What a Carve Up! (9 page)

Hilary

In the summer of 1969, shortly before they went up to Oxford together, Hugo Beamish invited his best friend Roddy Winshaw to stay with his family for a few weeks. They lived in a huge, cluttered, slightly dirty house in North West London. Roddy’s sister Hilary was invited too. She was fifteen.

Hilary found the whole thing excruciatingly tedious. It was perhaps marginally better than spending the summer in Tuscany with her parents (again!), but Hugo’s mother and father turned out to be almost as dull – she was a writer, he worked at the BBC – while his sister, Alicia, was nothing but a crashing bore with buck teeth and terrible spots.

Alan Beamish was a kindly man who noticed quickly enough that Hilary wasn’t enjoying herself. One night as they all sat around the dinner table, with Roddy and Hugo loudly discussing their respective career options, he watched her pushing a mound of tepid pasta around her plate and asked a sudden question:

‘And what do you see yourself doing in ten years’ time, I wonder?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Hilary hadn’t given this matter much thought, taking it for granted (rightly, of course) that something glamorous and well-paid would sooner or later fall into her lap. Besides, she hated the idea of sharing her aspirations with these people. ‘I thought I might go into television,’ she improvised, lazily.

‘Well you know of course that Alan is a producer,’ said Mrs Beamish.

Hilary didn’t know this. She had got him down as a company accountant or at best some sort of engineer. Even so, she was not in the least impressed: but from that moment on, Alan, for his part, chose to take Hilary under his wing.

‘Do you know the secret of success in the television business?’ he asked her, late one afternoon. ‘It’s very simple. You have to watch it, that’s all. You have to watch it all the time.’

Hilary nodded. She never watched television. She knew she was too good for it.

‘Now I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,’ said Alan.

What they were going to do, it transpired – much to Hilary’s horror – was to sit down in front of the television and take in an entire evening’s viewing, with Alan talking her through every programme, explaining how it was made, how much it cost, why it had been scheduled at a certain time, and where its target audience lay.

‘Scheduling is everything,’ he said. ‘A programme stands or falls by its scheduling. Understand that, and you’ll already have a march on all the other bright young graduates you’ll be competing with.’

They started off with the news on BBC
I
at ten to six, followed by a magazine programme called
Town and Around.
Then they switched channels to ITV and watched
The Saint,
with Roger Moore.

‘This is the kind of show the independent companies do best,’ said Alan. ‘Very sellable abroad: even to America. High production values, lots of location work. Snappy direction, too. It’s all a bit shallow, for my liking, but I wouldn’t knock it.’

Hilary yawned. At seven twenty-five they watched something about a Scottish doctor and his housemaid, which all seemed very slow and provincial to her. Alan explained that this was one of the most popular programmes on television. Hilary had never heard of it.

‘They’ll be discussing this storyline in every pub, office and factory in Britain tomorrow,’ he said. ‘That’s the great thing about television: it’s one of the fibres that holds the country together. It collapses class distinctions and helps create a sense of national identity.’

He was equally lyrical about the next two programmes: a documentary called
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
and another news bulletin at nine o’clock, this one lasting a quarter of an hour.

‘The BBC is respected the world over for the quality and fair-mindedness of its news coverage. Thanks to the World Service, you can tune in a radio almost anywhere on the globe and be sure to hear impartial, authoritative bulletins, mixed in with lighter programmes which maintain the highest standards in music and entertainment. It’s one of our greatest post-war achievements.’

Until now Hilary had merely been bored, but at this point things started to go rapidly downhill. She was made to sit through a dreadful comedy show called
Nearest and Dearest,
full of coarse jokes which had the studio audience screeching with vulgar laughter, and then they saw a thing called
It’s a Knockout,
which featured a series of witless outdoor games. She began to squirm with rage and embarrassment. Unconsciously, she channelled her agitation through her fingertips by reaching across to a fruit bowl next to the sofa and plucking off grape after grape: she would peel each one with her tapered fingernail before popping it into her mouth. A little pile of the skins started to form on her lap.

‘This isn’t my sort of show at all,’ said Alan. ‘But I don’t look down on it. You have to make things which appeal to everyone. Everyone’s entitled to their bit of fun.’

They finished off by turning over to BBC
₂
and watching a series called
Ooh La La!,
adapted from the farces of Georges Feydeau. This one starred Donald Sinden and Barbara Windsor. Hilary fell asleep halfway through, and woke up just in time to catch the end of an astronomy programme presented by a peculiar man in an ill-fitting suit.

‘So there you have it,’ said Alan proudly. ‘News, entertainment, comedy, documentary and classical drama in equal measure. There’s no other country in the world which could offer you an experience like that.’ With his gentle, melodious voice and greying bushes of hair he was beginning to look and sound, to Hilary, like the worst sort of parish priest. ‘And it’s all in the hands of people like you. Talented youngsters whose task in the years to come will be to carry the tradition forward.’

At the end of the holiday, Roddy and Hilary took the train back to their parents’ current home in Sussex.

‘I thought old Mr Beamish was a bit of a sweetie, actually,’ said Roddy, taking out a cigarette. ‘And yet Henry told me that he’s frightfully left wing.’ He lit up. ‘Hasn’t rubbed off on Hugo, thank God. Anyway, you’d never guess it, would you?’

Hilary stared out of the window.

∗

From
THE 10 MOST LIKELY
: colour feature in
Tatler,
October 1976

Lovely Hilary Winshaw is a recent Cambridge graduate who intends to make quite a splash in her new job at——Television, where she will be training as a producer. Hilary already has strong views about the work which lies ahead of her. ‘I think of television as one of the fibres which holds the country together,’ she says. ‘It’s brilliant at collapsing distinctions and building a sense of identity. And that’s definitely a tradition I hope to encourage and foster.’

In this picture Hilary is all ready to keep the winter cold at bay with a Royal Samink cape from Furs Renée, 39 Dover St, Wl (£3,460), sweater with roll-neck in camel cashmere by Pringle, 28 Old Bond St, Wl (£52.50), gloves in camel wool, medium-length from Herbert Johnson Ladies Shop, 80 Grosvenor St, Wl (£14.95), and boots in beige leather, mid calf, with stacked heels, from Midas at 36 Hans Crescent, SW1 (£129).

∗

——
Television plc. Extract from minutes of Executive Board
Meeting,
14
November 1983. Confidential.

… It was reiterated at this point that nobody undervalued Ms Winshaw’s contribution to the company’s programming successes over the last seven years. However, Mr Fisher insisted that her decision to purchase TMT, the American production company, for £120 million in 1981, had never been offered to the board for proper scrutiny. He asked for clarification on four points:

i) was she aware that, at the time of purchase, TMT was running up losses of $32 million a year?

ii) was she aware that her weekly flights to Hollywood, the purchase of her flat in Los Angeles, and the running expenses of her three company cars had all been cited as major contributing factors in the assessment, by independent management consultants Webster Hadfield, that the company’s costs were currently 40% too high?

iii) was she aware that her policy of purchasing low-cost drama from TMT, and then insisting that it be re-edited by the addition of previously deleted sequences (in order to expand the running time – often by as much as thirty minutes – and thereby increase the cost-effectiveness of the purchase) had significantly influenced the IBA’s recent judgment that the company was failing to meet acceptable quality thresholds?

iv) was the doubling of her salary to £210,000 p.a., agreed upon by the board in February 1982, a fair and accurate reflection of her increased workload since the acquisition of TMT?

Mr Gardner remarked at this point that he would have thought twice about accepting this job if he had known that he was joining a sinking ship, and asked whose idea it had been to employ this bloody woman in the first place.

Mr Fisher replied that Ms Winshaw had joined the company on the recommendation of Mr Alan Beamish, the distinguished producer, formerly of the BBC.

Mrs Rawson requested, on a point of order, that Ms Winshaw stop playing with the grapes as somebody might want to eat them and there was no longer scope for waste in any area of the company’s activities …

At 4.37 p.m. it was agreed by a vote of 11–1 that Ms Winshaw’s contract should be terminated forthwith, and that she should be compensated with a lump sum which took realistic account of the present state of the company finances.

The meeting adjourned at 4.41 p.m.

∗

From the
Guardian,
Diary, 26 November
1983

RAISED eyebrows all round at the news of Hilary Winshaw’s recent departure from——Television. It’s not so much the fact that she was ousted (most observers had been predicting that for some time) as the size of the pay-off: a cool £320,000, if rumours are to be believed. Not a bad reward for reducing this once-profitable outfit to a condition of near-bank-ruptcy in a couple of years.

Could such unprecedented generosity have anything to do with her cousin Thomas Winshaw, chairman of Stewards, the merchant bank which has a hefty stake in the company? And could it be true that the multi-talented Ms Winshaw is about to land herself a plum job as columnist on a certain daily newspaper whose proprietor also just happens to be one of Stewards’ most valuable clients? Watch, as they say, this space …

∗

Hilary’s reputation had preceded her, and she found that on her first day she did not receive much of a welcome from her new colleagues. Well, she thought: fuck them. She was only going to be coming in one or two days a week. If that.

She had her own desk with her name on it in a far corner of the open-plan office. All it contained, so far, was a typewriter and a pile of the day’s other newspapers. It had been decided that the title of her column would be
PLAIN COMMON SENSE
. She had to fill up most of a tabloid page, leading off with a longish opinionated piece and following it with two or three more personal, gossipy items.

It was March 1984. She picked up the first newspaper that came to hand and glanced over the headlines. Then, after a couple of minutes, she put it down and began to type.

Underneath the headline
THE POLITICS OF GREED
, she wrote:

Most of us, still tightening our belts in the wake of the recession, would agree that this is not the time to start banging on the government’s door and asking for more money.

And most of us, with images of the dreadful ‘Winter of Discontent’ still fresh in our minds, would agree that another wave of strikes is the last thing the country needs.

But we would have reckoned without neo-Marxist Arthur Scargill and his greedy National Union of Mineworkers.

Already Mr Scargill is threatening ‘industrial action’ – which of course means
inaction,
in anybody else’s books – if he and his comrades aren’t showered with yet another round of pay rises and perks.

Well I say, Shame on you, Mr Scargill! Just when we are all pulling together to put this country back on its feet again, who are you to take us back into the Dark Ages of industrial unrest?

How dare you put selfish greed before the national interest!