I’m the man who sells Selina Scott

Rod Gilchrist helped bring the much-loved Selina Scott back to our screens but, he says, being a star’s agent is pure hell

According to legend, showbiz agents are supposed to have a glamorous life. But it’s not all ‘Hello, darling!’ and champagne cocktails at the Ivy. I know because I’ve dipped my toe in this celebrity swamp.

My sole client is Selina Scott, soon to appear in the new series of The Real Marigold Hotel, filmed in Udaipur with Stanley Johnson, Stephanie Beacham and Susan George, among others.

It’s Selina’s first series for the BBC in thirty years and marks a comeback of sorts after a rocky relationship with the Corporation.

Selina has always run from reality television, even Strictly. But she had a personal reason for taking the job. When she was a little girl, her mother told her stories of her great-greatgrandfather, a surgeon-soldier with the British Army during the Raj, trapped in the 1857 Siege of Lucknow. He survived; his wife and twin daughters did not. Selina had always wanted to visit the subcontinent and connect with her ancestor.

My introduction to the film-noir world of the showbiz agent began after her former agent was reluctant to support her in a battle with Channel Five – when it reneged on a job offer. The agent told Selina she would become a ‘leper’ in the television industry if she took legal action. Selina pressed on alone and won a considerable settlement.

Having spent four decades in Fleet Street, negotiating kiss-and-tell stories with the likes of the unsavoury, late Max Clifford, I thought it would be fun to play poacher turned gamekeeper. In fact, I was soon to feel like Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole into a bemusing alternative universe.

This dizzy descent started when Selina contacted Prince Philip to request the first television interview celebrating his ninetieth birthday in 2011. He agreed. He sent Selina a warm, handwritten note, and a list of his interests, inviting her to attend any of his public appearances, where they could talk privately.

Having secured his approval, Selina visited Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, who used to make her tea as a junior producer. Thompson put her on to his executive responsible for royal specials. The executive, miffed he’d been bypassed, insisted Selina must get the Prince to discuss a wide range of personal issues he was unlikely to talk about – including his birth on a Corfu kitchen table. As if. When she protested that royal protocol would forbid this, the shutters came down. The Palace press office, upset that it had been cut out of negotiations, also took umbrage. The interview was given to Fiona Bruce, with disastrous results. Prince Philip, who made his preference for Selina clear, was surly, sarcastically congratulating Bruce on the banality of her questions.

What’s not known about Selina is her wicked sense of humour. Bra company Playtex offered her £50,000 to pose in one of its lace-and-wire flimsies, with cups shaped like torpedoes. That set both of us off with the giggles. When I confessed I knew nothing about the bra industry, Selina insisted I did so before negotiating a deal, directing me to the lingerie department of Selfridges to quiz assistants on the architecture of female underwear, greatly enjoying my discomfort.

This was just before she appeared in front of the BBC Trust to chastise them over the way women past their fiftieth birthday were treated by the Corporation, long before others found their voice.

Gritty stuff – but where was the showbiz glamour? In Sweet Smell of Success – the Hollywood film about a New York press agent, played by Tony Curtis, he and Burt Lancaster met for supper in New York’s swanky 21 Club. In the budget world of independent television, you’re lucky to get coffee tasting like diesel oil.

Hand on heart, there were one or two glittering evenings: David Frost’s celebrity gatherings; a summer party at Annabel Goldsmith’s Georgian mansion on Ham Common. But I remember one party with toe-curling horror. It was a black-tie affair in Chelsea’s Physic Garden when a TV star told guests he had just learnt Selina didn’t own a television in her London flat.

‘I’ve got 36 inches if she’s got somewhere to put it,’ he leered.

Selina has both loved and loathed the BBC, like many the Corporation has taken to its bosom then casually neglected. She has written acerbic newspaper articles about the old BBC. But now a new young breed of commissioning executives, unshackled from past prejudices, has rediscovered her – and she’s back with the broadcaster where she belongs, integrity intact.

She’s had to learn how to deflect unwanted attention. Donald Trump, obsessed with her, kept up a lurid correspondence for ten years.

The legendary American agent Swifty Lazar (1907-93) set the model for the super-agent. Swifty got Elizabeth Taylor the first $1m deal for playing Cleopatra.

‘Never let the other guy think you screwed him because you might want to negotiate with him again,’ he said.

Swifty’s gentler days are long over. As a fellow agent put it to me, ‘If you are not a monster, the wolf will eat you.’