When Frost Met Bakewell: Joan Bakewell at 80

Joan Bakewell has been a formidable but provocative presence

on our television screens for more than 50 years.

She came to fame in the 1960s on Late Night Line-Up,

the BBC's end-of-day discussion and arts programme.

Talking late into the night with the movers and shakers of the day,

Joan quickly became a new face of the BBC.

Young, fashionable, clever and, of course, female.

She would lead a mini-skirted assault

on the tweedy, all-male preserve of arts and academics.

In the pre-politically correct age,

they would call her "the thinking man's crumpet."

It was a label that stuck.

But Joan took no notice, and with her cool mix

of head prefect meets girl about town,

embraced the spirit of the age.

She'd escaped a humdrum childhood in the North of England

to read history and economics at Cambridge.

There, she met her first husband, Michael Bakewell.

They married in 1955, and would go on to have two children.

But a life of conventional domesticity was not for Joan.

These were the pioneer days of television,

and she could not resist them.

One guest at Late Night Line-Up was the playwright Harold Pinter.

Their love affair, conducted throughout the '60s,

and while both of them were married, became the stuff of media legend

and inspired one of Pinter's best plays, Betrayal.

Now, Joan is 80. She's still broadcasting...

..she's a Dame of the British Empire,

a Baroness in the House of Lords...

..she goes to the gym twice a week,

tweets daily, and drives a fast car.

She believes the longer you live, the more outspoken you can be.

SAXOPHONE MUSIC

Hello, good evening, and welcome,

and above all, Joan, congratulations on making it to 80.

Thank you, thank you.

You don't feel that old, do you?

I don't know how old it's meant to feel, I think

you feel where you are, you know,

so the number is really irrelevant. I still feel -

and a lot of older people will tell you they still feel -

as they did many years younger, because the spirit doesn't age.

And why do you work so hard?

Oh, that's the point of life, isn't it? To go on doing

what it is you enjoy.

That's how I'm planning to spend the next 20 years,

which is to do more of the same, and get as much pleasure from it.

Well, let's go back into your world.

"I was born into happiness," you said.

Yes, I was born to parents who were delighted to have a child, very much

in love with each other,

the first born, and I was the benefit of early years that were,

I think, enormously influential in me,

they gave me an upbeat spirit,

a sense that the world was a good place to be, and that has lingered,

even though the family went rather off track.

Yes, that was tragic, what...

Your mother developed or whatever, melancholy or a depression,

and that started when you were about 11?

Yes, what is interesting is I think it happened to a whole

generation of women who were school girls in the '40s.

What seemed to happen was that their mothers, who had opportunities

when they were younger -

my mother got a scholarship to a grammar school but had to leave

because they couldn't afford the uniform - hopes raised then dashed.

She got a good job as a tracer in an engineering firm, head of the

department, job applied for, couldn't do it because she was a woman.

So hopes raised and then dashed, hopes raised and then dashed

and that afflicted a whole generation of women

who became depressed, and there was a big rise

in the taking of tranquilisers among housewives after the war.

Women were somehow disappointed in the options that life had

seemed to present and then had snatched from them.

There was something additional,

probably, with your mother, wasn't there?

Although at home she became more and more silent and

non-communicative and more temper and so on and so forth, at the same

time, you said, if you went out,

then she would talk and so on, because she wanted everybody

to think you were a perfect family, so that she could force herself

to talk, going out - why couldn't she do it at home with you?

That's very true of a lot of depressive people though,

they are able to sustain an image of themselves in the outside world,

one that they really wished was a genuine one, but when

they were at home, the inner self and the depression took over.

There was also the dilemma for my mother which was that

I was the first generation of young people who made it to a university,

and to some extent she envied me the opportunities

I've had. She was every bit, if not brighter, than I was.

And she would have flourished in the sort of generation today,

but that was not available to her, and she must, I now realise,

have looked with envy on the sort of options that life offered me.

What impact did it have on you, do you think, seeing your mother

in this non-communicative state most of the time?

It often made rather conflicting emotions,

one which was, of course, having had these early years of such

happiness, I was enormously bewildered by what was going on,

but also nobody used the word depression in those days,

there was no such thing as therapy for depression.

We just thought she had, the phrase was, "trouble with her nerves."

A lot of women had "trouble with their nerves."

And so I was completely bewildered by it, but also quite angry.

How important at that time in your childhood was the wireless,

was the BBC wireless?

Oh, the wireless, it was absolutely crucial - that

and the record player. The radio was the lifeline for

all news during the war.

You listened to every bulletin to hear about the defeats

and, to some extent, the BBC tempered its reports to indicate

that we weren't losing as hard as we were doing,

when really we almost lost the war,

so you went along with all the posters, you know,

Dangerous Talk Costs Lives, Dig For Victory,

all of that to a young person was a great rallying call for unity,

so I became enormously patriotic,

something I've not lost, enormously committed to the righting of wrongs

which, rather naively, perhaps, I still believe in.

Yes.

And also the sense that a community can work together to an objective -

the war instilled that in a whole generation

and you don't find that so much today. There was a sense

of united purpose about the country, which in the memory feels wonderful,

but, of course, you were fighting a most tyrannical and dreadful enemy.

I remember the blitz in Manchester,

going out into the back garden and seeing a great glow,

which was something like 15 miles away, which was Manchester burning,

and that was terrifying - as a child you didn't know when it was going to

be near you. I remember a German plane being shot down nearby

and all the children rushing to collect shrapnel,

and we traded shrapnel, like other children traded stamps,

we collected shrapnel.

So there was fear and a sense of brooding terror around.

There were things later on that you had to learn about war,

but, at the time, it was a very exhilarating, morale-boosting

enterprise which resulted in victory which we celebrated.

What about when you saw pictures of Dachau, and Belsen, and so on,

what did you make of those?

Well, that came after the war and I never forget that.

The shock, when we went to the cinema

and saw the newsreel of the concentration camps, was traumatic.

I was relatively young,

I thought the world was a good place,

I thought people behaved well, even in war, when they killed each other -

I knew about war, but I didn't know about concentration camps and

torture, and extermination,

I had no idea that people could behave like that.

And, of course, the pictures of piled bodies went unedited, virtually,

and I've never forgotten that moment,

I've never forgotten how terrible it was.

And, in a sense, it shifted my view of the world, that the world

contained such horror, and from then on I've always been rather...

not cynical, but aware that the world contained monsters.

Did your parents at that time... As you were studying, and so on,

were they ambitious for you or not? Later on your mother,

we think, from what you say,

resented your success possibly, later,

but, at the time, were your parents rah-rah-rahing you on to get awards

in terms of examinations that the family had never had before?

Well, I was part of that generation who benefited, probably yours, too...

-Yeah.

-..who benefited from social mobility, so my grandparents had both

worked in factories or foundries or breweries and so on.

My parents had "bettered themselves,"

would be the explanation, the word they used.

And they believed in getting on in study and achievement,

so they were aspirational, I think the contemporary word is,

and they were for me.

So they wanted me to pass exams and do well, just for its own sake,

because they knew it would be rewarding, whatever I made of it.

And then when boyfriends came on the scene, that triggered

off an explosion with your mother, really, didn't it?

The burning of the photograph.

It triggered a lot of things - I think boyfriends often do.

But in those days and certainly in my background, which was

sort of lower, well, working class, lower middle class, now we're

defining classes, which class we belong to, there was a great deal

of anxiety surrounding sex, basically because girls could get pregnant

and that was the most terrible thing,

you would be a social outcast if you were,

you would be a social outcast if your DAUGHTER got pregnant.

So, the arrival of boyfriends carried that menace with it

and I went on a trip to Holland which was a scholarship,

travelling scholarship, with boys from the local grammar schools,

heretofore I'd been at a girls-only school,

and therefore obeyed all the rules of the women teachers.

Access to boys was new to me and very exciting and I came back with a

variety of photographs, one of which - if you think of photographs now as

being shocking, this was a picture of me kissing a boy, which my mother

discovered and called me in and lit a fire laid in the hearth and she

said, "I am going to burn...

"We're going to burn this photograph together,

"and I never want to know anything like this ever happening again."

And she put it on the fire and the flames consumed the photograph.

How she expected me to ever have a boyfriend and get engaged

and married, let alone have children, I have no idea, but it represented

real terror for her that at the age of 16 I was kissing boys.

Sex before marriage most parents forbade,

didn't they? Whereas today...

You say you remember it and it was a very strange time.

People got married in order to have sex, sex before marriage was

forbidden and all sorts of crazy rules were established to

make sure that you didn't "do it".

I was not allowed to be in the house with a boyfriend on our own,

my parents had to be there.

But it just meant that we went down the fields and we went, you know,

we went, as it were, the back of the bike shed, so it wasn't literally

the back of the bike sheds, but, I mean, in order to get some expertise

in this extremely important skill of one's sex life, you had to avoid

all sorts of barriers put in your way by teachers, by the church, by

the parents. All three institutions believed in the same thing -

that young girls should be protected from the evils of sex

and the risks attendant on it until they were married, at which point

it was expected to flower into some great romantics of orgy of pleasure.

These untrained lovers were expected to cop on to it immediately.

How foolish can you be, really? But of course it caused

a lot of pain for struggling...

-You know, eager young women, and boys, too.

-Of course.

The next change... When you moved on to Cambridge, that was a family

dream that you were fulfilling for the first time,

really, wasn't it?

Yes, I've always thought that the moment

I went to university at Cambridge it changed my life.

First of all, geographically, I mean, I grew up in Stockport, which was

a smoky, factory town in the North of England and quite drab - still

not very bright, but I am very loyal to it -

and I went to Cambridge - leafy paradise - so that, geographically,

was just extraordinary. Poetically, you know - walking along the banks,

the daffodils in spring, all the cliches.

But the other thing was moving from a community concerned

and obsessed with all these anxieties, to a free-spirited...

A place where people exchanged ideas and where learning mattered,

having fun mattered, you were allowed to, you were given permission

and within the limits of Cambridge,

as it was then, very, very liberating.

And you found your accent was very different

to that of all your contemporaries at Cambridge,

although you had had... Your mother, I guess, or your father

had organised elocution lessons for you when you were growing up.

Yes, the aspiring working class wanted their children to

"speak proper" and I was sent to elocution lessons to get

rid of my Stockport accent,

and...my mother struggled to give me a decent elocuted voice.

So, I arrive at Cambridge, a scholarship girl from Stockport,

and all the other girls at Newnham and Girton are,

a lot of them are from Rodene and St Pauls and Cheltenham Ladies College,

and although they treat me as an equal

and don't remember my anxiety....

No-one else from Stockport Grammar?

Nobody else was from Stockport Grammar School and,

and they all spoke with southern accents,

and I found that rather intimidating - I just wanted to be like them.

Did you have a go?

Yes, I was so anxious to run with the crowd

that I completely over did it.

When I went back home, my parents didn't know what had happened,

some extraordinary change had come over me

and, of course, it's often mentioned in people's autobiographies and

novels of the time that going away to university from a working class

family - you come back and there's a gulf has opened up between you.

And when you were at Cambridge, were you already planning careers,

or didn't that really happen until after Cambridge?

I did a little acting at Cambridge, not very distinguished,

but, nonetheless, I was thrilled by that.

I was in Peter Hall's first production, he later became

the person who created the National Theatre, of course.

I was in his first production, which was Anouilh's play,

Point Of Departure. I played...

As one of my contemporaries then practising being a critic said,

"Joan Rowlands..." -

that was then my name - "..played a whore like the Virgin Mary."

Not a great recommendation really, so I clearly wasn't very good.

But I liked the idea of being part of a team that

put on a performance, which of course is what television is.

And so you were, you were learning things that were in addition

to academic things that would be of value for you in different,

different fields, even if you didn't know which fields at that time.

More important than that, I was learning who I was.

I was learning who I was,

and that was really at that time between 18 and 22

when you really find out, so quickly, so many different

things about what you want in life, the truth about yourself with all

the complex social overlay stripped away...

I think that is wonderful, I think

it's great to be between those ages and able to discover what you want.

And I knew I wanted to belong to this world of ideas in some way.

And feminism, by the time you were at Cambridge, was that

word in currency?

No, it wasn't, though I have to say I was at a school that had -

a girls grammar school - which had six houses,

and they were called Bronte, Austin, Gaskells, Nightingales, Slessers

and Beales, all named after distinguished women, so it was bred

into us that women were on their way and women had to define their lives.

Now, of course, when I arrived at Cambridge, which was a great

benefit, women were not allowed...

And you were to follow quite soon after,

but your trajectory was entirely different from mine, because women

were not allowed in the Footlights,

they were not allowed to be in the Union, there were only two women's

colleges and 14 men's colleges,

so, although Cambridge was hugely eye-opening, it was pretty restricted

in the opportunities it gave you - you had to make the most of it.

So, also women did feel there was a lot of work

to be done about the opportunities given to women

and, of course, it's been the story of my life how they've done it.

There were some advantages to being

a woman - like, for instance, the fact that there were roughly,

when I was there, 9,000 men and 1,000 or so women,

so that you had much more choice.

Yes, there was, there was choice.

It was rather strange, it was rather...

We were in these single sex colleges

where men were not allowed to stay, obviously, overnight and if you got

pregnant, as a colleague of mine did, you were sent down on the instant.

No appeals, as it were?

The very next train, the very next train out of Cambridge

because she'd "fallen from grace," as it were...

She's still married to the person who was the father of the children!

So there was all that constraint on the lives that women

led in Cambridge.

But nonetheless there was a great sense that the role of women

was changing, and in a sense perhaps the men didn't really

know about it yet -

that in fact it would be the story of the 20th century,

the emerging role of women, that would affect us most.

And how did you learn - not from your parents, obviously -

how did you learn the facts of life? Conversation with girlfriends, or...

a secret copy of Alex Comfort's first book or what?

Oh, no, the books about things weren't available.

Gossip, exploratory conversations -

"Does it..." "What, you mean that..?"

"Oh, how strange" - that was at school.

A little later it got, it got subsumed into an enthusiasm

for, I don't know, Wuthering Heights and Rochester and Heathcliff and

DH Lawrence and the great fiction about sexuality,

which of course was heady stuff.

Not much practical use - practical use was taught

between girls, about what you could do,

and how there was such a thing as contraception,

and where you could go for it, and where you might find it.

And indeed also current was how you might get, if you needed it,

an abortion, which was illegal.

And at that stage, when you went to London, you failed to get

contraception, contraceptive advice or whatever, didn't you?

I went... That's right. I mean, it's hard to imagine now

that the world could have been so resistant to

women changing their lives. I went along to a doctor and said I wanted

some contraceptive, and he said... And I said I was getting married,

I was just about to get married. "Oh," he said,

"You don't need anything like that, you're a good healthy woman,

"you can bear lots of children."

Goodbye, end of story, no help there.

So, I mean, the world was very reluctant to equip girls with

the wherewithal to have a sex life that was free of anxiety,

free of anxiety, so there was a lot of anxiety around sex.

And so you were thwarted at that turn

and so you, at that stage,

you decided just to take the risk, as it were?

Yes, people, people took the risk, they knew the odds.

Some were unlucky, most of us got away with it.

We didn't go in for orgiastic indulgence,

but, I mean, you know, romance and so on had its power,

not to mention the hormones.

But you fell in love at Cambridge, didn't you?

I did, yes - I fell in love quite a number of times,

and then eventually I fell in love with someone who was to become

my first husband, to whom I was married for 17 years.

And you weren't allowed even -

until you got married, you couldn't share a flat or anything,

even when you left Cambridge?

No, when you went to rent a flat,

they did need to know that you were married.

There was a lot of wearing of curtain rings on your third finger

and a lot of lying and cheating. You know, the world

you lived in was a construct to serve what you actually wanted.

So people got married in order to have sustained sex in the same

place regularly - that's what marriage offered people

who might wish to cohabit, but society made it very difficult.

So that's why people did marry and married at 22.

And marriage obviously came at a time when you were also,

in your case, being 22, you were thinking about a career

and therefore you were face to face with the fact that it was

more difficult for women to combine work and marriage than men.

Do you know, David, I don't think I've ever thought in terms of a career.

I've always thought in terms of doing something interesting with my time.

So I did sign up and became a BBC studio manager in radio -

technical job, I was terribly bad at it,

and because I was bad at it, I wasn't happy,

and so I didn't stay there very long.

I became a copywriter - now that was a very interesting training.

It trains you in the use of words,

but it also trains you in the place of women in the world,

and I was given the Tampax account, which was an American product

for women's health, but the leaflet had to be translated

into English from American and I was given that task.

In the course of this advertisement,

they wanted to shift from the sketches,

which were socially acceptable,

of women during "that time of the month",

into a photograph of a woman - new realism was the case in advertising.

There was to be a new reality in television

and they could not find a model who would be photographed

for a sanitary product - no model would dream of doing it.

So, eventually, I just said, "Oh, well, I'll do it,

"I'll do the photographs." I got six guineas.

Six guineas!

So, advertising you found a bit pernicious, didn't you?

It seemed to me that advertising got people to buy things they didn't need and couldn't afford,

and I thought, was this exactly the right thing to be doing?

And so I was a little high-minded about advertising -

much fun to be had, but I was... I wasn't sure that social objectives

were ones that I really rated very highly.

So how did you make the transfer to the BBC?

Well, I was doing... I was out of the BBC for being a bad technician.

I then married, and then I had my first child,

and I'd read all the books about childcare, I was going to do everything

according to the book - people always start out that way -

and decided to stay at home.

After about nine months staying at home rocking the cradle -

babies don't talk very much - I found I was getting really quite bored

and I remember thinking, well, I got a degree at Cambridge

and here I am. I mean, this is it - is this it?

Is that how it's meant to be? And what I started to do then was recall my time in radio

when people used to arrive at Broadcasting House and would

go into a studio - I was doing the knobs, turning the knobs badly.

They would record a talk, which they had typed out, brought in,

they read to the microphone, it took about half an hour,

and they went away with three guineas.

And I thought, that's an interesting way to earn a living,

because you can look after a child and earn three guineas in an afternoon.

How do I crack that? How do you get to do that?

You have to have something to write about.

And so I set about concocting all sorts of ideas

and writing to everyone - "no, no, no, no, no, no."

And that's where my sheer persistence at that stage

won me the opportunity to do the occasional talk for three guineas,

and it was in radio that I just began to learn, by copying others,

how to write and present small items.

And then, 1965, you made it to Late Night Line-Up.

Yes, I was... This was suggested to me -

television as an option was suggested to me in the bar

at the BBC, which was a very flourishing place in those days,

by a very distinguished radio producer called Reggie Smith,

who was full of ideas and opportunities, and I remember him

turning to me one day and saying, "You've done radio, Joan, "What about television?"

And I said, "Well, no, I can't do the technology of radio,

"I'm certainly not going to be able to do camera work in television."

He said, "In front of a camera."

I said, "What?! In front of the camera?"

He said, "Give it a go. There's this new building

"over in West - Television Centre - in West London, they're building this

"new building, it's full of wonderful studios,

"it's a factory of programme making -

"get over there and see if you can't do something to camera."

When was the first time you conducted your first interview

on Late Night Line-Up?

I've wiped it from my memory. It's gone, I am happy to say.

Line-Up was on every day of the year except Christmas Day,

so that's 364 programmes a year, and it was on for eight years.

And I joined it in 1965,

it was on BBC Two, every night - late, obviously -

and somewhere along there I was given the chance to do

an interview. I can't believe how terrible it must have been.

But in a sense it was a new medium, and people were trying out

new things, and they were prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt,

and I stayed with that team for many, many years.

And according to the dates, it shows that in 1966, only after

a year at Late Night Line-Up, you were chosen to confront the one

and only Robin Day, which must have been quite a fearsome moment.

Yes. Robin meant it to be fierce.

Robin Day represented a breakthrough in the style of interviewing.

He prefigured Paxman,

he was aggressive, and pursued his interviewee.

I was invited to interview him and he was enormously rude, I think

you could say, very stone-walling, completely ungenerous.

What did he say to you off camera?

Oh, Robin was very sexist, you know, and that was the era when sexism was

quite current as we now know in the BBC. I always remember him saying

to me, "Do the people you interview always stare at your breasts?"

Did he?!

I don't recall, but obviously he remembered.

Well, let's take a look at that, where you are confronted with

the challenge of Robin Day.

Your directness is very often taken for rudeness, and I wonder

if the directness doesn't often antagonise the person

that you are interviewing.

Well, when you say it's very often taken as rudeness, what is your evidence of that?

Well, the image that you convey is of almost trying to undermine

someone's confidence and opinions.

Well, an image isn't evidence, and when you say try to - what did you say? -

"undermine their confidence," well, I don't know how often

you go to the House of Commons, but if for instance you'd been

to the censure debate last Monday night in the House of Commons

when Mr Wilson most of the time was trying to speak above a hubbub

of uproar, and it often happens the other way round,

constant interruptions.

Now, anything that happens in a short television interview

is absolutely peanuts.

Well, an Oxford contemporary of yours said that you've at sometime or other

insulted all your friends, so it isn't surprising

if the image has been conveyed that you do tend to be rather aggressive.

Well, if we are going to bring up what one's student contemporaries

said about one in a moment of friendly excess,

I don't think we're going to get accurate reports of anybody.

Well, there - holding your own after a year in television.

His eyes were in the right place, though, they weren't looking down.

No, no, ignoring the breasts at that point.

Well, Robin, as you can see, was enormously aggressive,

and it was quite unfamiliar at that time for people

to be that aggressive, and certainly that aggressive towards a woman,

and he enjoyed that, he liked that, and he would have said

that's fair enough. And I didn't mind at the time either,

but I wasn't particularly fond of him, I have to say.

-Absolutely. There was no hint of a budding relationship there?

-There certainly wasn't!

Not a hint. And just as a contrast, you interviewed also at that time

Kenneth Clark. I mean, Civilisation was a television series,

but, I mean, it was almost god-like, and so to have Kenneth Clark

to talk to was a plus, and in fact, here he is right now.

At what stage in your career did you begin to collect paintings

personally as a patron of the arts?

-Oh, at school.

-Did you really?

Yes, I did indeed, I got some nice things when I was at school,

easily get things then, got a very nice Bonheur drawing

which I have still, and in my first year at Oxford

I got nice things too.

This series of 13 programs has the very ambitious title, Civilisation.

It deals with the history of Western civilisation.

Is it a personal view of yours,

or is it some attempt to make a definitive account?

Oh-ho! It couldn't be that.

Of course it's a personal view. And it's a personal view

controlled by all kinds of factors - I mean, 13 is an arbitrary number,

and obviously one could have gone on to a good many more.

How have you been able to reject close favourites - buildings,

paintings - you've not been able to use all the pieces that you love.

Which hurt most?

I minded very much leaving out the German Romantics.

Because I think they added a great deal to human faculties.

I think that was a bad mistake - or not mistake,

that was a great misfortune.

Why I did it was simply there wasn't enough visual material

-to make it that interesting.

-Mm.

How patrician things were in those days!

-Yes, wasn't it patrician?

-De haut en bas, I think.

No, it's fascinating. Do you think, in fact, that television

is a good medium for the arts, or do you see it gradually winnowing away?

By no means, by no means.

The Kenneth Clark series Civilisation was

commissioned by David Attenborough when colour came onto television.

David Attenborough thought, what would look good in colour?

The whole art of the Western world.

Which of course made the series a world success.

No, I think the arts have absolutely a major place to

play in the television schedules.

People like it, it gives lots of people access to stuff

they didn't know before. People enjoy them.

And what, on reflection,

do you think now of the words of the one and only Frank Muir?

"Thinking man's crumpet" is what you are avoiding saying,

and I thank you for that.

At the time it was a small passing remark, but it became emblematic

and was used by editors as a shorthand to define me,

and I resented that, really. I didn't mind it as a social joke,

but it did tend to categorise me in a world where you were either serious

or you were light entertainment,

and it caught me between the two,

and I wanted to work in quite a serious arena of television,

and it rather put the block on that.

So it wasn't useful and I don't think it was accurate.

Do you think you had more pressure on the way you looked,

or the way you had different outfits and costumes?

Were there more headaches for a woman on television?

It's hard to know what it was like being other people.

So I only know what it was like being me.

Well, here's an example on Nationwide, I think, coming up right now.

Lot 289 - very pretty dress, this one, 289.

Can I say eight to begin? Eight.

When I was asked to choose a dress,

I was torn between taking the plunge or keeping up appearances,

so I think in choosing this one I've managed to do both at the same time.

Although what in television terms

you'd say it gives you "very little coverage",

it is in fact a very proper dress -

it's very heavily boned around the waist and around the back,

and I have to stand very straight, completely unbending in it.

It gives one a dignity that normally

slacks, sweater, boots don't give you.

It makes rather a change for us from our working clothes,

the clothes we normally wear on television,

to be able to live out our feminine fantasies, and I see nothing

incongruous between doing a job and earning your living

and looking feminine when you want to.

You really enjoyed that bit. We all did.

I've completely wiped that from my memory -

I have to say I don't remember doing it at all.

But I like several phrases, which was "very good coverage" -

I like that, good television phrase, isn't it? "Very good coverage".

And the idea that... I still hold to the idea that there is no conflict

between looking good and enjoying feminine things,

and feminism - they are not in conflict, they are adjacent,

you don't have to be one or the other.

Don't have to be ill-dressed or whatever.

One of the great landmarks also in your life was

when you met Harold Pinter - that was in 1960, wasn't it?

Yes, yes.

And was it love at first sight for either of you?

We'd met because Harold was a recently arrived playwright

and my husband was in the drama department of radio,

so the bond initially, the friendship, was between them.

But there was an occasion at a party in which Harold

and I encountered each other,

which he's chosen to record in his play Betrayal,

which was a kind of electrifying moment of attraction,

and, in the event, not to be resisted.

And how quickly did it start after that first meeting?

Oh, the time went on and we met each other, but this,

this moment could not be denied, we couldn't pretend it hadn't

happened, and so slowly we came to the idea

that we might meet each other in a cafe

for a drink and so on - it was easier to get around

London in a car in those days, no parking problems.

How people have affairs now I don't know -

certainly no mobile phones in those days.

So one could, you know, as it were be off the radar for a period of time,

and we began to meet, and met more often,

and things moved from there.

And in fact you, you had a flat of your own.

Eventually, yes. As all lovers know, you have to find somewhere to go.

We found somewhere to go,

and eventually things became under such pressure that we had

a flat, and years later Harold was to use this story,

almost exactly, in the play Betrayal.

He didn't really invent very much except, of course,

the characters themselves, which are neither me nor him.

He wrote the play, which was looking back to this episode,

and then he had it couriered round to me one evening,

which he did with his new work,

and I read it that night and I was completely shocked.

I was completely shocked,

I was reduced to a sort of gibbering wreck.

I couldn't sleep, I was absolutely... I wasn't distraught,

I was completely disturbed by the idea that something that had

happened in the '60s that had come to a decent ending had been

resurrected in the mid '70s

into a different, entirely different life.

So I did ring Harold the next morning,

and he said, "Well, of course,

"I'm sure you want to meet," so we met and talked,

and I did say, "Of course you can write, you must

"write your plays, you must write exactly as you feel, but if I were

"to ask for one thing, it would be that you would change the title of

"the play, Betrayal, because I regard that as an accusation against me."

And Harold very carefully and meticulously explained that

the number of betrayals within the play are numerous.

And that I shouldn't take it personally!

"You shouldn't take it personally."

Of course, you interviewed Harold once on Late Night Line-Up.

I interviewed him.

There was a half-hour long interview between myself and Harold,

it was pretty electric in the studio at the time, quite a lot of...

Well, it must have been, because, did you do it as a sort of dare

in the sense of seeing whether you got rumbled?

I mean, because you weren't particularly rumbled.

You got through the interview, subtly in your part,

talking mainly about the theatre rather than private life, obviously.

No private life figured at all, and there is no trace of the recording.

This was the habit in those days. Late Night Line-Up, I did

hundreds and hundreds of interviews, but all of them were either wiped

so that they could re-use the tape, or simply ditched.

So a large part of my career has completely vanished,

regrettably, that interview with Harold.

Oh, yes, that's emotionally, and every other way, regrettable,

but the transcript exists.

Yes, we talk about plays.

It still has a certain life, but it is in the written word.

If you look at the transcript, there are occasional remarks like,

"as you know" or "as I told you before" or "I think we both know"

scattered throughout the transcript.

"I woke up in the middle of the night and I said..." Yeah.

This is a quote of yours on this area.

"In the event, an extra-marital affair,

"surviving together the loss of trust,

"is a major rite of passage in a lifelong marriage.

"With longer lives, a grown-up marriage,

"an affair is almost inevitable." It does go, you think, as far as...?

Well, I do know people who have had lifelong marriages,

and I know very well and they probably know that each or either

or both have strayed, as the phrase might be, from the loyalty.

But the strength of their commitment to each other deals with it.

Now, that seems to me an extremely adult way to deal with being married,

and they are very fortunate in having that depth of commitment

to be able to overcome these hurdles. But hurdles there will very often be,

and I think that's a mark of real success.

Yeah. Can you remember - this is more recently, um...

When you heard about Harold's recent death, um...

..what effect did that have on you?

Well, I knew he was dying.

All those close to him did,

and he'd phoned me about a fortnight before and said,

"I won't be phoning you again."

So I was ready.

It was just a complete absence, sudden absence,

of a huge and important figure in my life and in the lives of many people

and in the culture of the country.

So it was just an absence,

the sense that what had been there -

even if I didn't see him very often or speak to him very often -

lunch with him from time to time, quite regularly -

there was just nothing - absence, gone.

That was... terrible.

But as you get older, you learn about bereavement,

and, of course, that goes on happening.

Not with such a strong bond as I had with Harold,

but, generally, of course, you lose family, friends and so on.

Yeah. That's a very good description of the pattern, there.

Moving on for now.

You've done such interesting things.

I mean, for instance, there is an example here of Taboo,

which was a series you did early in the 2000s.

Here is an excerpt from that.

Nudity, shame and guilt go back a long way.

Far enough and we reach the Garden of Eden,

with Adam and Eve evicted because they knew that they were naked.

Throughout the Renaissance, Adams and Eves aplenty

were herded out of Paradise grasping guiltily at fig leaves.

The focus of their shame was their genitals.

The myth of man's fall into sin is rooted deep in Western culture,

as it was in my 1940s Sunday school.

I grew up in a family with one sister and no brothers.

My parents were modest folk, prudish by today's standards,

so I never saw them without their clothes. It would have been

unthinkable for me to see my father naked.

So I knew what girls looked like, but what about boys?

It wasn't until I came to museums and galleries like this

that I really found out the difference.

And because it was stone cold marble, I took a closer look.

Nudity gets used in all sorts of ways.

It can suggest innocence, health, honesty.

Art uses nudity to create beauty.

Politics can see it as a matter of personal freedom.

Whichever it is, it can often make us smile.

Very good timing, the phrase personal freedom comes up.

The opportunity to smile, I think, is important, too!

Yes, absolutely.

And, I mean, you said somewhere else

one of the forbidden areas or the most taboo area left

was, in fact, the male organ in an extended position.

Nudity doesn't do people harm,

and neither does entire nudity,

and neither does an erect penis. It doesn't do anyone any harm.

So, when I did that series Taboo, my basic premise -

and this qualifies what I've just said - was

nudity, sex, pleasure - good. Violence, abuse, and damage - bad.

That was my basic tenet.

But nudity? So what.

And what are the essential differences

between men and women today?

Well, I don't know where to start.

First of all, I have an impulse to say, "Look, Simone de Beauvoir."

You know, men and women are made by their culture and basically deserve

equal treatment and opportunity.

On the other hand, since her day in the late '40s, neuroscience

and investigation generally, biology,

and the look at the detail of what makes up the human organism,

the male and the female,

we're conspicuously different - we are conspicuously different.

And people are aware that different segments of the brain

in men and women work in different ways, so what we are...

Having made this strident demand that we should be equal,

we are now faced with the problem

of trying to work out how we do that when we're different components.

Absolutely, absolutely. And in terms of religion, Joan,

you've said... You've described yourself as a non-believing

member of the Church of England.

What about the Church Of England do you believe in and what not?

I am more and more confused by the Church Of England,

simply because I think it's confused about itself,

but I am, you know, baptised and confirmed

and indeed married in church

and I've had a lifelong interest in people's values

and the nature of what religion does for people

and what it means to them, which is persistently strong

even though we live in a largely secular-behaving society,

one in which science is seen to offer a challenge to religion.

Religion is amazingly resilient,

because it answers a need that is created in the human mind,

so I'm always interested, and I do still do programmes about religion

and the nature of belief. I did a series called Belief.

But do you... Do you ever pray?

No. I ask you what you think prayer is.

I sit and think. I sit and...

..look at life.

I sit and wonder at its awesome scale.

The night sky or a landscape.

So I might say that I contemplate things,

and sometimes even meditate, if I get that right.

I do remember a phrase that Harold Pinter used to use, which was

"Thinking got me into this and thinking's got to get me out."

And I sometimes use that.

If I'm in a jam, I will go,

"Thinking's got to get me out of this."

And thinking is very good. Very good for you, it's quite hard.

Yeah, yeah. What about television?

Do you think the BBC, your beloved BBC, has lost its way a bit or not?

Well, it certainly did have, didn't it, over the Jimmy Savile case

and all those enormous revelations that came as such a shock to

everyone, and then attempts to deal with it which kind of went wrong

because people were still reeling under the shock.

And I think it's got a chance to get things sorted out.

It's got a new director general -

I forgive him for sacking me in the 1980s, but never mind!

-Did he?

-We get on very well since.

He was part of a system that abolished my job,

which I didn't relish at the time, but I think he has got, you know,

a new broom, he's going to, I think, change things. It needs change.

I do think it's got a fantastic future,

but what its destiny will be in the multiplicity of options

for viewing, seeing, recording programmes, I don't know.

But I believe, I want to believe, that it will always be there.

What about politics?

Which mainstream politician over your life -

and as you know by the title of this programme,

we've got 80 years to choose from here -

but which politician have you, during your life,

most admired, respected?

I met Clement Atlee in the 1950s.

He came to the Cambridge Labour Club.

He was the most modest, uncharismatic figure I can remember.

But he was completely purposeful about what he meant

and what he said, so you did believe his project,

which was the welfare state.

And so, although I only met him fleetingly, it's a memory I cherish,

because there has been no-one so consistently dedicated to an idea

without any sense of ego being attached to it,

and I do think that's very remarkable in our day.

There is someone else, of course - how could I not mention him?

Nelson Mandela.

Now, Nelson Mandela went to prison for what he believed in -

there can be no greater tribute to his ideology than that.

That's a very good, very good point, and let's just pause there

because one of the first of his interviews that he ever gave

was to you, and here is just a moment of it, coming up right now.

'Nelson Mandela walks free

'after serving over 27 years of his prison sentence.

'He walks into a welcome on a world scale.'

Let me ask you personally, what has kept you going

through all those years in prison?

You. And others.

Terrible flirt!

And firstly, although we were sentenced,

and sent to jail,

we felt that we had come out

head and shoulders above the government.

Our defence was an attack on government policy,

right from the time when they asked us "Are you guilty?"

"No, we are not guilty. It is the government that is guilty."

Can I ask you, now you are out of prison, how will you cope with

the will for revenge, for retribution against the killers

of Steve Biko, for example? How will you cope with that need for revenge?

No. Fortunately we have had enough experience to know

that there is no such threat from blacks.

We have no desire to bring anybody to book

for what they did, for having oppressed the masses of the people.

-We have no such ideas.

-But the deaths in prisons?

-No.

The essence of reaching a political solution

means that you must let bygones be bygones.

What was the lesson you got most of all from - in addition

to what he was saying about revenge, of course, and that was followed

up with the Truth And Reconciliation Commission in South Africa -

what did you come away with from listening to,

talking to Nelson Mandela?

-Integrity.

-Yeah.

Integrity, a lifelong integrity

of the truth of the man to his values,

which is to be prized wherever you find it,

and his was just exceptional.

He never deviated from what he believed to be true,

he knew to be true, and he laid down a lot of his life

in order to see that through, and of course came out...

I'd just got that interview with him the moment he was out of prison,

and he went on to lead his country in the most triumphant way,

and he is a landmark figure,

a great, great figure of our century and the last one.

A great, great figure. Absolutely.

Tell me something. In terms of your life, looking back on it, Joan,

what would you say was the thing that most makes you joyous

when you think about it, reflecting on your life?

My family. I think my family. I think it's a cliche,

but I think being true to what I know of how I feel

when I am alone and getting on in years, and looking back all

those years, family is what matters.

Family is what matters to everyone - whether they have it or not,

they yearn for it, and when they find it,

it's to be cherished, so my family give me great joy.

Very good, the...

And what about in terms of looking back at the down moments and so on?

I mean, what's the thing that makes you most sad or angry?

I suppose the opposite of the Mandela moment, really.

The lack of integrity and the lack of trust, and the falling away

of those idealised hopes that I had in the post-war years -

the welfare state, the feeling that things could get better.

I think we live in a world in which we think

things are just going to get worse.

And now that's terrible for everyone, but it's particularly hard

on young people, because I grew up when the world was getting better.

And... And I flourished under that expectation.

So, now I see my grandchildren just feeling that the world -

they are quite buoyant about themselves -

but that the world will get tougher,

and that's a very tough prospect for the world in general,

so that's a bit of a downer, really.

Have you ever thought very much about death?

I mean, what it is, whether you will live forever,

whether there is life after death?

But death itself, what sort of an experience is that going to be?

Well, depending on the state of medical decision-making

at the time, I hope it will be painless.

I don't believe in life after death except in so far as we all are energy

and energy doesn't die,

so something will happen to whatever's going on here.

I do think about it. You do as you get older, you know,

you get a hiccup, you get a fever, you think, "Ohh, could get worse!"

But strangely enough I am less haunted by death

than I was when I was young. I think the old grow to know

that death is there waiting for them.

They think about it sometimes, but if they do so...

I think I do it occasionally and think, well, it is waiting,

and it's not as far away as it used to be.

And there will come a moment when I just say,

"Yes, come on in, it's time to go."

I hope that will be as serene as possible.

I've been at the death beds of family,

and I don't find it terrifying,

I find it quite uplifting in a strange way.

It gives me a sense of serenity that all things come to an end,

and of course at my age, I've had a very good time.

Absolutely, but in terms of now,

and so on, I mean, people say "the best is yet to come"

and so on and so forth. I mean, there is nothing that says that you

couldn't, for instance, marry for a third time, fall in love again.

Nothing. Absolutely, I am open to life's experiences,

whatever they may be. I don't think older people close down the options,

society closes down the options for them by expecting them

to live in certain ways and to grow old gracefully and so on.

The old don't feel like that - the old want to keep the options open.

-Yes.

-They want to be vigorous, lively, dangerous,

full of zest. They want to keep going,

that spirit that refuses to acknowledge what the body

inevitably has to acknowledge.

A quote of yours - "The fact that I am still DOING

"as opposed to just BEING is quite important for me."

Keep on doing.

And that is true of... Old people want to be doing things,

they don't want to be sitting at home with a rug over their knees

waiting for people to look after them.

They don't want that. It may be inevitable in some cases,

but doing something with your life is what being alive is, of course.

Give it to more people, they want it. More of the old want to be doing.

Well, at that point, may I just say let's make a date

for ten years from now,

and look then at Joan Bakewell at 90.

-Thank you so much.

-Thank you, David.

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