Tony Benn did a one-man turn at Cheltenham that delighted the large audience. "Amnesty," he said, "calls me a prisoner of conscience of the Labour Party"
Four literary egos, each with a book to sell: that was my Cheltenham challenge. Four interviews in less than 12 hours, and the first none other than my old boss John Birt. When he arrived at the BBC in 1987, I was working at Lime Grove, headquarters of television current affairs, and described by Birt in his new autobiography, The Harder Path, as a broadcasting Gormenghast whose culture "at its worst was cocky, world-weary and sneering". He cheered when the building was bulldozed.
In the circumstances, we had a good-tempered exchange at Cheltenham's Everyman Theatre, as he made his case to be considered as the man who saved the BBC . . . from people like me. Afterwards, he settled down at the signing table and waited for customers. The organisers of the literature festival had thoughtfully provided a few copies of my Alistair Cooke biography (vintage 1999) so that I shouldn't feel left out, but it was still a surprise when the first woman to reach the table was brandishing a copy of my book.
"I like you," she said loudly. "I think you're very good." She looked down her nose at Birt sitting beside me. "But I don't like him at all."
This was the most awkward moment in a testing day: Lord Birt (509 pages) followed by Chris Woodhead (208 pages of educational theory), Tony Benn (671 pages of diary musings) and, finally, Matthew Parris (490 pages of soul-searching).
Birt's book contains just one revealing human story, and it took several attempts to get him to repeat it on stage. He was a teenage bouncer at a Beatles concert, and accepted a "snog and a feel" from the prettiest girl in Formby as a bribe for letting her meet Paul McCartney. Apart from that single, adolescent fumble, this is decidedly not "kiss and tell" territory. Chatting to Birt's wife, Jane, whom I'd never met, I patted the book and said something like, "Of course, I know all about you now." "Not much about me," she replied - a little tartly, I felt. Afterwards I checked the index: she gets 21 mentions - only a couple more than David Frost or Peter Jay.
In Birt's case, I had at least read the book. I acquired Woodhead's Class War 55 minutes before the event began. I crossed my fingers, trusting to my familiarity with the author's seamless transition from Labour's education watchdog into virulent critic of David Blunkett, Estelle Morris and all their works. I needn't have worried. An audience of 250, twice the size of Birt's, lapped up Woodhead's populist recipes for freedom, choice, vouchers and an end to gobbledegook. No wonder Class War doesn't have an index: perhaps some of those he vilifies haven't noticed yet.
That gave me three hours to gather my thoughts for Tony Benn, whose new volume of diaries (1991-2001) also lays into new Labour with a will. I already had a good feel for the contents, thanks to the Daily Mail serialisation which appeared - by coincidence, obviously - on the eve of Tony Blair's Blackpool conference. Benn was enjoying a cup of tea in the writers' room, and seemed relieved that I hadn't ploughed through the whole book: "The index is a monograph in its own right," he sighed. And a good one, too: "Clarke, Nick - 537", even if this was only a passing reference to my chairmanship of Any Questions when he was a panellist.
Fresh from his one-man tour of Britain, Benn didn't really need an interlocutor to deal with a thousand admirers packing Cheltenham town hall. He has clearly been practising his one-liners: "Amnesty International calls me a prisoner of conscience in the Labour Party" . . . "There are still some Labour people in the Labour Party. Well, there are still some Christians in the Church of England." Live shows allow him to tell the same jokes day after day, but the audience loved it anyway and his signing queue was the usual scrum. People were so enthusiastic that they even asked me to sign some books. Pity it was his books rather than mine.
It was now 7.15 pm. A poet with a guitar was strumming away distractingly in the corner of the writers' room, and I had 90 minutes to absorb Chance Witness, or "Matthew Parris Uncovered". I was beginning to falter. Could I really find out enough about this confessional to avoid revealing my ignorance in front of 800 people? As my eyes began to glaze over, Parris strolled in, fresh as a daisy, from what sounded like a nightmare cross-country rail trip.
Parris may be the most accomplished, and funniest, parliamentary sketch-writer of modern times, but this Cheltenham performance was not played merely for laughs.
As the evening drew to a close, I noted that Parris, like Woodhead, was showing an unfashionable amount of ankle between sock and trouser-leg. Birt's shoes had been slightly scuffed, Woodhead's were in post-(secondary)-modern black suede, and Benn's a comfortable brown under green corduroy suiting. Parris (as he proudly confessed) had spent £12 on his sneakers. I mused on these matters, having become aware during the day that I had been sitting on these elevated platforms, under the lights from morning till night, in my gardening shoes. That's what radio does for you.
Time to retire to bed with a good book.
Nick Clarke presents The World at One on Radio 4
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