A Very Private Celebrity by Hugh Purcell Page A

his guests on Face to Face , but he gave absolutely nothing away about himself.
    He carried this anonymity to extreme levels when other programmes or press articles tried to turn the tables on him. In 1961, the other famous interviewer of those days, Malcolm Muggeridge, did his best on Granada’s Appointment . The Guardian TV reviewer Mary Crozier wrote: ‘The most curious thing was that John Freeman remained virtually the faceless man. Nothing came out that could not have been known without this interview. We were left with the impression that Mr Freeman was an almost alarmingly impersonal person.’ 4
    Perhaps Lord Birkett would have been more successful than Malcolm Muggeridge, but when Birkett suggested a reverse Face to Face to end the first series, he was given short shrift. Many journalists made attempts to try a Face to Face on Freeman, but none got further than Anthony Clare in 1988.
    Freeman was prepared to talk about the programme, but not about himself. He had the gift of thinking up an interesting reply that did not answer the question. He never said what sort of man he was.
    The interviewer for an article in Tatler , ‘The Grillers Grilled’, got closer than most:
    INTERVIEWER: In the broadest terms, a psychiatrist would classify you as an introvert rather than extrovert, wouldn’t he?
    FREEMAN: Probably, yes.
    INTERVIEWER: Dr Carl Jung says that introverts tend to be governed at the unconscious level by their emotions. Could that come across to your audience?
    FREEMAN: One can’t know for oneself. Someone else must answer that.
    Interviewers got more out of Freeman when he was talking about his cats, who roamed around Heath Mansions when the press came to call. Indeed, the press probably turned to the cats in desperation, as ‘television’s most penetrating interviewer’ was full of insight about them: ‘Pushkin has all the male characteristics in that he’s bossy, sometimes bad tempered, with a logical brain and an engineer’s approach to life; Dulcie is flighty, silly on occasions, but very affectionate.’ 5
    The myth about Face to Face is that it was ‘trial by television’ with Freeman as the ‘grand inquisitor’. The interviews with comedian Tony Hancock and TV entertainment celebrity Gilbert Harding were undoubtedly forensic in a highly personal way, and perhaps that is why they are among the best known, but they were the exception. Most of the others were unremarkable ‘the real person behind the public façade’ interviews, and, in fact, only fourteen of them were ‘live’ broadcasts.
    Yet there was something inquisitorial about the interviews. Freeman often let the subject know what was coming with a semi-jocular opening question: ‘Are you going to come clean?’ Then ‘his matchless voice, ultra-polite, devastatingly persistent’, dominated the studio in the absence of any glimpse of its owner. He admitted that, for him, interviewing was ‘a psychological exercise’:
    I am, I think, a purely intuitive interviewer. I read a lot about the person I am going to interview, and I think up questions, but most of mywork is taken up with making up my mind about what sort of person I am dealing with. After the opening question, I tend to play the whole thing by ear, though usually I have an idea with which question I shall end the interview. 6
    The ambience, then, was inquisitorial but the substance only rarely justified the press term ‘trial by television’.
    Freeman’s second guest, in March 1959, was the renowned philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. He was eighty-seven and campaigning vigorously for nuclear disarmament. Before the recording, which took place at Russell’s home, Hugh Burnett found an obituary that Russell had written about himself. Beaming widely, Russell read it out at the start of the interview:
    His life, for all its waywardness, had a certain