The Classic Interviews of John Freeman

We have seen some of these images before, but usually only in small portions or snatches of other documentaries. This remarkable DVD re-issue by the BBC includes all the surviving audio-visual footage from its Face to Face series, which was telecast as a regular feature in the United Kingdom from 1959 to 1961. The format of the series was unusual. The subjects interviewed included a wide variety of eminent people in politics, the arts and the professions, ranging from Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Lord Shawcross QC to Dr Martin Luther King, from the psychologist Carl Jung to the comedian Tony Hancock, from the poet Dame Edith Sitwell to the pop singer Adam Faith, and from the painter Augustus John to the racing driver Stirling Moss. In all, some thirty-four people who were great figures at the middle of the twentieth century agreed to undergo a lengthy and probing (but always civil) interrogation on national television. The interviewer was former Labour MP John Freeman, who was later to be British ambassador to the United States. He was one of the most confident, astute and penetrating interviewers ever to appear on television. Notably, however, the format agreed upon required that in all these interviews, only the back of Freeman’s head would appear, with the camera focusing intently (and at times, quite intensely) upon the interviewee, who remained seated in a chair set against nothing more than a black velvet studio cloth, which further focused all attention upon the features and demeanour of the subject.

The results are startling and wonderful in their immediacy. Such in-depth interviews with major public figures are these days increasingly a rarity. Indeed, it is hard to think of any similar examples in recent years; and it is a long time since David Frost’s interviews with Richard Nixon. And no wonder—any politician’s media “minder” these days would run a mile before exposing his charge to a John Freeman. But then, the likes of Freeman are scarce. Occasionally these days, an evening television news magazine in Australia such as The 7.30 Report will feature an experienced interviewer such as Kerry O’Brien effectively grilling a public figure on some issue or other and managing to get a little beyond the “spin” which now infects so much public discourse on serious matters. Or, we may see more extended interviews with public figures, most often in retirement or decline, being interviewed in a “softer” manner. We rarely see an incisive and extended probing such as those by John Freeman in Face to Face.

Hence this DVD re-issue stands out as an exceptional document. It is accompanied by a generous forty-eight-page booklet about the origin and making of the series, as well as notes on the lives and careers of the “sitters” in this exhibition gallery of televised notable personalities. The notes appear over the name of Hugh Burnett, producer of the series, but they were presumably proofed by someone of a much more recent generation than Freeman and his collaborators, as they contain some howlers such as an English judge being “elected” to the Bench, and reference to a lawyer as “King’s Council”. One wonders what readers of the Spectator would make of the blandly egregious statement, in connection with the interview with the British politician Lord Morrison of Lambeth, that: “His grandson, Peter Mandelson, became a prominent Labour politician and played a major part in modernising the party in the mid-1990s.”

However, the booklet is otherwise very good and neatly encapsulates the significance of each interviewee and aspects of their interviews. Indeed, taking together the booklet and the six discs of interviews reproduced in all the sharp clarity of vintage black-and-white television, and amounting to a total running time of some eighteen hours, one can treat this as a major collection of explorations into the lives, achievements and foibles of the subjects. If printed in book form, it would be a production of substantial bulk indeed. Therefore, at a cost of around fifty pounds, these six DVDs represent very good value for money. Bonuses on Disc 6 include a photo gallery and footage of John Freeman interviewed in California in 1988 by the late Irish psychiatrist and broadcaster Anthony Clare.

Space does not permit comment here on all the interviews; and to do so might reduce the enjoyment of one’s actual viewing. However, suffice it to notice the following few instances from these sequences of footage, which must now, at an interval of about fifty years, constitute insightful historic documents of the very first order. We see the eccentric dress, style and manner of Dame Edith Sitwell, but we also learn her quite down-to-earth reasons for adopting them; as well as her reasons (good ones) for trying to teach critics “their manners”. And all expressed in her very distinctive mode of speech. Tony Hancock is subjected to a searching set of questions and at various points, the pressure upon him shows in his face and hands. Like some other interviewees, he nervously smokes cigarettes. Augustus John, interviewed in his old age, comes across as the venerable bohemian that he was; and he chain-smokes profusely. It is highly unlikely any interviews could now be conducted in clouds of smoke, in these days of “health and safety” and political correctness.

One of the boldest and most effusive subjects interviewed was an associate of Churchill, Lord Boothby, who had a lengthy affair with another premier’s wife, as well as leading a colourful playboy life generally. However, the jewel in the crown of these interviews is perhaps that of Evelyn Waugh—by turns reserved, sharp, precise and almost feline in evasion when it suited him, but on the whole frank and forthright. This interview has not quite the same fire as Waugh’s 1953 BBC radio effort (also available on CD from the British Library in its Spoken Word series) which was described as “the most ill-natured interview ever”—but his televised performance is not to be missed.

Some of the interviews were, owing to the subjects’ age or frailty, conducted not in the special studio, but on location. Freeman visited Jung in Switzerland, Henry Moore at his studio at Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, John in his Hampshire studio, and Sir Compton Mackenzie in bed at his Edinburgh home. Among other subjects Freeman interviewed were the conductor Otto Klemperer, the politician Lord Hailsham, philosopher Bertrand Russell, diplomatist Adlai Stevenson, King Hussein of Jordan, film-maker John Huston, Lord Reith of BBC fame, the French actress Simone Signoret, politician Jomo Kenyatta, playwright John Osborne, photographer Cecil Beaton and the footballer Danny Blanchflower.

It is a valuable additional feature of this DVD re-issue that the fine portrait drawings of the interview subjects, done for the series by Feliks Topolski, also appear at the start of each episode. The signature tune used for the series, an overture excerpt from Berlioz’s unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges, caused some hilarity after Lord Birkett, a then very senior judge, appeared on the series. A friend of his noted that Les Francs-Juges “concerned the sinister tribunals held in Westphalia during the Middle Ages, after which the condemned prisoner would disappear for ever”. Birkett then wrote to Freeman amusingly: “What do you think the damages would be if a powerful Broadcasting Corporation were to play this music as the prelude and postlude to a television programme consisting of an interview with a celebrated Judge who sits judicially in the House of Lords?”

It is a sad comment on how the medium of television has “developed” to have to note that television interviews of this depth and incisiveness are not only now a very rare occurrence, but also that such an interview at the same level of timing (an average duration of about thirty minutes each) and the same standard of sustained and informed interrogation, is infrequently countenanced by telecasters. Well after Face to Face came Michael Parkinson’s shows involving a different type of interview (and sometimes with more than one person at a time) and often with subjects whose main point of eminence was celebrity. David Frost’s interview style was perhaps a little closer to Freeman’s, but the format was again one which gave at least some prominence to the personality of the interviewer rather than a close and unrelieved focus on the subjects themselves. One has to allow for some idiosyncrasies on Freeman’s part: in certain ways (more or less irritating, according to taste) he does remind us of “the man with the New Statesman” who keeps turning up at sightseeing venues in Martin Boyd’s Much Else in Italy. Contemporary interview formats are more usually much more diffuse and more often than not, tend towards the “panellist” format. Some television interviewers today, such as Andrew Denton in Australia, do still operate along lines broadly similar to Face to Face. However, Freeman is a hard act to follow. This DVD set from the BBC is an inspired document of television past.