotesque” puppet) and impressionists such as Rory Bremner repeating the phrase “And why not?”, which Norman himself insisted he never used. It did, however, furnish the title of his memoirs in 2002.
Having been born into a film family – both his parents were in the business – Norman was an enthusiastic customer at the four cinemas that were walkable from his childhood home in Edgware, and in the 1960s applied his expertise to his work as a showbusiness writer for the Daily Mail. He acknowledged that, as a boy, he should have been attending the theatre instead – “going to the movies was a working-class activity that the middle-classes frowned upon,” he admitted – but his lifelong film habit was to bring him into contact with the great stars of the day, and he later hobnobbed socially with Peter Sellers, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, among others.
His own favourite films included
Citizen Kane (1941), Manhattan (1979) and Gregory’s Girl (1981). By 1995 he reckoned he had watched more than 10,000 movies, not counting ones he saw as a child, and was reviewing them professionally at the rate of five a week. But by then he was wearying of being assailed by the din of the popcorn-crunching audience at his local cinema in Hertfordshire.
A Labour Party convert to the SDP, he once became embroiled in a blazing political argument about Vietnam with one of his screen heroes, the robustly conservative John Wayne, who called him a “goddam pinko liberal”, jumped up from his seat, threatened to thump him and had to be dragged away by his minders.
Barry Leslie Norman was born on August 21 1933 in London, the son of Leslie Norman, the British producerdirector (of The Cruel Sea and Dunkirk, among others) who had started as a film editor with Ealing Studios. Barry was a sickly, chesty child and nearly died of pneumonia when he was three. Educated at Hurstpierpoint College and Highgate School, where he was good at sport, especially cricket, he wanted to follow his father into pictures, but finding the British postwar film industry in a parlous state he opted for a career in journalism instead.
After 14 months on the local weekly
Kensington News, in 1953 he sailed for Johannesburg where he worked for the South African Star as a junior reporter earning £9 a week at the age of 19, but disliked the apartheid regime, and after a spell on the
Rhodesia Herald returned to England in 1955.
Turned down as a foreign correspondent by the Daily Express, he entered Fleet Street as a trainee gossip writer with the Daily Sketch, became its diary editor, but resigned in a row with the managing editor. In 1957 he was taken on as a news reporter by the Daily Mail, soon moving to its Paul Tanfield gossip column. “I hated it,” Norman recalled. “I was very good at rewriting other people’s stuff, but when it came to going to society balls and asking so-and-so why his wife had just run off with the man next door, I was hopeless.”
Eventually he became assistant entertainments editor and quickly promoted himself to deputy theatre and film critic, which meant that he “got to the theatre three times a week and saw all the movies I wanted”. But just as he was settling in, the
Mail and the Sketch merged, and he was made redundant. It was to be the making of him. The security of the redundancy cheque enabled him to write freelance.
He wrote a humorous weekly column for The Guardian, having badgered the features editor in the office gents “when all his defences were down”, television reviews for The
Times and the words for the Flook strip cartoon in the Daily Mail as well as abundant magazine work.
When Norman joined Late Night
Line-up on BBC Two, the producer Iain Johnstone was impressed and offered him a three-week contract presenting Film 72. Norman proved popular with the viewers, and duly progressed to Film 73. With Film 90 it became the longest-running networked television arts programme, and the series carried on with Norman until 1998.
He also succeeded on radio, as a presenter on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, the breezy travel shows
Going Places and Breakaway in the 1970s, and The Chip Shop (about computers) in 1984. In 1977 he became the first chairman of The News Quiz.
Also from 1977 – “with much wit and not a little affection”, as The Daily
Telegraph’s critic reported – Norman presented The Hollywood Greats, a warts-and-all series about the private lives of stars of the silver screen. Starting with Clark Gable, Norman’s stellar crew included the likes of Charles Laughton, Errol Flynn, Edward G Robinson and Marilyn Monroe. He followed this with The British Greats in 1980.
Norman presented Omnibus in 1982, declaring it to be an entertainment rather than an arts programme, and although it proved to be a brief, unhappy union (“his lightness of touch,” complained the Telegraph critic, “looked strained”) his career continued to prosper. He returned to present Film 83 the following year and he went on to star in his own right, presenting television series bearing his name: Barry Norman in Chicago, Barry Norman’s Hong Kong Quest, Barry Norman on Broadway, Barry Norman’s London Season and Barry Norman in Celebrity City.
His 10-part series of documentaries Talking Pictures, launched in 1988, offered a historical perspective on Hollywood from the silent era to modern times.
Although he considered his writing as a mere hobby, he produced nearly a dozen “train reading” novels as well as several works of non-fiction, including The Hollywood Greats (1979), The Movie Greats (1981) and a second work of autobiography, See You in the Morning (2013).
Disillusioned with John Birt’s cultural revolution, Norman left the BBC in 1998 to join Sky Television’s film channel on a reported salary of £350,000. He left Sky in 2001, and gave up reviewing, complaining that most new Hollywood films were based on comic books.
Norman was a keen sportsman who called himself a cricket “nut”, joined the Lord’s Taverners, listed “playing village cricket” as his principal recreation and published Barry Norman’s Book of Cricket (2009).
In 1988, in his first attempt at live television sport, he was hired by Channel Four as the network’s co-anchorman (with Nick Owen) at the Olympic Games at Seoul. Presented with a group of people to interview, he was told in his ear to talk to the former diving champion Brian Phelps, but realised he had no idea which of the group he was. When the camera briefly cut away, Norman hurriedly had to get the director to point him out.
In 2007 he launched his own line of pickled onions, prepared according to his mother’s family recipe.
An amiable but highly professional operator, in 1981 he was presented with the coveted Richard Dimbleby award at the Bafta ceremony, but was dismayed when the Dimbleby family later complained that the award was intended for people working on “factual” programmes.
He was voted Britain’s Best Dressed Man in 1985, Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1986 and appointed CBE in 1998.
Barry Norman married, in 1957, Diana Narracott, once the youngest woman journalist in Fleet Street and later a historical novelist, who died in 2011. Their two daughters survive him.
Barry Norman, born August 21 1933, died June 30 2017