A Very Private Celebrity (19 page)

Before the interview, he compiled and answered his own questions, despite the advice of his foil in
Hancock's Half Hour
, Sid James: ‘For God's sake, don't answer everything truthfully – you'll be right in it!' But Hancock ignored the well-known warning among comedians to not take themselves too seriously. He was determined to tell the truth.

Freeman's aim was to push this to the limit, although he did not quite put it that way. He said he set out to explore ‘the old
Pagliacci
theme, the sorrow behind the mask of laughter, of which he was a prime example. I thought the public would be interested in seeing a little of the torment that goes into the making of a great comic.'
15

On
Face to Face
, Hancock was obviously nervous – pursing his lips, puffing on a cigarette butt and grimacing. He answered questions about his childhood, about why he was childless, about his ill health, about whether he was happy and about why he was anxious, but it was only in the last few minutes that Freeman became persistent and intrusive.

The audience research report on
Face to Face
with Tony Hancock was mixed. The reaction index was well below average, at 64 per cent, and some found the interview ‘painful'.

‘John Freeman hit below the belt and at times was impertinent,' reported one of the panel. ‘His questions seemed barbed with antagonism,' said another. There was even some sympathy for Hancock: ‘He was like a fish out of water.'

Others, however, thought the interview was ‘painfully effective' and ‘most accomplished'.

Freeman wrote to the
Daily Telegraph
in self-defence: ‘I judged that more of Hancock's complex and fascinating personality would appear on the screen if he was kept at full stretch. I hope viewers did not equate that with hostility. I am sure Hancock didn't.'

Hancock certainly did not. He went round to Heath Mansions to watch the programme being broadcast and afterwards he stressed that he had felt no embarrassment: ‘After all, we know that if you go on a programme like that, some of the questions are going to be tough.
They were tough, but good, and I'm sorry that Freeman got the worst of the criticism.'

The two became friends, and the self-improvement continued. Catherine remembers spending the weekend with the Hancocks at Lingfield in Sussex and falling asleep (she was heavily pregnant), much to John's displeasure, while he and Hancock discussed a chart on the wall linking quotations from Kant, Hegel and Descartes. ‘This man has a fine mind,' Hancock said of Freeman, ‘and he was very good for me because he used to listen and then he would say, “Some of your points are very good, but you are talking like a student.” I'm very fond of him.'
16

After the Hancocks' marriage fell apart, Tony took refuge in Freeman's flat at Heath Mansions. When the Freemans were in India, Tony stayed with them in New Delhi on his way to Australia to do a new show. Soon after arriving in Sydney he committed suicide.

On 11 April, some months after the Hancock
Face to Face
, John Freeman was Roy Plomley's guest on
Desert Island Discs
. His choice of music was eclectic but familiar. In fact, Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘What Is Life?' (‘the voice that has moved me most in my lifetime'), Dylan Thomas (‘whom I have met') reading his own ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion', Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit', and Toscanini conducting Verdi's ‘Agnus Dei' are among the most popular records chosen in the long history of the programme. However, Freeman must be one of the few guests to have welcomed the desert island – ‘I have often thought that an enforced spell in prison or hospital would be a good way of collecting my senses' – but did he really mean that, or was it an example of an interesting but untruthful answer? He admitted, surprisingly, that before
Face to Face
he was ‘absolutely shaking with nerves'.

Roy Plomley was most interested in Freeman's interviewing technique:

From Freeman's perspective, the high point and low point of
Face to Face
occurred, respectively, with the racing driver Stirling Moss and the painter Augustus John.

He told Anthony Clare that his interview with Moss (with Albert Finney, the only
Face to Face
subject alive in 2015), broadcast in June
1960, ‘was almost the only one I can ever recall doing on
Face to Face
, or anywhere else, for that matter, from which I came away reasonably satisfied'. He had expected a playboy with a talent for driving fast cars, but he instead found an ‘intensely serious professional'. Moss dismissed the concept of fear and replaced it with a matter of calculation: if you got the calculation right, there was nothing to be afraid of. Freeman observed: ‘This was a man of cold, precise, clinical engineering judgement, and that surprised me very much indeed.'

Freeman revealed that the notion of a man who could live so closely to the edge of death and danger, but trust entirely his own judgement to keep on the right side of the line, appealed to him very much. The analogy could be applied to Freeman's live broadcasting of
Face to Face
. In front of an audience of several million and with no escape, Freeman had to trust his own judgement to keep on the right side of the line and deliver a winning interview. John Freeman and Stirling Moss had much in common, and perhaps this was why he found the interview so satisfying.

The
Face to Face
with Augustus John, pre-recorded but eventually broadcast after retakes in May 1960, was a near disaster. The old painter appeared semi-drunk and slightly senile. For once, Freeman appeared to have no empathy and little courtesy; in fact, he could barely contain his irritation. Afterwards he let rip to Burnett:

John Freeman and Hugh Burnett did not always have an easy relationship, and it was going to get worse.

In December 1960, the
Face to Face
guest was pop star Adam Faith. Lizi Freeman says he was her choice, after she dissuaded her stepfather from inviting Tommy Steele. She and some friends watched the live programme from the gallery. The interview was, said Adam Faith afterwards, ‘a pleasant talk with a pleasant man', and that is how it seemed to viewers. Proof again that Freeman was not always the grand inquisitor. Perhaps the subject and style were chosen deliberately as a reaction to the notorious
Face to Face
with Gilbert Harding three months previously.

Although a minor figure compared with most of the other guests, Harding was one of the best-known faces on BBC television and, in an age of deference and politeness, he was known for his irascibility. ‘The rudest man in Britain,' the tabloids called him, partly for his performance as a panellist on the quiz show
What's My Line?
, where he bullied or insulted the participants. Harding was a fellow TV professional and he had actually approached
Face to Face
for the interview himself, so Freeman and Burnett considered him fair game. Their plan was for Freeman to question Harding about his reputation for rudeness. Did it make him happy? Freeman intended to suggest that a professional life as a panellist and disc jockey after a Cambridge University education meant Harding was working ‘below his capacity' and that this disappointment had made him the rude man the public saw.

So the interview began. But then, in a more psychoanalytical approach, Freeman asked Harding if he had ‘obsessive thoughts about
punishment and discipline?' Then: ‘Are you good at enduring pain? Then: ‘Do you fear pain?' Then: ‘Can you stay with other people who are suffering pain? Then: ‘Do you fantasise about punishment for your enemies?' Then: ‘In your dreams are you a dominant figure?' Then: ‘Have you ever been with a person dying?' Then: ‘Is that the only time you have seen a person dead?' Quite where the interview was leading no one could tell, because at this stage Harding was close to tears, with beads of sweat running down his temples under the studio lights. It turned out that Harding's mother had died recently and he had been at her bedside. Freeman did not know this and he was distressed when he was told afterwards – more so by the suggestion (typical of the myth of
Face to Face
in the tabloid press) that he had consulted Harding's psychiatrist before the show to discover his most vulnerable point. Mary Crozier, reviewing in
The Guardian
, was unimpressed: ‘Mr Freeman kept on in a really tedious way about pain, disappointment, punishment, discipline, dreams and childhood. I begin to think he attached far too much importance to this amateur psychoanalysis. I fancy Mr Harding's answers showed considerable control.'
18

The interview revealed that under Harding's grumpy persona was a sad and lonely man. Burnett wrote that letters of sympathy flooded in. During the interview, Harding said: ‘I'm afraid of dying. I should be very glad to be dead, but I don't look forward to the process of dying.' Eight weeks after the transmission, he suffered a fatal heart attack as he was leaving Broadcasting House. He was fifty-three.

In January 1961, John Freeman took up his new post as editor of the
New Statesman
. He was shortly to turn his back on
Face to Face
, literally. That month, anticipating Freeman's departure, Burnett wrote to Ed Murrow and asked if he would like to present a
Face to Face
series in America, featuring, it was hoped, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West,
Professor Oppenheimer (of A-bomb fame) and Mort Sahl. Murrow was ‘very interested', but the series came to nothing.

In due course, Freeman resigned, but he told Burnett he might return after he had settled into the editor's chair, provided he was billed as ‘John Freeman, editor of the
New Statesman
' and paid more money than the 100 guineas a performance. In the meantime, Burnett piloted a programme with
Panorama
's Robert Kee.

In July 1961, Freeman wrote to Burnett denying that he was being ‘uncooperative or superior' and agreed to present one more series in the autumn, if the money was right. Showing a cool nerve that Stirling Moss would have admired, Freeman did not sign a contract until within days of the series starting in October. He was polite but insistent: more money, and first-class air travel. Burnett complained about Freeman's ‘militant attitude'. ‘Katie [Catherine Freeman] is doing her best to persuade him,' said someone in the talks contracts department, and Leonard Miall dined Freeman at L'Escargot in Soho. In the end, the BBC caved in and the series went ahead, but it was doomed from the start.

The series opened with the trade union leader Frank Cousins. It was a straw in the wind when Burnett wrote to Leonard Miall: ‘I would like to place on record that to put the first of a new series of
Face to Face
between an appeal for the National Old People's Welfare Council and the Venerable F. W. Cox doing an
Epilogue
is death and destruction to this programme.'
19
The series continued with a very popular interview in London with the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King.