Television Roger Lewis
Markov arrived at Bush House looking ill, and got home that evening feeling worse. By Monday morning he was dead.
Around Sue Macgregor’s table, the producer Dan Hardoon had gathered Markov’s BBC boss, Peter Udell; Bernard Riley, the junior hospital doctor who was told ‘there’s a nutter in cubicle five who says he’s been poisoned by the KGB’; and the political documentary-maker Michael Cockerell, whose Panorama on Markov’s murder won an Emmy. From the archives came the girlish voice of delightful Mrs Markov, Annabel Dilke, writer of novels with amusing titles such as Rule Three: Pretend to be Nice.
What young Dr Riley thought resembled a horsefly bite turned out to be a tiny, silver pellet filled with ricin, as Porton Down scientists confirmed. (After the inquest, Dr Riley’s wife told him he should read Agatha Christie; then he’d know about ricin from her story The House of Lurking Death.)
Nobody has ever been arrested for Markov’s murder, and Bulgarian secret police managed to burn the records. ‘I’m not a vengeful person,’ Annabel Markov said, ‘But I wanted the regime to admit that they ordered the killing of my husband.’ Her grateful letter to Dr Riley, thanking him for not dismissing her husband’s story as inconceivable, caused a Damascene conversion: he had planned to go into forensic medicine but her letter turned him towards working in intensive care instead.
The independent company Whistledown, which produces The Reunion, has a formula now aged to perfection, but the real credit for its success goes to Sue Macgregor. She masters each subject, summarises it crisply and with clarity, steers the conversation briskly but unpushily, and asks exactly the right questions.
Markov, she told us, had written for the ‘approved satire’ magazine in Bulgaria’s state-run media until 1968. It was called the Hornet. I can neatly link this to I, Object!, the series presented by Ian Hislop of Private Eye, who curated the British Museum exhibition of objects associated with challenging officialdom, blowing a raspberry at those in power.
Hislop started with an 18th-century, porcelain teapot marked under the spout with ‘45’ in tiny, gold filigree characters: ‘45’ meant issue 45 of the North Briton, the magazine edited by radical John Wilkes, freely criticising King George III and Prime Minister Lord Bute. Hislop was impressed that a mere issue number could signify liberty and freedom of speech. I suspect he was equally pleased with the fact that Wilkes, though repeatedly exiled and accused of seditious libel, kept getting re-elected to Parliament ‘because people liked him’.
This reminded me of when, on Have I Got News For You, Piers Morgan sneered at Hislop and turned to the audience with a challenging question: ‘Do you like him?’ There was a deafening chorus of ‘Ye-e-es!’ And we do.