Philip Purser

Of all the innovations of the 20th century, none has so completely penetrated and combined with everyday life as broadcasting. It would be difficult to find many people born in Britain in the past forty years who did not grow up to Muffin the Mule or Thunderbirds or Dr Who, and for whom the television set has been other than a natural adjunct to existence ever since. It would be equally hard to find natives of fifty-plus whose upbringing was not coloured by Dick Barton, Band Waggon or Monday Night at Seven (later, Eight) on the wireless. When other wells of nostalgia dry up, we bore each other with jokes and catchphrases and signature tunes that have stuck with us. We annotate our lives by reference to fragments seen or heard over the air. If I write ‘the day war broke out’, many will instinctively hear the phrase in the baffled tones of the comedian Robb Wilton who began a famous monologue with it. If I try to recall the actual day war broke out, on 3 September 1939, I can calculate that I was just 14, and remember that about that time, give or take a week, I had a stiff neck from diving into Hoylake Baths with my head on one side: but I can only tell exactly where I was (outside the police station), and what I was doing (listening with a few others to the car radio of a parked car), during the minutes when Chamberlain was speaking on the wireless that Sunday morning.

As a young soldier in Germany at the end of the war I was dropped head first into two manifestations of the Third Reich which half a century later continue to exert a peculiar fascination. After two months in what became the Russian occupied zone, the field company to which I belonged was moved back to the Harz Mountains area. We were told we would henceforth be located in somewhere called Lebenstedt. Lebenstedt turned out to be like nothing any of us had seen before: instead of the familiar shattered towns, and the villages of old crooked houses with Gothic texts carved into their timbers and farmhouses fronted by open manure pits, it stretched away unscarred, uniform and seemingly endless. The roads were laid out in a rectilinear grid and lined on each side by long apartment blocks with steep roofs and rows of double windows. There were trim paths, strips of grass. All was orderly, well-built but featureless, and there was altogether too much of it. When we started holding dances, officially for young females from the displaced persons camps in the area, but very soon frequented by Germans, the abschnitt, or sector of the town in which a local charmer lived, was her most important statistic. Abschnitt 5 meant a long, long walk to see her home, plus the same distance back to billets.

Philip Kerr’s detective hero Bernie Gunther is Sam Spade with raw herring on his breath and a smattering of German or Germanic slang (‘Kripo’ for the Criminal Police, ‘bulls’ for policemen, ‘chocoladies’ for those of dubious virtue) stirred into his tough private-eye talk. He drags on a cigarette, keeps a bottle in his desk, has a way with women but not much luck with them. Underneath his sceptical exterior he is brave, persistent and not without honour. The thing that sets him apart from Spade and Marlowe and their legion of imitators is that he is based – or has been so far – not in urban America in the Thirties and Forties, but in the Berlin of that period.’

At the beginning of the third volume of his autobiography, Elias Canetti is still in his twenties. He has been cooped up for a year in a bed-sitter on the outskirts of Vienna with only a print of the Isenheim altar as company, working on the grim novel that was eventually to be called Auto da Fé. Early one morning he catches the first workman’s train into town, dashes through empty streets and lets himself into the apartment of his loved one, later his wife, Veza – she has given him a latchkey against such an eventuality. Is it the old Adam stirring? With the manuscript finished at last is it time for a little Beinüber? No such luck, if that is what Veza has been hoping: Elias is bursting to tell her about the book he’s just discovered and been reading all night, Büchner’s Wozzeck. When Veza sleepily says it’s been one of her favourites for ages, and rolls out of bed to find her copy, there’s an almighty row. What does she mean by having known Wozzeck all these years and never even mentioned it? It’s as if she has been unfaithful – no, worse! Because in Canetti’s estimation, or anyway in the estimation which he applies so rigorously to every figure he encounters in The Play of the Eyes, affairs of the mind are far more important than those of either body or personality.’

Early in Huw Wheldon’s television career, when the programme with which he made his name, Monitor, was about a year old, he had to deal with a minor ethical point. He had flown to Switzerland with a film unit to interview Georges Simenon, still in his prime and turning out five or six novels a year. Wheldon was fascinated by Simenon’s method of work: the preliminaries of choosing names and backgrounds for his characters, undergoing a medical check, setting Mme Simenon to clean dozens of pipes, sharpening eighty pencils and then immuring himself in a turret room for exactly eleven days, at the end of which he emerged wearing the same shirt as when he went in but bearing a finished manuscript. Little was then known of the equally concentrated bout of sexual activity which followed: Simenon’s invariable habit, pausing (presumably) to change his shirt, was to drive into town and take a succession of young women he referred to as ‘dancers’. Would not dwelling on the author’s writing habits be seen as mere gossip and triviality? The question was gravely discussed as the film was edited. Wheldon declared that it was relevant to the consideration of Simenon as a writer. It was part of his creative process. The seclusion and the pencils and the shirt showed how he needed to impose a ritual on himself in order to make his subconscious operate. Whether Huw would have made the same claim for the subsequent part of the ritual, had he known about it, can only be a matter for speculation, but as recounted by Paul Ferris in Sir Huge the episode quaintly anticipates the row which has broken out over the publication of this biography, and brought such champions of Wheldon’s reputation as Sir Denis Forman, Ludovic Kennedy and Melvyn Bragg trumpeting into the field.