Really?

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !

It’s only taken  40 odd years  for me to get there and find myself named in the same sentence as Helen Mirren and Meg Ryan.  How I laughed!

40 years ago I was interviewed by a journalist called Andrew Billen for the London Evening Standard,

in connection with something I was doing on tv.  I can’t remember what and unless it was something of particular interest, I will have done my best, taken the money and gone home.  I remember something of what I wore and certainly where we met. 

Mr. Billen didn’t like me.  I made the mistake of trying to talk him into it, as in “go on, you do really”,  and  probably bored him.   When the  piece was published, he referred to me as being  “almost asexual.”  I am not sure after all this time about the “almost”  but I am certain about the asexual. 

And I was quite put out.

Sex and sexuality had been one of the few securities of my life.  Now apparently that was up for question.

When I spoke to the my endlessly thoughtful manager,  she asked what had happened and I told her what I have just written – that he didn’t like me and I got my response wrong.  And we discussed why I did that and what I must learn from it.  End of.  In those days, old newspapers wrapped chips.

So on Friday morning all these years later, Andrew Billen wrote a piece about the upcoming chat show of Claudia Winkleman, in which he referred to what a tricky beast the chat show is with reference to those who failed, those who succeeded and those who didn’t get a look in – writing “Even the naturals stumble.  Parkinson’s old school chauvinism bombed with several female guests.  Helen Mirren, 

Meg Ryan and the agony aunt Anna Raeburn (he jocularly asked her “your place or mine?” only for her to remind him that he was married).”

I am so glad I had my youth when I did.  Just for the record Mr.Billen, I didn’t find Parkinson anything as much as enormously able and professional.   I didn’t see that interview  in which I am the spam in the sandwich between Rod Hull’s fabulously malevolent emu

and the wonderful Billy Connolly until it was rerun a couple of years ago.  And I wouldn’t have seen it then had not Pam the Painter suggested with some force that I did.

Parkinson behaved beautifully to me, his manner was his manner – and he was good.  He made us all shine. You can disagree with  somebody profoundly but there is a place for the fight – and it wasn’t in my judgement on a night when I had a terrific time.  And it shows.  The thing that most  impressed me, watching 50 years later, was how happy I was.

In the Winkleman piece, I am thrilled to have been mentioned in the same breath as Mirren –  a year younger than me and a very very good actress – and Ryan,

a mere stripling in her late sixties and a very good actress – but don’t infer any sense of late stage generosity.  I was in the clip that came up next when Mr. Billen was looking through background on chat shows.

I have been thinking a lot about my mother recently.  When I was a child and turned up panting with the whichever dog was current, she’d say “What’s the matter with you ?  Think you missed something ?”   When you’re a child, that’s curiosity.  Nowadays it seems to be the terror that you will have missed the latest trend – whether in eyebrows, speech, chins or clothes –  and thus your chance at being  “in”.

If I had rung her about the Evening Standard, she would have dismissed it.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t.

My mother, whose own mother was not kind, was herself bright, penniless,  better than pretty and took no prisoners, and brought me up like that with love. .  She was never “in”.  Nor I.  I danced to a higher power.  She did it her way and I did it mine and her way was a big contribution to the possibility of even a corner of the overcrowded public and media world. 

Everybody in public life  – which means any life – is misunderstood or misrepresented once in a while.   You get on with it   You live.  And I did.