Nothing summed up better what I was trying to achieve, nor illustrated more clearly the change in the game since Skinner’s time, than the obituary I wrote when he died in 1995. I reprint it because it tells you much about the way a game and society has changed and explains a lot about heroes and why they matter.
Skinner Normanton died peacefully aged 68. Between 1947 and 1953 he played 134 times for Barnsley and ended his career with a brief spell at Halifax. He retired to his garden where he grew sunflowers and turned out occasionally for the local team when they were a man short.
Sydney Albert Normanton was a local legend when he played at Barnsley. He was the hard man of the side, the minder for ball-playing colleagues of delicate disposition. There wasn’t much of him but every ounce counted. He was destructive in the tackle, as unrelenting as a heat-seeking missile in pursuit of the enemy.
If I close my eyes I see two images. The first is a still photograph with Skinner posed in the manner of the day, arms folded and one foot on a leather football. His hair was short and wavy, parted near the middle and rigid with Brylcreem and his legs were as sturdy as pit props with bulging shinpads and bulbous toecaps that glowed with dubbin and menace.
My second memory is more like a black and while film of the time with Skinner taking a penalty in a Cup tie and running from the halfway line before toe-ending the sodden football which became a blur as it passed the motionless goalkeeper, crashed into the underside of the crossbar and rebounded on to the back of the goalkeeper’s head and into the net.
The goalkeeper was poleaxed and took several minutes to recover and it wasn’t until much later that the iron crossbar stopped quivering from the impact of the shot. For a while it hummed like a male voice choir.
He was a local celebrity. Mothers would tell their children to stop mucking about or they would send for Skinner. He gained a wider audience many years after he retired when I first wrote an article about him.
I don’t know what it was about the article that captured the imagination. I think it might have been the name. If you wanted to invent a local football hero of the time, someone who worked in the pits during the week and spent Saturday afternoons kicking lumps off the opposition, you’d invent a man called something like Skinner Normanton.
Whatever the reason, his fame extended far beyond his beloved Oakwell. I have been asked about him during all my travels throughout the world. There was something in the name that was irresistible to Brits living abroad, particularly when they were feeling homesick for Saturday afternoons and kick-off time.
Many people believed him to be a mythical character like the Great Wilson of the
Wizard
. I remember Yorkshire Television producing him as a surprise guest on a programme I was doing in Leeds. They brought him into the studio and announced him in triumphant fashion as if they had found Lord Lucan or were about to produce the Loch Ness monster on the end of a lead.
He was smaller than I remembered and was wearing a blue suit with a nipped-in waist. The hair was as immaculate as ever and he looked like he was going to church. I had never seen him in his Sunday best. When he spoke his voice was soft, the manner modest, even shy.
It was difficult to convince people that this gentle and diffident man had at one time put the fear of God up any member of the human race who didn’t wear a Barnsley shirt. He played at a time when the game drank deep from its tap roots and although there were many more skilful and talented than he there was no one who better represented what you were up against if you took on a collier from Barnsley.
I was thinking that they ought to name the new stand at Barnsley after him. The Skinner Normanton stand would be a constant reminder that no matter how much we merchandise the modern game we must always remember what it is we are really selling. Nowadays they talk of image. There was a time, when Skinner was a lad, when it had a soul.
Reading it again is to be warmed by memories of a happy childhood in a land a long, long way from the one I now live in. I was happiest when I was writing for a living because I could push the rest aside and dwell in a world of my own recall.
37
GARDEN SHED COMEBACK
The way back to the BBC and a revival of the talk show began in my garden shed. In 1995 a young BBC producer, Tony Moss, recalled watching the Muhammad Ali interviews as a child and wondered if they were as good as he remembered them and, if they were, would they be worth a second showing and would I be willing to introduce them. We couldn’t afford to film in a studio so we set up in my garden shed, blacking out all the windows, creating a dark and dramatic setting for my recollections of interviewing the great man. The public and the critics liked what they saw and the BBC ordered more.
We repackaged the interviews with Peter Cook, Richard Burton, Orson Welles, David Niven, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd into a five-show series. Jack Tinker, in the
Daily Mail
, wrote: ‘The entire series . . . was in itself a revelation of just how far interviewing techniques have fallen since he all but disappeared from our screens in any creative capacity. He was undoubtedly the master of the chat trade.’ Giles Smith, wrote in the
Independent
:‘The compelling repeats . . . lift out of the screen like treasures from a Golden Age, before television chat shows turned into
Hello!
with some of the longer words left out.’
There was another series and rumours of my return with a talk show, although no one made an official offer.
In the meantime, I was having a good time at Radio 2 where, under the amusing and benign leadership of Jim Moir, the station was transforming itself from a fossil into the most popular of them all. Moreover the column in the
Daily Telegraph
was winning awards. So it was in a contented frame of mind that I passed my sixtieth birthday and looked ahead to a tranquil future watching cricket and having the odd cocktail, ideally with Oscar Peterson providing the soundtrack to my gentle drift into senility.
One programme changed all that. Because of the success of the repeats, and in order to see me in a setting other than a garden shed, BBC producer Bea Ballard asked me to host an evening celebrating sixty years of BBC television.
I later learned I was not first choice. There was a thought Noel Edmonds might be the man and some disquiet that someone last seen on afternoon television on
Going For A Song
was suitable for a show of this magnitude. But Ms Ballard is a very determined lady and she had her way. I tried to sound confident about the job I had to do but its significance made me slightly nervous. For one thing the studio audience would be entirely composed of BBC executives and stars, past and present, and if that wasn’t daunting enough, I realised, as did Bea, that it was not so much a job more an audition, the chance to prove that I was due a return to the BBC mainstream.
We worked hard at it, left nothing to chance and I got through it without falling down. At the party afterwards people kept sidling up making agreeable cooing sounds. Bea was approached by executives who thought I should be doing something with the BBC, but what? Bea was unequivocal. ‘Bring back the talk show,’ she said. And, after a while, they did.
We started with Paul Merton, Barry Manilow and Sir Anthony Hopkins, who spent most of his time imitating his great hero, Tommy Cooper. We booked imaginative pairings, as we had done in the seventies – Billy Connolly and David Attenborough (a triumph); John Prescott and Phil Collins (they both played drums). We went for the exclusive one-man show – George Michael talking about his escapade with a policeman in a gents’ toilet in the USA.
George said he would do the interview if we could meet beforehand and have a chat over a quiet dinner. We went to the Ivy, which was a bit like having a secret meeting in the middle of Wembley Stadium during a Cup final.
When we met he said, ‘I have to tell you I have always wanted to appear on your show. Just think, I had to flash a policeman to get on.’
I told him, ‘Say that as soon as you come on set and we’re off and away.’
And he did, and we were.
The ratings were wonderful, the critics kind. We won the first of four consecutive National Television Awards, followed by the Comic Heritage Gold Award, the Broadcasting Press Guild Award, a Variety Club Award, the gold award from the music industry and a BAFTA. About the only award we missed out on was one from Crufts. It was a rich and heady time, particularly as, during the seventies, doing a series of shows now described by the critics as ‘classics’, we won not a sausage.
It was especially pleasing to have a second chance at interviewing some of the stars we had missed out on first time around, such as Woody Allen. He had been top of my list since the time in the sixties when he was every talk-show host’s favourite guest and a regular on
The Eamonn Andrews Show
. It was a very different Allen now. This was Allen the film-maker whose catalogue of movies puts him in very select company.
It was also a controversial Allen, no longer the cuddly, friendly, funny guy but the man who had a much-criticised relationship with his stepdaughter Soon-Yi. We were told this was an area he would not want to discuss. I said that I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in people’s private lives, but Mr Allen’s career had been seriously affected by his affair with Soon-Yi, because Middle America disapproved and stopped going to his movies, and that justified a line of questioning. The interview was going well until I raised the subject. He was displeased but he didn’t flounce out. I tried to justify the enquiry and he did his best to get rid of it as soon as possible. I think there might have been a discussion after the interview with his publicist, but the show went out as we planned.
We always refused to accept any pre-conditions on an interview. That is why I never interviewed Barbra Streisand and why it took many years before I finally interviewed Madonna.
I had moved to ITV before we managed to persuade her to do a one-woman show without any pre-conditions. She turned out to be so bright, frank and funny it made you wonder what the previous debate had been about. Hers is an extraordinary story of determination and hard work and the perfect antidote to the celebrity pap fed today’s wannabes. Anyone wanting to succeed in the music business, or indeed any other business, should watch the interview and learn what it really takes to get to the top.
One of the fascinations of working with divas is in finding out the duties of the entourage. What, exactly, do all those people do? Observing Madonna, in a recording break, surrounded by her worker bees, I was fascinated to see that one assistant, armed only with a cotton bud on the end of a stick, was trained in a manoeuvre, which, as far as I could make out, was designed to make certain Madonna’s nose was free from bogies.
Clint Eastwood was another star I had been trying to interview ever since the show began. He came over to publicise
Mystic River
and the deal was he would do the show if I interviewed him at the National Film Theatre. I had particularly wanted to meet Eastwood, and not simply because he has a wonderful screen presence and is a marvellous director, but also because of his love and deep knowledge of jazz. He directed Forest Whitaker in
Bird
, the biopic of Charlie Parker, uses jazz often on the soundtracks of his films and has a son, Kyle, who is a jazz musician.
After we finished the interview, I collected Mary and took her to meet Eastwood, a most agreeable and pleasant man. We were chatting away, Mary transfixed by his lanky, easy charm, when he said to me, ‘I’m going out to have dinner then on to a jazz club to see my son Kyle play. Would you and Mary like to join me?’
And I said, ‘Thank you but I’m feeling knackered and I think I’m going to have an early night.’
As we left his company Mary said, ‘I can’t believe you said that.’ Nor could I. She moans about it to the present day.
I interviewed Oprah Winfrey, the most self-possessed woman I have ever met, who seemed to glow with success. George Clooney appeared to me to have all the charisma and old-fashioned charm of James Stewart and Henry Fonda. So did Tom Hanks, Kevin Costner and Kevin Spacey, but Clooney, in particular, created the kind of interest among the female staff I had only witnessed once before, when Robert Redford appeared on the show in the seventies.
But the biggest star of all, the one who created most interest among both sexes and gave us the highest rating we ever achieved on the comeback series, was David Beckham. He appeared with Victoria, along with George Best and Elton John, and the show was watched by more than nine million viewers. It was the top entertainment show on British television that week and made headlines that, in a sense, lasted forever. It was Victoria’s admission that she called her husband ‘Goldenballs’ that caused the media frenzy. The moment she said it I looked at David and he gave me a wry smile as if to say: ‘That’s me labelled for the next twenty years or more.’
Another time he was on the show we had adjoining dressing rooms. I answered a knock on my door and discovered David standing there with just a towel round his middle.
He said his shower wasn’t working so could he use mine? After the shower he stepped out of my room and into the path of a BBC secretary who was walking down the corridor carrying an armload of papers. When she looked up and found herself confronted by a half-naked David Beckham, she gave a little cry and an involuntary jerk of her arms, which sent her papers spilling on to the floor.
David and I helped her pick them up, and when she eventually continued her journey and passed me, flustered and blushing, she said, with a tut, ‘And me, a married woman.’
The appearance of George Best alongside David was particularly emotive. In the world of football, George was David’s godfather – George, the first rock’n’roll footballer, the original superstar, David then at the very apex of his fame and fortune. George, a recovering alcoholic, David so fit he gleamed with health. Most poignantly of all, George, for all his celebrity, earned, at most, two hundred quid a week from soccer and David was worth millions.