Brian McFarlane

Having cut my narrative teeth on Dad and Dave and Martin’s Corner (and my critical molars on the Listener-In), I had high expectations of this book. Night after childhood night, I would wait agog for Wrigley’s Chewing Gum and a burst of rowdy music to usher in the outback doings of Dad and his hayseed family. Martin’s Corner, on the other hand, was brought to our living room by Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which, we were assured, would ‘provide the essential bulk or roughage your system needs to keep it functioning healthily and regularly’. I didn’t know what this meant, but, such was the persuasive power of commercial radio, I believed it. Just as I believed from Sunday-night listening to the Lux Radio Theatre that ‘nine out of ten Hollywood stars used Lux for their daily active lather facials’, though I did wonder about the arid pores of that misguided ‘tenth’ star. The ABC was there for the news, but it was 3LK for entertainment, including such taxing intellectual games as Quiz Kids and Bob Dyer’s Pick-a-Box.

Reviewing is normally a pleasurable activity, but it’s not often so absurdly enjoyable as listening to the three CDs at issue here. These are a treasure house of British writers whose lives span 150 years. Authors from Arthur Conan Doyle to Muriel Spark, to name the first and last interviewees (1930 and 1989), can be heard talking about the art and craft of their profession. Perhaps because we now live in such a celebrity-conscious age, I kept marvelling to myself: that’s G.K. Chesterton’s or Graham Greene’s actual voice I’m hearing.

Noël Coward is caught for a few questions on the run at Heathrow; Virginia Woolf reads from a prepared script. The approach for most of the rest lies somewhere in between, as the big names are encouraged by interviewers of varying degrees of intrusiveness and deference. So Kenneth Tynan fields Harold Pinter almost as a mate, the somewhat hectoring Walter Allen addresses C.P. Snow as ‘Charles’, while Frank Kermode calls the author of Lord of the Flies ‘Golding’. Some just introduce their subjects and leave it up to them; others, most notably George MacBeth when interviewing J.G. Ballard, see themselves as co-stars.

I approached this readable and well-informed study expecting a middling book on a middling filmmaker. Michael Winterbottom is obviously a talented man by the standards of modern British commercial cinema, but I have always associated his work with a routine blend of fashionable technique and pious liberal sentiment. Nor did Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams raise my hopes with their introduction, in which they praise Winterbottom’s business sense and his avoidance of ‘high-flown accounts of what he is up to’. Above all, they seem impressed by the sheer industry of a director who has averaged one feature a year for the past decade and a half; however you judge him, ‘he does keep getting his films made’.

If you felt there was a touch of hubris in Baz Luhrmann’s naming his movie Australia, you may think the opening sentence of Christopher Bigsby’s biography of Arthur Miller even more startling in its pretensions: ‘This is the story of a writer, but it is also the story of America.’ Not, observe, ‘a story’, but ‘the story’. This grandiose proposition helps to account for nearly 700 dense, uncompromising pages – and they only take in the first half of Miller’s long life (1915–2005).

To become associated, even identified, with a role or a certain kind of role may ward off the financial uncertainties of an actor’s career, but it undoubtedly also brings its limitations. Remember how ineffably lady-like Greer Garson appeared in her MGM heyday: I recall watching her narrow her eyes in Mrs Miniver and thinking that she could play Lady Macbeth if someone gave her the chance. No one ever did. Leo McKern wasn’t quite so effectively imprisoned by his ‘Rumpole’ persona, but it is at least on the cards that he will be remembered with such tenacity for nothing else.