I’m aware that television – the goggle-box, the idiot childminder – is still widely reckoned to be an enemy of budding literacy and a terrible drain on the imaginations of prospective young readers. This was how it was considered in ‘my day’, too, back when we barely had four channels. Nonetheless I must confess that during my adolescence the TV did a huge job of persuading me to pay attention to good books: this on account of the very serious, committed and diverse coverage that the tube gave to worthy writers and their works. I’m not certain British television can claim a similar distinction today, though obviously one remains grateful for what one gets – such as the chance a few years ago to watch DBC Pierre lead Alan Yentob (whom Pierre breezily dubbed ‘Yobs’) on a merry dance across Mexico.

Still, I’m fairly sure that in the 1970s and the 1980s the space allotted to literature on telly was broader, less apologetic, and scheduled at an hour more likely (in the words of the late Dennis Potter) ‘to catch the audience with their pants down.’ Thus, at hours when I ought to have been doing my homework, television allowed me to eavesdrop on P.D. James and Christopher Hitchens arguing about Anglo-American relations; on Martin Amis and Saul Bellow debating the ‘moronic inferno’ of contemporary culture; on Anthony Burgess and George Steiner trying to determine the precise afternoon when literary Modernism began. I can remember generous South Bank Shows on Derek Walcott and David Mamet, Garcia Marquez and Marguerite Duras. The BBC’s Late Show would happily serve up an hour’s worth of Susan Sontag in conversation; or kick-start studio debates about more pressing matters, as on the night of the day of the Khomeini fatwa against The Satanic Verses, when Hanif Kureishi, asked what would be his advice to the embattled author, urged Salman Rushdie to go get himself a gun.

The great thing about this heritage of audiovisual material is that it seems largely to have survived and matured into a well-managed archive. The BBC once had a dodgy reputation for wiping clunky old tape recordings of cultural broadcasts, but the digital age has now shed light on a wealth of preservation. And if you are interested in hearing literary voices of the past imparting deathless wisdom about their craft, I urge you to check out BBC4’s currently airing series In Their Own Words: British Novelists, a three-part compilation of material culled from those various BBC arts strands (Monitor, Bookstand) that featured interviews with major authors. The final episode, Nothing Sacred, airing Monday August 30, takes us up as far as the 1990s and the aforementioned Mr Rushdie and friends. The Age of Anxiety (1945-1969) offers Tolkien, Golding, James Bond, Doris Lessing and the so-called Angry Young Men. But the real gem seems to me the opener, Among the Ruins 1919-1939, available on IPlayer until September 6.

Therein you will find novelists who made their names between the wars, putting wary toes into the relatively new medium of television, blinking into lights and subjecting themselves to light grilling. Evelyn Waugh, questioned quite truculently by John Freeman of the quick-fire Face to Face show, remarks airily that he is doing the interview for money and claims to have no idea why people think him a ‘snob’, though he does admit to the sin of ‘irritability’ (which he felt towards ‘absolutely everything.’) PG Wodehouse, in life a far sturdier fellow than in my imagination, is seen being exceptionally amiable and pipe-smoking and candid from a garden chair at his Long Island retreat, insisting that he couldn’t become a ‘serious’ writer if he tried, and that he would never allow such footling issues as character psychology to get in the way of the precise working-out of his brilliant plots (‘Oh heavens, no…!’).

Some of the authors shown clearly had a harder time adjusting to the impertinence of the TV interviewer. A wary Robert Graves, quizzed by that awful old fraud Malcolm Muggeridge, finds himself forced to sound as dismissive as possible about a homosexual ‘phase’ while he was at Charterhouse. T.H. White, made rich and famous by his sequence of novels about Arthurian legend, is depicted at leisure on one of the Channel Islands, insisting he lives very modestly, what with his swimming pool and purpose-built temple to Hadrian, and the perennial demands of the taxman.

Against such defensiveness, it’s a pleasure to see Christopher Isherwood, gamely if ineptly pretending to jog down sunny Venice Beach in long trousers, before pulling up in front of the attendant BBC crew so as to tell the viewers all about how he used to live in Berlin. Though not an easygoing speaker, Isherwood, author of I Am a Camera, clearly understood what the lens was for, also how to address it.
Graham Greene, however, possibly understood these matters too well, and so refused to allow his face to be photographed for an early BBC study of his work. Instead, surviving footage offers abstracted parts of his dark-suited frame as he and the interviewer converse in a carriage of a night train rattling through Lausanne. The reason Greene gives for this subterfuge is beautifully lucid: he is ‘afraid of playing a part on screen… the part of a writer.’

This strikes me as a very fine and early formulation of an ongoing problem for writers, who are required to seek media ‘exposure’, ‘coverage’ and ‘profile’ for their work while knowing full well that the work itself has either said what needs saying or else is of little use to anyone. Moreover, any artist knows it’s best to retain a little mystery around one’s persona and creative process, rather than spilling one’s guts all round the houses. Still, our age is one wherein Katie Price is, amazingly, and among other things, a bestselling novelist; and, famously, there’s not much Katie won’t do. Even writers whose work is far removed from Angel or Crystal must face the uncomfortable truth that, these days, the retiring types struggle to get a start in the great cultural marketplace. If the likes of a JD Salinger or a Thomas Pynchon came along today with the resolute intent of going about their business unrecognised and unmolested, would anyone get to know about their stuff in the first place? Or would a 21st-century Salinger be out there avidly blogging and tweeting and web-chatting all about how he first ‘got the idea’ for The Catcher in the Rye? (‘Thanks for your question, jane1563…’) I’m not sure, nor can I honestly say which of these seems to me the least palatable scenario. But, while I remain quietly relieved that Dostoyevsky or George Eliot didn’t live to have to hawk their wares out there on Sky TV, I do think it a valuable thing that, once upon a time, novelists of stature were allowed into our living rooms to speak their minds; and In Their Own Words is a treasurable souvenir of that bygone era.

1. Jon Says:
   October 13th, 2010 at 2:28 am

   I have watched most of the series online and have enjoyed it. I really was intrigued at seeing flesh and blood authors, especially J.R.R. Tolkien showing a rascally side, T.H. White at home being amused by the interviewer and not “BaBa”, Robert Graves being rather unfriendly but softening as the interview went on, even rolling a cigarette, William Golding teling of the sea, P. G. Wodehouse at his home on Long Island etc. etc. I wish we had more such shows.

2. Bob Miller Says:
   February 19th, 2011 at 11:48 pm

   Television and authors at their best! More please

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