Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark Blues Brother suit. He looks like a poseur, and indeed studied drama at Rada. Lynn Barber, the ‘celebrity interviewer’, is the self-acknowledged scourge of pomposity and pretension. (Melvyn Bragg, among others, has felt the lash of her schoolmarm tongue.) Like Meades, Barber grew up in early 1950s middle-class England. An only child, she found a way out of the bridge/ canasta tea parties and sherry-tippling of Twickenham, her childhood home, to become a staff writer on Penthouse girlie magazine; her first book, published in 1975, was a sex manual entitled How to Improve Your Man in Bed (which, incidentally, my wife has still not read).
At 69, Barber claims to be the oldest ‘still-practising’ interviewer in Britain, a hard-drinking mumsy figure who likes a smoke and a laugh. Her memoir, My Curious Career, takes us through her student years at Oxford when she slept with a grand total of 50 men (How to Exhaust Your Man in Bed?), and on to marriage, children and her current post at the Sunday Times. Her ‘first big celebrity interview’ was with the tiresome Salvador Dalí in 1969. It went well, but Barber has had run-ins with the actor Martin Clunes, Sir David Attenborough and J.G. Ballard (who complained of her ‘usual puzzled ramble through my dusty carpets’ on being interviewed in 1991). A Curious Career has much to say about the ‘celebrity interviewing game’, but, annoyingly, it’s littered with exclamation marks and lengthy extracts from Barber’s own published interviews. What a swizz!!
Barber really should interview Jonathan Meades, who is roughly her age, and also an only child. In the early Sixties, Meades abandoned his native Salisbury for London, where he hurried to shed all trace of bumpkin gaucheness (as he perceived it).
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in