These days I can't stand such programmes, but when I first became interested in politics as a young teenager I listened avidly to Any Questions? on BBC Radio 4.
So a few random memories of some of the more regular panellists in those days.
Richard Marsh had been a trade union official and a youthful member of Harold Wilson's cabinet in the Sixties, but by the time I heard him he was gratingly pro-business - full of talk of "UK Ltd" and the like. It was no surprise when he endorsed Margaret Thatcher in 1978 and received a peerage in return,
Ann Mallalieu was a young Labour-supporting barrister with a lovely deep voice. She received a peerage in 1991 and returned to prominence in the media as a supporter of fox hunting when Blair's government set about banning it.
Russell Braddon was an Australian writer who had made his name with The Naked Island, an account of the war in the Pacific and his years as a prisoner of the Japanese. I remember him as purveying right-wing views in an overly emotional voice.
Arianna Stassinopoulos - billed as a former president of the Cambridge Union - was never off the programme, though some wags claimed she was so dull that you fell asleep halfway through her name.
Michael Clayton, "editor of Horse and Hound", was another permanent fixture. He was on the panel when they broadcast the programme from my school and he later moved to the area. It turns out that, until the early Seventies, Clayton had been a BBC foreign correspondent and had also reported on the Fischer vs Spassky match in Reykjavik.
Fast forward a few years (which seemed like a couple of lifetimes while I had to live through them) and I'm a student at York. In fact, I'm at the Derwent Horrors - a long evening of horror films put on from time to time by Derwent College.
On the bill that night was Rabid, an early David Cronenberg film. But I remember another offering from the evening because it was so bad. In Night of the Lepus, an American family is menaced by giant killer rabbits that have escaped from a secure facility after an experiment gone wrong.
Because the film's premise was so ludicrous, and because the family had a particularly annoying child, we took to cheering the rabbits whenever they appeared.
And what ties all these memories together? It's that Night of the Lepus was based on a novel called The Year of the Angry Rabbit, which had been written by Any Questions? stalwart Russell Braddon.
4 comments:
Arianna Stassinopoúlos (later Arianna Huffington, of Huffington Post fame) was the, erm, "muse and confidante" of Bernard Levin, the Times columnist, and another Any Questions stalwart. The reason the programme was so good in those days was because they rarely had politicians on the Panel, and never a front bencher. The occasional backbencher would make up the numbers from time to time, but they weren't there to peddle a party "line". They were expected to be a bit idiosyncratic in order to make the programme more interesting.
Like you, I never listen these days - and the TV version is even worse.
Are you too young to remember Bob Boothby, another regular panel member, who I used to find most entertaining as one of the more liberal Conservative members? That was before the revelation of his promiscuous sexual behaviour including an affair with Dorothy Macmillan and his relationship with the Kray twins. Mirror proprietor Cecil King had a photograph of Boothby with Ronnie and Reggie and one of their stable of boys which would surely have brought down the Conservative government if published.
Yes, people of my generation will have witnessed the swing across the party arc of Richard Marsh. In a prophetic contribution to AQ? when he was still a leading Labourite, he said that he had been told that people became more conservative as they grew older. So, he said, he dreaded going to heaven when he died because it would be full of Tories.
I can remember seeing Boothby on television, but he was really before my time. His relations with the Krays may have unconsciously inspired Lord Bonkers' friendship with Violent Bonham Carter.
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