Was it a shock, Joan Bakewell was asked, when Harold Pinter showed you the script of his latest play? Bakewell was hardly going to reveal live on air to ten million listeners what she really felt about Pinter’s use of their affair as a plot device in Betrayal. She’s far too smart for that. All she would say on Desert Island Discs this week is that their long friendship of 40-plus years was far more important than their seven-year affair. Her inquisitor, Kirsty Young, still would not give up. But surely it was a curious situation for someone like you to be in? ‘We had a damned good time,’ Bakewell replied.
I tuned in on Sunday morning precisely because I had been so caught up by Bakewell’s thoughtful direction of a discussion on terminal illness and the elderly on Inside the Ethics Committee the previous week, and wanted to find out more about her personality (in a Harmanly, not Jordanly, kind of way). But I guess I should have known better. Bakewell was given the DID once-over, and in spite of her valiant efforts to talk intelligently about her choice of music and her new official role as the Voice for Older People much of the conversation was devoted not to her intellectual journey but to her love of high heels and the fact that at 76 she’s ‘still in incredibly good nick’.
When asked what she thought of that clever but irritating moniker ‘The Thinking Man’s Crumpet’ (dreamt up for her by Frank Muir), she again showed her mettle. The fact that people still ask me what I think, she said crisply, ‘shows the unoriginality of male editors’. (As it happens, DID is currently produced by a woman.)
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