Did You Really Shoot the Television? (26 page)

His advice to me about forswearing sunglasses on camera reflected an almost pathological distaste for this affectation. He himself never wore them, even amid Arabian sands. At
Tonight
in those days there was a talented director, with an intake of alcohol notable even by
Mac’s standards, named Derek Amoore. Among other peccadilloes, Amoore wore shades indoors and out, by day and night. Mac grew to dislike this habit, and its noisily trendy perpetrator, so passionately that he could scarcely bring himself to speak to the man, never mind work with him. In 1966, when he wrote the last of his ‘Mr Cork’ thrillers,
Cork on the Telly
, he introduced a thinly disguised Amoore figure as the plot’s chief villain. In all this, Mac was illadvised. Though Amoore was indeed awful, he was a rising power, who returned Mac’s contempt. The young producers at Lime Grove did not achieve the celebrity of the performers, and worked for pittances. But many were highly gifted. Several, such as Jack Gold, Ken Russell and Kevin Billington, went on to careers as feature film directors. Others rose to become senior BBC executives. They represented the future, and it was they who made the key decisions about appointments of presenters and reporters. The support of Grace Wyndham-Goldie, Donald Baverstock and Alasdair Milne counted for a lot, but Mac paid heavily for his disdain towards the young turks coming up behind, soon occupying big desks and decreeing who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’ within BBC TV’s Talks Department.

As the 1960s advanced, Mac found himself marginalised. His defiant adherence to the standards of old Britain, his contempt for the ‘swinging’ decade in which he now found himself, seemed ever more fogeyish. He commanded affection among colleagues, but some were exasperated by his refusal to accept advice, sometimes even direction. Gin affected his fitness for work. Producers joked that if Mac had to shoot a piece to camera after lunch, it was prudent to locate a doorpost for him to lean against while delivering it. There came a day in 1965 when some remote administrative figure wrote a bland letter saying that with regret ‘the Corp’ would not be renewing his annual contract. He continued to make occasional appearances, persuading the BBC to let him present a dramatised documentary series about Robert Churchill the gunmaker’s appearances as a witness in famous murder cases early in the century –
Call the Gun Expert
. He wrote and presented
The Hated Society
about the Jesuits, in whose bosom he had been reared. But for four programmes he was paid a mere £500 for a
notional two weeks’ writing and three weeks’ filming – pin money even in those days. For some time he presented a little weekly magazine show for Tyne-Tees Television,
Man Bites Dog
. His glory days as a broadcaster were done. He was not yet sixty, but he had blown it.

I understood why. Anthea understood why. He never did. He continued to write books, contribute occasional pieces to magazines, cherish the public recognition he retained. But his income declined steeply. He owned no property, and had made no pension provision. I was shocked to discover after his death that by the late 1960s he was bringing in less money than me – just £1,500 in 1969, compared with £6,500 three years earlier, his last serious earnings. His books made little. He got £100 for
English Sporting Guns
, the same for
After You, Robinson Crusoe
. He continued to do the work he wanted to, heedless of its marketability. But this was only possible because my stepmother bankrolled the family.

The most significant contribution Mac could make to their finances when these were strained was progressively to sell personal treasures: a few pictures including a cherished Rowlandson watercolour, some guns. Save for his wonderful good fortune in marrying Anthea, Mac would have been stony broke in the last fifteen years of his life. We know that all careers end in failure, but I was deeply moved by the waste. Mac threw away his talents, forfeited the fruits of the real love his TV fans felt for him, long before his time should have been up. His financial difficulties, together with the awareness that as a family the Hastingses have been shockingly improvident, made a profound impression on me. After emerging from my spendthrift youth, throughout my later working life I have been almost obsessed with the importance of avoiding being old and poor.

Anne began a time of great happiness when she formed a new relationship with Osbert Lancaster, the artist best known for his pocket cartoons on the front page of the
Daily Express
. Not long after Mac’s expulsion, or maybe even before – Anne was exceedingly coy about such matters – they encountered each other at a cocktail party given by former
Express
editor Arthur Christiansen. She had known Osbert
for years as a Fleet Street acquaintance, but without enthusiasm. She found him supercilious. He, in his turn, professed to have been terrified of her: ‘She was always so elegant, so aloof and so much taller than me.’ Now, however, at the Christiansen party where neither he nor she encountered any other congenial company, they went off to dine together at the Ritz. They discovered much in common, and the relationship blossomed – Osbert was already living apart from his wife Karen.

Physically, it was an implausible pairing. Anne towered above the world, dwarfing her new man, who was notably short. An intensely mannered figure, born in 1908, he modelled himself on the Edwardian writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, who like him and indeed me was educated at Charterhouse and thoroughly disliked the place. A dandy, meticulous about his appearance even unto the daily carnation, perhaps in response to a lack of physical advantages which he cheerfully acknowledged, Osbert had become celebrated not only for his newspaper work – including the creation of his famous characters Lord and Lady Littlehampton – but also for his deeply informed and wonderfully witty studies of architecture, in words and pictures.

I always wondered whether Osbert fell in love with Anne because of her resemblance in style if not pedigree to Maudie Littlehampton. Often, noting Maudie’s succinct and scornful judgements upon the follies of mankind on the front page of the
Express
, I heard my mother’s voice. She shared almost all Osbert’s enthusiasms, save his taste for clambering into white tie and tails to attend City livery dinners – formal occasions bored her. At first the relationship was discreet. But following the death of Karen Lancaster in 1964, they began to be seen together openly. After a lifetime of worrying about money, it was a relief for Anne to share the life of a rich man. Osbert, whose grandfather was among the founders of Prudential Assurance, had inherited a fortune sufficient to enable him to indulge his own lifestyle, independent of his income as an artist.

In 1967, when a reporter telephoned him to enquire whether it was true that he was to marry Anne, he acknowledged the impending wedding, adding in character: ‘Living in sin would have been much cheaper, but you can say that we are still good friends.’ So they
remained through the years that followed. Osbert’s establishment in Eaton Square was notably more elegant than Anne’s rambling old mansion flat in Cromwell Road. She loved first nights with him at Covent Garden and Glyndebourne – Osbert designed many ballet and opera productions – together with the accompanying social life. He was inexhaustibly gregarious.

His father had been killed on the Somme in 1916, and he spent much of his childhood in the homes of rich grandparents. During four years at Oxford he forged a reputation as an aesthete, one of the few to be resolutely heterosexual. He became celebrated among his contemporaries, and left with an impenitent Fourth in English. His family wanted him to become a lawyer, but after his studies were interrupted by a brush with tuberculosis, he went instead to the Slade. Thereafter his social persona, as one of the landmarks of upmarket London, evolved in step with a burgeoning artistic career. Hugh Casson wrote of a wartime encounter in a restaurant, where Osbert’s ringing tones as usual commanded the room: ‘The sonorous voice, the elaborate phraseology, the bristling moustache and staring eyes, the physical presentation – half Balkan bandit, half retired Brigadier – was at first terrifying, and then almost immediately endearing. Osbert, it quickly became clear, is a performance, meticulously practised and hilariously inflated and at times disturbing.’ Among Osbert’s peccadilloes was a distaste for Winston Churchill, matched by a loyalty to the prime minister’s son Randolph, whom he had first met at Oxford. Osbert claimed to be the only man on earth who liked Randolph.

Vermeer was his favourite painter. Unsurprisingly, given his passion for gossip, he retained a lifelong addiction to Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
. David Pryce-Jones, who first met him at university, wrote in the 1960s that Osbert seemed quite unchanged by the intervening forty years: ‘He might, then as now, have been an Edwardian dandy, moustached and pinstriped, perhaps a trifle trimmer at twenty than today, but already with the communicative air – since he remained passionately interested in the doings and foibles of countless friends – of a bigger and rounder Max Beerbohm.’

It would be quite inadequate to describe Osbert’s political views as conservative. He was a shameless enemy of ‘progress’ in all its manifestations, mocking change and supposed improvement in the condition of society with relentless scorn. He was never apologetic about his taste for the high life, observing that he made jokes about the smart world because it was the only one he knew. ‘It would be silly to try to make working-class jokes. One can make jokes about bus conductors, because one meets them. But not jokes about agricultural labourers, because I don’t know any.’ Interviewed on
Desert Island Discs
, he chose as his castaway’s luxury a live sturgeon, to provide a secure source of caviar.

In those days the
Daily Express
used the great Giles’s cartoons to portray the working class; The Gambols strip to tease suburban Britain; and Osbert’s pocket cartoons to divert its upmarket readers. It is doubtful how many Giles fans understood Maudie Littlehampton when she said, for instance, in 1964 after Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused to make a statement in the House of Commons: ‘But darling Aunt Ethel, I do assure you that it was
quite
a different Mr Wilson who was so terribly keen on open covenants openly arrived at!’ Likewise
Express
readers may have felt unsympathetic to a drinking companion at the
bar of White’s Club who remarked to Lord Littlehampton: ‘You know, Willy, I’ve been thinking and I’ve come to the conclusion that the trouble with us is that we were never educated for leisure.’ The
Express
prized the Littlehamptons’ creator, however, because he provided important people with an excuse to buy a paper they might otherwise have spurned. ‘My dear, have you seen Osbert Lancaster today?’ was for thirty-five years as familiar a line at fashionable parties as is the same enquiry today about Matt’s cartoons in the
Telegraph
.

I never achieved a comfortable relationship with Osbert. My first physical impression of him was that he resembled one of the villains of Ian Fleming’s thrillers – Sir Hugo Drax, perhaps, or Goldfinger – misshapen and hirsute. He had no sporting enthusiasms, and I then supposed that every right-thinking Englishman shot pheasants or pursued foxes. He had spent the war in the Foreign Office rather than on battlefields, albeit with a memorable eighteen-month stint as press attaché at the British Embassy in Athens during the 1944–45 Greek Civil War. He had never, so far as I could discover, attempted to kill even a small German.

I was bemused by the manner in which he allowed my mother to belabour him for his impracticality. He took pride in the indifference to domestic matters that wealth makes possible. He went to his grave without, so far as is known, having washed up so much as a cup and saucer. Not long after he and Anne began their relationship, John Betjeman – Osbert’s oldest and closest friend – took me to lunch at the Great Western Hotel at Paddington, one of those railway establishments which he loved. He said: ‘Dear boy, it would give everybody such pleasure if you could be just a little bit nicer to Osbert.’ I said: ‘John, I don’t see how he can bear to sit in the corner and let himself be bullied by my mother.’ Betjeman answered: ‘But don’t you understand? Osbert
adores
it!’

My own attitude to Mother’s new domestic arrangements was coloured by a muddled sense that, while I had not the slightest desire myself to share a roof with Osbert, it was unjust that she and my sister Clare should be luxuriously ensconced in Eaton Square, while I was then eking out an existence in Belsize Park. My wildly exaggerated sense of entitlement was similarly affronted when I encountered them in Athens, staying at the Grand Bretagne Hotel, at a moment
when my own resources encompassed a bunk in the city’s youth hostel. I record these unworthy sentiments not in quest of sympathy, but as symptoms of crass immaturity. Beyond my own lack of appreciation for Osbert’s gifts, on his side he was understandably reluctant to welcome the excesses of a large, noisy, bellicose adolescent as part of the baggage which came with Anne. His present to me, the first Christmas that he and Mother spent together, was a 1953 American edition of one of his own books. Keenly materialistic, I interpreted this gesture as a declaration of war. Our relationship remained distant. I regret this, and accept most of the blame. To my sister Clare, incomparably more sweet-natured and accommodating, he displayed affection and generosity to the day of his death.

Many times since, people have said: ‘It must have been fascinating to have somebody as clever and funny as Osbert as a stepfather.’ It should have been. But few children are as indulgent towards their parents’ love lives as mature judgement recommends. We may reluctantly accept the notion that they slept with each other often enough to conceive us, but we recoil from the vision of them making love to third parties. In disgust at Mother’s perceived betrayal of my father, on visits to Rose Cottage I treated Osbert as an unwelcome interloper.

I was not alone, however, in finding his manner a trifle ponderous. Graham Greene, who admired Osbert’s drawing but was impatient of his prose, described him as ‘a charming creature with a heavy moustache, looking like a miniature Guardsman…He has a curious pompous style which is excellent when he is being funny, but is heavy when he’s serious.’ James Lees-Milne observed of Osbert in a passage of his famously bitchy diaries: ‘He is more facetious than funny. And the text of his latest book which he brought for us,
The Littlehampton Bequest
, bears this out. The incomparable illustrations (and they are marvellous) are far more amusing than the text.’ Lees-Milne thought better of Anne: ‘extremely tall, with a splendidly lissom figure, very pretty face, dresses admirably and is elegant. Is the exact opposite to Osbert in looks, demeanour and behaviour, although O is always neatly dressed, too neatly for the country. She told me that Osbert is not in the least interested in individuals, only in people in the
mass. He knows nothing whatever, she asseverated, about the heart, a piece of anatomy which bores him stiff.’ This chimed with my own perception – that for all his geniality, Osbert was a cold fish.