Olden Life: Who was Gilbert Harding? Andrew Roberts
Gilbert Harding?
Sixty years ago, on 16th November 1960, the TV and radio star Gilbert Harding died, aged 53, of an asthma attack outside Broadcasting House as he was getting into a taxi.
Only a few weeks earlier, on 18th September 1960, he'd been the subject of one of the Face to Face interviews with John Freeman. A man known for his irascibility on the panel show What’s My Line? seemed a bizarre choice for such a prestigious series.
But his rise to fame, almost entirely due to the medium of television, in some ways encapsulated the nation's social changes. Harding was born to the master and matron of a Hereford workhouse.
Five decades later, he was immortalised in Madame Tussauds as ‘The Most Famous Man in Britain'.
After graduating from Queens' College, Cambridge, he drifted through various schoolmaster posts and even a brief spell as a Bradford police constable before joining the BBC Overseas Service in 1939. He was assigned to Outside Broadcasts three years later, and by 1950 he regularly chaired Twenty Questions, where he became infamous for his suspension for drunkenness on air.
His conclusion was especially memorable: ‘I'm fed up with this idiotic game. As for the score, if you've been listening you won't need it. If you haven't, you won't want it.'
Such outbursts set the template for Harding's future career. From 1951 onwards, a combination of short temper and brandy prompted him regularly to berate the contestants of What’s My Line? When Bob Monkhouse made a guest appearance, the producer instructed Harding to ‘goad' the star to make better television.
As well as his memoirs, Harding's work includes his novelty record, Takes Two to Tango with Hermione Gingold. There were also ten film appearances, usually cameos, in which he played himself.
None of these enterprises could have anticipated Face to Face. Broadcasting conventions meant there could be no overt references to Harding's homosexuality, and so the interviewer's questions referred to how a deep relationship with his mother prevented his marrying.
Joe Moran points out, in Armchair Nation, how the producer Hugh Burnett was ‘constantly urging his cameramen to go in tighter, believing, as the Ancient Greeks did, that the face was the mirror of the soul'. There were no cutaways to Freeman; the broadcast focused on a middle-aged man, awash with regrets, who wept on air.
This self-loathing was a constant theme of his ghost-written books. Along My Line concluded with ‘But I do wish the future were over.' Stephen Wyatt's radio play Doctor Brighton and Mr Harding suggests that Harding hoped the interview would finally destroy his popular image. Harding regarded himself as a ‘tele-phony'. All the viewers seemed to crave on What’s My Line? was another Harding outburst as he attempted to guess the profession of a ‘cheese-winder's clerk'.
Harding once observed his status was akin to that of a weary circus lion in need of protection from his public. Face to Face removed the bars from the cage.