Fiona finished reading and looked at me for a few seconds. ‘I’m not sure that I understand,’ she said.
Hilary
In the summer of 1969, shortly before they went up to Oxford together, Hugo Beamish invited his best friend Roddy Winshaw to stay with his family for a few weeks. They lived in a huge, cluttered, slightly dirty house in North West London. Roddy’s sister Hilary was invited too. She was fifteen.
Hilary found the whole thing excruciatingly tedious. It was perhaps marginally better than spending the summer in Tuscany with her parents (again!), but Hugo’s mother and father turned out to be almost as dull – she was a writer, he worked at the BBC – while his sister, Alicia, was nothing but a crashing bore with buck teeth and terrible spots.
Alan Beamish was a kindly man who noticed quickly enough that Hilary wasn’t enjoying herself. One night as they all sat around the dinner table, with Roddy and Hugo loudly discussing their respective career options, he watched her pushing a mound of tepid pasta around her plate and asked a sudden question:
‘And what do you see yourself doing in ten years’ time, I wonder?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Hilary hadn’t given this matter much thought, taking it for granted (rightly, of course) that something glamorous and well-paid would sooner or later fall into her lap. Besides, she hated the idea of sharing her aspirations with these people. ‘I thought I might go into television,’ she improvised, lazily.
‘Well you know of course that Alan is a producer,’ said Mrs Beamish.
Hilary didn’t know this. She had got him down as a company accountant or at best some sort of engineer. Even so, she was not in the least impressed: but from that moment on, Alan, for his part, chose to take Hilary under his wing.
‘Do you know the secret of success in the television business?’ he asked her, late one afternoon. ‘It’s very simple. You have to watch it, that’s all. You have to watch it all the time.’
Hilary nodded. She never watched television. She knew she was too good for it.
‘Now I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,’ said Alan.
What they were going to do, it transpired – much to Hilary’s horror – was to sit down in front of the television and take in an entire evening’s viewing, with Alan talking her through every programme, explaining how it was made, how much it cost, why it had been scheduled at a certain time, and where its target audience lay.
‘Scheduling is everything,’ he said. ‘A programme stands or falls by its scheduling. Understand that, and you’ll already have a march on all the other bright young graduates you’ll be competing with.’
They started off with the news on BBCI at ten to six, followed by a magazine programme called Town and Around. Then they switched channels to ITV and watched The Saint, with Roger Moore.
‘This is the kind of show the independent companies do best,’ said Alan. ‘Very sellable abroad: even to America. High production values, lots of location work. Snappy direction, too. It’s all a bit shallow, for my liking, but I wouldn’t knock it.’
Hilary yawned. At seven twenty-five they watched something about a Scottish doctor and his housemaid, which all seemed very slow and provincial to her. Alan explained that this was one of the most popular programmes on television. Hilary had never heard of it.
‘They’ll be discussing this storyline in every pub, office and factory in Britain tomorrow,’ he said. ‘That’s the great thing about television: it’s one of the fibres that holds the country together. It collapses class distinctions and helps create a sense of national identity.’
He was equally lyrical about the next two programmes: a documentary called The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and another news bulletin at nine o’clock, this one lasting a quarter of an hour.
‘The BBC is respected the world over for the quality and fair-mindedness of its news coverage. Thanks to the World Service, you can tune in a radio almost anywhere on the globe and be sure to hear impartial, authoritative bulletins, mixed in with lighter programmes which maintain the highest standards in music and entertainment. It’s one of our greatest post-war achievements.’
Until now Hilary had merely been bored, but at this point things started to go rapidly downhill. She was made to sit through a dreadful comedy show called Nearest and Dearest, full of coarse jokes which had the studio audience screeching with vulgar laughter, and then they saw a thing called It’s a Knockout, which featured a series of witless outdoor games. She began to squirm with rage and embarrassment. Unconsciously, she channelled her agitation through her fingertips by reaching across to a fruit bowl next to the sofa and plucking off grape after grape: she would peel each one with her tapered fingernail before popping it into her mouth. A little pile of the skins started to form on her lap.
‘This isn’t my sort of show at all,’ said Alan. ‘But I don’t look down on it. You have to make things which appeal to everyone. Everyone’s entitled to their bit of fun.’
They finished off by turning over to BBC2 and watching a series called Ooh La La!, adapted from the farces of Georges Feydeau. This one starred Donald Sinden and Barbara Windsor. Hilary fell asleep halfway through, and woke up just in time to catch the end of an astronomy programme presented by a peculiar man in an ill-fitting suit.
‘So there you have it,’ said Alan proudly. ‘News, entertainment, comedy, documentary and classical drama in equal measure. There’s no other country in the world which could offer you an experience like that.’ With his gentle, melodious voice and greying bushes of hair he was beginning to look and sound, to Hilary, like the worst sort of parish priest. ‘And it’s all in the hands of people like you. Talented youngsters whose task in the years to come will be to carry the tradition forward.’
At the end of the holiday, Roddy and Hilary took the train back to their parents’ current home in Sussex.
‘I thought old Mr Beamish was a bit of a sweetie, actually,’ said Roddy, taking out a cigarette. ‘And yet Henry told me that he’s frightfully left wing.’ He lit up. ‘Hasn’t rubbed off on Hugo, thank God. Anyway, you’d never guess it, would you?’
Hilary stared out of the window.
∗
From THE 10 MOST LIKELY: colour feature in Tatler, October 1976
Lovely Hilary Winshaw is a recent Cambridge graduate who intends to make quite a splash in her new job at——Television, where she will be training as a producer. Hilary already has strong views about the work which lies ahead of her. ‘I think of television as one of the fibres which holds the country together,’ she says. ‘It’s brilliant at collapsing distinctions and building a sense of identity. And that’s definitely a tradition I hope to encourage and foster.’
In this picture Hilary is all ready to keep the winter cold at bay with a Royal Samink cape from Furs Renée, 39 Dover St, Wl (£3,460), sweater with roll-neck in camel cashmere by Pringle, 28 Old Bond St, Wl (£52.50), gloves in camel wool, medium-length from Herbert Johnson Ladies Shop, 80 Grosvenor St, Wl (£14.95), and boots in beige leather, mid calf, with stacked heels, from Midas at 36 Hans Crescent, SW1 (£129).
∗
——Television plc. Extract from minutes of Executive BoardMeeting, 14 November 1983. Confidential.
… It was reiterated at this point that nobody undervalued Ms Winshaw’s contribution to the company’s programming successes over the last seven years. However, Mr Fisher insisted that her decision to purchase TMT, the American production company, for £120 million in 1981, had never been offered to the board for proper scrutiny. He asked for clarification on four points: