Andrew Billen is impressed when he meets the adaptor of Poldark
As an interviewer, you get used to – after 30 years, I have had to get used to – being reminded that we are an unequal species. The ability gap between an interviewer and interviewee is a given. Recently, however, I keep confronting multiply talented subjects. Lennie James, whom I spoke to for this magazine, is an actor and a screenwriter. Melvyn Bragg, impudently grilled by me in the Times, is not merely our top arts broadcaster, he is a prolific novelist. Graham Norton met me to discuss his new novel. It’s his second, and both are very good. Most impressively of all, perhaps, Debbie Horsfield, the Poldark adaptor, has not only also written stage plays but successfully brought up four children, whom she chose to home tutor. Would it have been expecting too much for natural selection to distribute outstanding talent on a one-per-person basis?
Opening my own paper today, I find a letter saying that, far from Eddie Mair’s pay needing to be cut by the BBC, it should – on account of his talent – have been doubled. Then I read his Radio Times column, in which Mair reveals that he was willing to lop his salary all along. He is off to LBC for the heck of it. That he was not a remunerative correctness refusenik is a disappointment, however. You would have to be deaf to think all PM presenters deserve to be considered equal.
At the time of writing, we do not know LBC’s plans for Mair. The question for me is whether we will now learn his politics, as we do the rest of the station’s argumentative presenter roster. His almost divine command of irony suggested that Mair was above opinions, amused only by the weaknesses in them all. The man he won’t, alas, be succeeding on Question Time is equally inscrutable. Charles Moore in the Spectator said he assumed, on account of his wealth and lifelong attachment to the BBC, that David Dimbleby was of the left. As a former (minor) newspaper baron, who faced union problems in the 1980s, he might equally be the precise opposite. Dimbleby ensured his impartiality, of course, not with irony but with authority.
Peter Firmin has died, the visual half of the partnership behind Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss. A few years ago, I interviewed him. The night before, I read a book about his career, its pages beautifully illustrated with his art.
In the early hours, I woke up screaming: “It’s a [expletive deleted] outrage.” This was the crisis in a dream in which I got worked up at the injustice that, while Disney, Hanna and Barbera, Matt Groening et al became millionaires, Firmin made virtually nothing from his genius, even sending out knitting patterns so parents could make, rather than buy, toy Clangers.
Firmin was mystified when I said this. He was comfortably off, had his family and was happy. I am arguing against myself now, but, for some people, money really does not come into it.
One of the best surprises of late fatherhood is having children who enjoy ITV’s Thunderbirds Are Go at more or less exactly the same age that my brother and I did the original Thunderbirds. The series has been taken off, mid-run, for the summer – the World Cup, I assume.
Joy awaits, however. In London this autumn, a show called Thunderbirds: Beyond the Horizon promises an immersive theatrical experience in which we can board Thunderbird 2 and embark on an international rescue. Where to, however? The caves of Thailand? The Hawaii volcano? Or the BBC salary review committee?
Andrew Billen is a feature writer and former TV critic on the Times.
