An actor friend and I were worried that we were not being good male role models to our sons, of which we have three apiece. It was all very well taking them around National Trust properties, teaching them chess and explaining to them the difference between native and Pacific oysters, but what they needed were fathers who took them to football matches — especially the eldest, who are now pushing eight. As my friend lives in Chelsea, we decided Stamford Bridge would be the place. ‘Do you just turn up?’ he asked. ‘I’m pretty sure you have to book,’ I replied. ‘Right. I’ll get on to it,’ he said. ‘This Saturday?’ ‘Yes, this Saturday.’ We steeled ourselves to the prospect of having to chant on terraces and drink lager from cans. Then my friend rang back and, sounding rather sheepish, said, ‘Um, apparently the football season ended last Saturday.’
My day job is writing interviews for the Sunday Telegraph and top of my wish list of subjects at the moment is the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I particularly admire his use of the phrase ‘economic girlie men’. I’m not quite sure what it means but I imagine he thinks most men are girlie men, compared to him. My actor friend and I no doubt qualify.
I’ve been ‘postal stalking’ Arnie for months now and I’m beginning to suspect that it is my request to do the interview at his house that is putting him off. I always try this on, and am surprised how often people agree. The ‘at home’ interview has thrown up some fascinating insights for me over the years: the walls of Gore Vidal’s palazzo in Italy were covered with photographs ...of Gore Vidal; an entire wall of Joan Collins’s apartment in New York, meanwhile, was taken up with a mirror; Ann Widdecombe’s fridge was full of tiramisus; and in the downstairs lavatory of Dave Lee Travis’s farmhouse in Tring there was a stack of jokey books about flatulence. I request the interview be ‘at home’, then, because I feel it important to see interviewees in their own contexts, surrounded by their own ephemera. And because I am very nosy.
I have a friend who paints portraits and he is given much greater access to his subjects — Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Rupert Murdoch among them. As Murdoch was too busy to do formal sittings, my friend had to fly around the world doing preliminary studies wherever he could. After a few weeks he became invisible, always quietly sketching away in the corner. I pleaded with him to keep a diary but, alas, he is far too discreet. I did manage to prise one endearing story out of him, though. Only once did the mogul come to the studio where my friend works. As it happened, that day the place was also being used to film one of those lookalike commercials, and waiting in the corridor outside were ‘Posh and Becks’. Murdoch was bemused: ‘Wasn’t that ...?’ he asked after walking past the two lookalikees. The director of the commercial was equally puzzled: ‘Did we order ...?’
Today, 28 May, is the 60th anniversary of the capture of Lord and Lady Haw-Haw, the subjects of a biography I’ve written. It was an appropriately embarrassing episode. Two British army officers were collecting firewood on the Danish–German border when a man approached and started chatting to them about trees. As he had one of the most recognisable radio voices of the war, this was not a clever thing to do. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be William Joyce, would you?’ one of the officers asked. Joyce reached into his pocket for his false passport. The officer, thinking he was drawing a gun, promptly shot him in the buttocks. Lady Haw-Haw, meanwhile, went out looking for him, bleating like a lost sheep, their pet signal to each other. When she was arrested, slack-jawed soldiers formed a queue that trailed out of her cell and down the passage. They had come for a stare.
Sixty years on, Lord Haw-Haw is still a household name. As recently as 1994, the title was deemed unparliamentary language by the Speaker of the House, so joining a list of banned terms including ‘ruffian’, ‘Pharisee’, ‘cad’, ‘jackass’ and ‘Pecksniffian cant’. And for tabloids ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ has become a useful shorthand that implies treasonable activity without stating it overtly, and libellously. Among those who have had the name bestowed upon them in the past year are Piers Morgan, Michael Moore and, of course, George Galloway MP (Respect).
Perhaps if I made more of an effort to be interested in cars, my sons would think me more rugged. I bought a second-hand one recently and I even have to concentrate hard to remember what make it is, let alone how many cylinders per torque it has. It came with gadgets I didn’t need, or rather didn’t realise I needed, such as a satellite navigation system which has a woman’s voice like Celia Johnson’s, all clipped and stern. I sometimes deliberately take a wrong turn just for the pleasure of having her tell me off. My wife calls her the Navigatrix.
I have finally disposed of my Christmas tree. I normally manage to slip the thing into a neighbour’s skip by about Easter, but this year there haven’t been any skips on our road and it has been festering, brown and needleless, next to our bins. I was finally shamed into action when my father visited, chopped it up and put it into bin-liners for me. I loaded these into the boot and programmed the Navigatrix to head for the municipal tip in Wandsworth. I imagined this would be a place with bulldozers, seagulls wheeling overhead, and murdered bodies wrapped in carpets. But actually it is a clean and orderly dump, with 30 giant yellow containers, all lined up herringbone fashion. You select one and back your car up to it. I couldn’t resist having a rummage in the one I chose, and I came away with a serviceable Subbuteo table for my boys to play with. Sadly I couldn’t find the football that went with it, and I discovered when I got home that a ping-pong ball was too big for the goalmouth. Still, a step has been taken in the right direction, I feel.
Nigel Farndale writes for the Sunday Telegraph and is the author of Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, published by Macmillan.