Parky: My Autobiography (15 page)

In the meantime things at the
Express
gave every indication I had been shunted into the feature writers’ knacker’s yard where you either used your spare time writing a novel or drank yourself silly. I chose the latter course. Every day I would turn up at the office, draw a fiver from petty cash, and head for El Vino’s. There I would sit and await the call to duty. More often than not it never came, in which case I would wait for Poppins to open. Here I would cash a cheque and then give it all back in a boozy session.

I would catch a late train from Waterloo Station and hope to get off at Surbiton. The certainty of reaching my destination was somewhat diminished by my habit of falling into a deep sleep as soon as the train set in motion. More often than not I would awake in Portsmouth and have to catch the next train back. Once I fell asleep on the return journey and ended up back at Waterloo five hours after I had left it. On another occasion I awoke to the sound of seagulls and lapping waves. I thought I had been kidnapped and taken to a Russian submarine. In fact, the train had been shunted into a seaside siding at the end of its journey.

Worst of all, awakening as the train pulled into a station, I wiped the steamed window to find out where I was and all I saw was ‘—on’. I thought ‘Surbiton’. In any event I opened the carriage door and fell onto the express line at Wimbledon. I was hauled to safety by a couple of railway employees and then visited by the railway police who, quite rightly, told me what a chump I had been before seeing me home.

Mary said if I was drinking because I was unhappy at the
Express
then I must leave and get another job. I said we were broke and that we had a small child and a large mortgage and that I didn’t have a job to go to. But I knew she was right. I stayed a while longer. I volunteered for work in Manchester with the northern edition of the
Daily Express
and realised, every time I journeyed north, how much I missed that town.

Also it was the cricket season and I was pampered by the news desk, Keith Howard particularly, because I was needed to play in the needle match against the
Daily Mail
. The rivalry between the two newspapers was bitter and profound and the annual cricket match was as much a circulation war as a game. It was while playing for the
Daily Express
I met my great hero Keith Miller.

I had first seen him when I was ten and he came to England with the Australian Services team. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired and Hollywood handsome. He hit sixes, bowled like the wind and caught swallows. I was smitten. When I met him at the
Express
he had retired from cricket and was employed to write about the game. He was a reluctant member of our team.

He didn’t like playing what he defined as ‘comic cricket’, nor did he like taking candy from children, a fact he had amply demonstrated in times past. Playing for Bradman’s team against Essex in 1948, he walked to the wicket with Australia well on the way to a final total of 721, let the first ball he received hit his stumps and departed the field with the parting shot, ‘Thank God that’s over.’ His captain, Bradman, was not pleased. Bradman and Miller didn’t get on. It could have been the rumour that Bradman, lately signed by the
Daily Mail
, might turn out for them that enticed Miller to play for the
Express
.

The game allowed me the chance to stand next to my hero as we fielded against the
Mail
. He was at first slip and I was at second. I noticed a man near the sightscreen semaphoring Keith. This went on for an over or two before I asked my hero what was going on.

‘He’s a mate. He’s signalling the winners at Wincanton,’ he explained. Keith Miller liked a bet.

Ten minutes later, with the semaphore man still active, the
Mail
batsman snicked a fast ball, which flew towards my right hand. I wasn’t a bad fielder in those days, before the reflexes became dulled, and as I started to move, there was a flash across my body as Miller threw himself full length and took an extraordinary catch, ending up in front of the third slip. As he caught the ball, he rolled over, handed it to me and said, ‘I wonder what won the two thirty.’

We beat the
Mail
and our next game was against the
Daily Mirror
. Miller was excluded from the team on the grounds that no one cared if we won or lost against the
Mirror
. We won, and I scored a century. I calculated I could stay until retirement at the
Express
, providing Keith Howard didn’t move and I didn’t lose form. In fact, my final game for the
Express
was played in Manchester against the
Daily Mail
XI, which, I seem to remember, contained several Lancashire players plus a very aggressive quick bowler with a nasty temper called Don Mosey. Don later became a cricket commentator for the BBC and was affectionately known by Brian Johnston as ‘The Alderman’.

Back in the office I began to feel more and more like a spectator than a participant. In the features department there was much to occupy my attention, including our latest acquisition, John Braine. The author of
Room at the Top
had become one of the most famous literary figures in Britain. The
Express
employed him to write film reviews and gave him a seat next to me.

John Braine seemed to me like the Mad Hatter in
Alice in Wonderland
, living in a state of perpetual panic. He wrote his reviews in longhand in a school exercise book and endeavoured to eliminate the noise of a busy office by stuffing his ears with long strips of cotton wool that dangled on to his shoulder pads like fluffy icicles. His writing was laboured and slow and he paid little heed to deadlines. I remember an exasperated Harold Keble admonishing him with the line, ‘You are writing a review of a bloody film not
Room at the Top
volume two.’

On the other side of the desk Bernard Levin wrote about the theatre, Nancy Spain about television, Herbert Kretzmer, who later gained international fame as a lyricist, wrote elegantly and wittily about anything, and in the midst of it all sat Osbert Lancaster, painstakingly recording the doings of Maudie Littlehampton and her tribe, in between visits to his club. In the entire two years or so I spent at the
Express
I never spoke a word to Osbert. He never even acknowledged I was there. Some time later I bought a drawing of a costume design he created for a production of
Lucia di Lammermoor
, as a reminder of the silence between us.

The end came when I was sent to cover a train crash in which several people had been killed. When I reached the scene I called the office and asked them how much they wanted. There was a long silence and then I was told that actually, old boy, what we would like you to do is set up a couple of the victims’ relatives to be interviewed by Godfrey Winn. This instruction was not an uncommon one to
Express
journalists.

Godfrey Winn wrote excruciating sob articles popular with women readers. He was hated by everyone who worked at the
Express
. Bob Edwards, in his book
Goodbye Fleet Street
, wrote: ‘The news desk, from the news editor to the lowliest reporter, loathed it when Godfrey Winn was sent on a big story.’ I told the newsdesk I was not employed to be his gofer and refused the job.

The next day I went into the office and told them I was leaving. It neither surprised nor bothered them. The editor was demonstrating how to drink from a
porron
, a Spanish wine decanter from which you pour wine from a height into your mouth. The wine had spilled on to his hair and down his shirt front. It was my last image of the
Daily Express
and Fleet Street.

I went home and told Mary.

‘Where now?’ she said in her wonderful unflappable way.

‘No idea,’ I said, and I hadn’t.

Tony Howard heard the news and called me. He was friendly with an up and coming entrepreneur called Michael Heseltine who, along with his partner, Clive Labovitch, had bought a magazine called
Man About Town
. They were about to give it a makeover. Nick Tomalin, a journalist I had briefly met in a Fleet Street pub, was to be the editor. Why didn’t I give him a call?

Which is how I came to work for Michael Heseltine. The office was above a supermarket on the Edgware Road. I was the features editor and gave myself all the best jobs. I interviewed Ursula Andress in bed. She was in bed, I wasn’t. It was the sixties. We were young and daft and carefree and out of that volatile mix we created a magazine that became recognised as one of the most influential style magazines of them all.

Much of the success was due to the diminutive, seemingly per petually grumpy art director, Tom Wolsey, who gave the magazine an appearance so beguiling it made you want to stroke it. Next, Michael and Clive bought
Topic
magazine, which was described as Britain’s answer to
Newsweek
and
Time
. Oh yeah! They brought in Clive Irving (with whom I had worked on the
Daily Express
) as editor. I was his deputy. Clive was a brilliant editor. He did the hard and often inspired editorial grind with two other splendid journalists, Jeremy Wallington and Ron Hall. I looked after the columnists and soon rounded up a talented and convivial bunch, among them Ronnie Scott, which gave me entry to his club and the music I adored.

Ronnie became a friend but an elusive columnist. I had to organise search parties to find him on the day he was meant to deliver his column. More often than not he’d be found at some card game and his eight hundred words would be written, during a game of poker, on paper napkins, beer mats, backs of envelopes. On one famous occasion he rang me from a game, asking me to give him an advance on his wages to fund ‘a winning streak’. I did so and some time later sent a messenger to collect his copy, bearing a note from me saying: ‘How goes the winning streak?’ The messenger returned, minus the article but with a note from Ronnie saying: ‘Winning streak going well. Send more money.’

Topic
didn’t last long. It went bust. It didn’t spell disaster for Michael Heseltine because it wasn’t his money. He went on to a life in politics and a career as a very successful businessman.

Nick Tomalin joined
The Sunday Times
and proved himself a journalist of great courage and distinction. He was killed by a sniper on the Golan Heights on the border of Israel and Syria in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. I still see his lopsided grin. I miss him to this very day. Clive Irving took Jeremy and Ron to
The Sunday Times
where, under that brave crusading editor Harold Evans, they set up an investigative unit called ‘Insight’ and revolutionised the manner in which newspapers unearthed the big stories.

Perhaps its greatest triumph was in unmasking the thalidomide scandal, one of the few times it made you proud of being a journalist. Clive asked me to join him but I’d been hearing the Hovis tune again and fancied going back up north. I imagined editing an old-fashioned weekly, the kind with small ads on the front page. I would join the Rotary Club, buy a Labrador and take lung-filling walks across Ilkley Moor.

In fact what happened was I received a call from Barrie Heads, then an executive producer at Granada Television. We had met when I was covering a Labour Party Conference during my time on the
Manchester Guardian
. He was looking for a producer to work on local programmes and rang to see if I was interested.

‘But I don’t know anything about producing television,’ I said.

‘Nor do we,’ he said, with a laugh.

I was hooked and on my way.

18

GRANADALAND

When you walked through the door into Granada Television in Cross Street, Manchester you felt the place was special, certainly different from the other media temples I had worked in. The main reception area was dominated by a large compelling painting by Francis Bacon, the canteen illuminated with a challenging mural by John Bratby. In every office hung a portrait of P.J. Barnum, the American circus-owner, as a reminder that we might be journalists, but never forget the razzle-dazzle.

Everything bore the stamp of Sidney Bernstein, the socialist millionaire who founded the company with his brother Cecil. It is said that when deciding to apply for an ITV franchise, Sidney studied a map of Britain, checked the rainfall figures and chose the area that came to be known as Granadaland because it had a large population in a part of the kingdom where it rained most of the time. It was still in its infancy when I arrived but already had a reputation as a troublesome child.

The late David Plowright, with whom I was to work and who later became head of Granada, once described the company as ‘the most innovative, self-opinionated, insufferably arrogant television company of the lot’.

Another colleague, Brian Armstrong, who spent thirty-seven years at Granada, summed it up best of all. Brian said Granada was like a ‘large, sprawling, vexatious family always biffing each other on the nose, but if anyone comes from outside and says anything about them they get a whack’. It was quite unlike any organisation I had worked for before, or since.

In the early days only ten per cent of the programme-makers at Granada had any previous experience of telly. The rest of us, mainly recruited from newspapers, learned as we went along. The pervading atmosphere was one of creative anarchy. We didn’t have long and boring meetings talking about the meaning of programmes. We started with a running order, wrote a script, hired a front man, pointed a camera at him and hoped for the best.

Barrie Heads, who had hired me and had worked for the
Yorkshire Post
, said he wanted me to produce a five nights a week live show called
Scene at 6.30
. It came under the auspices of local programming but he asked us to pretend we had never heard the word. He wanted a programme to match the changing mood of the time, to be irreverent and funny and seditious.

We hired good writers, including Peter Eckersley, who went on to become Granada’s Head of Drama, and Arthur Hopcraft, who first displayed his talents as a playwright at Granada.