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book reviews
Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride and Paranoia
By Richard Lindley
(Politico’s, £18.99)
As a TV
practition-
er, he was
on Panorama
itself for 15
years, Richard
Lindley knows
how to hold an
audience with a winning smile and an attractive voice. As a seasoned journalist, he has plenty of pithy phrases.
It’s a good book, funny and wise, chronicling the pro- gramme’s evolution from rag-bag to flagship, fortnightly to weekly, magazine to single subject, via the disastrous first edition in 1953 when a tape ran backwards and assaulted black-and-white view- ers with Donald Duck squeaks, and that sensational Princess Diana interview in 1995 watched by a record 22.8m people.
As I know all too well from having tried with Radio 4’s Today programme, it is not easy writing the history of a broadcasting insti- tution. You have to spend weeks wading through yellowing memos at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre in Caversham; interview egoistic performers who want their successes emphasised and failures forgotten; leaven chronol- ogy with colour; and please lay- men and professionals alike.
Lindley manages all this with skill, profiling the likes of Grace Wyndham Goldie, Richard Dimbleby, Robin Day, Woodrow Wyatt, James Mossman, Julian Pettifer, and the two Toms, Mangold and Bower, while reflect- ing on bias, the meaning of cur- rent affairs and journalistic values.
He revisits big stories, balances anecdotes and analysis, and offers a gripping behind-the- scenes account of the Maggie’s Militant Tendency libel case.
Two years ago, Panorama was moved from Mondays, which it had dominated for 40 years, to a late and unsuitable Sunday slot. It goes out for only 32 weeks a year. It no longer fetes its own team.
So it is not surprising that Lindley is pessimistic about its future. But his (mostly) lively pages may help to secure it. They show that Panorama has been of real value, and that TV journalism needs its commitment, track record and resources.
His book is not only great fun and a good read, but will make populists think twice before send- ing the flagship on to the rocks. Paul Donovan
James Bond: The Legacy
By John Cork and Bruce Scivally (Boxtree, £35)
Forty years of Bondage deserves a glossy celebration and it comes handsomely in the form of this
large-format
companion to
everything 007
since the
world’s most
famous
secret agent
was merely a
gleam in
writer Ian
Fleming’s eye. The stunning pho- tographs include lavish coverage of the latest, Die Another Day, whose bikinied Bond girl Halle Berry pictorially brings the phe- nomenal franchise full circle.
And why not?
By Barry Norman (Simon & Schuster, £16.99)
Movie Wars
By Jonathan Rosenbaum (Wallflower, £12.99)
Even if you don’t agree with the
American
critic’s polemical
stance which
ignites with
“Hollywood’s
ruinous effect
on world cine-
ma” you won’t
fail to be
stirred – to
either anger or
approval – by some typically idio- syncratic opinions including his Alternate 100 Best American films featuring Billy Wilder’s Ace In The Hole at Number One. Miramax and Harvey Weinstein take a terri- ble pasting.
The Way To Wexford
By George Baker (Headline, £18.99) he small screen personifica-
tion of Ruth
copper Chief
Inspector
Wexford has
led a quite
fascinating
life, full of
success and
no little
tragedy,
since being born in
Bulgaria a little over 70 years ago. He has also the distinction of being the voices of both charac- ters when playing a scene with George Lazenby 007 (whom he dubbed) in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Asking For Trouble
By Sheridan Morley (Hodder & Stoughton, £20)
S
Robert Morley,
grandmother
Gladys Cooper
– the six-
tysomething
author/racon-
teur has par-
layed his lifelong love of the arts into ubiquitous, not to say peri- patetic, skills involving writing, producing and performing. No name’s dropped without at least one good story and generous- hearted Morley certainly doesn’t spare himself when describing, in sometimes painfully honest detail, some of his personal problems.
by Quentin Falk
F
amously, Bazza never actual- ly coined
the catch-
T
phrase that has become the stock-in-trade of various impressionists down the years. But
that only
helped add
a little extra
mystique to the TV face of
film criticism at the BBC and, later Sky, for nearly 30 years. The son of a distinguished editor/producer/ director, he talks films, film stars and settles a few old scores into the bargain.
The Kindness Of Strangers
By Kate Adie (Headline, £20)
A
Rendell’s solid country
30
s a reporter you are only as bold as the management behind you,” opines,
teeped in showbiz – father
arguably, the most famous face of BBC journalism
whose beat
since 1969 has
taken in almost
every major
arena of con-
frontation and
world conflict.
Sunderland-
born, she
writes vividly about
life on the Front Line and with sur- prising wit about some of her adventures before and between.
Photo opposite page:
The Academy’s Corporate Hire Department l-r: Georgina Fleming, Polly Collins and Shannon Kane- Meddock; from top: Men in Black II stars Will Smith at the press confer- ence and Tommy Lee Jones (centre) leaving 195 Piccadilly; The Grierson Documentary Awards, hosted by Michael Palin at BAFTA (photo Sylvaine Poitau)