Novel gazing

At the beginning of Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the Booker Prize (BBC4), Kirsty Wark’s voiceover promised us ‘a tale of fierce rivalries, bruised egos and, most importantly of all, countless brilliant books’. In the event, though — as the title perhaps suggested — those countless brilliant books proved rather less important to the programme than Kirsty’s edifying words had led us to believe. At one point, it noted in passing that Midnight’s Children is a very good novel. At another, it lamented the melancholy fact that Booker ‘voting intrigue and judges’ fallings-out’ have sometimes overshadowed ‘the books themselves’. But once those duties were discharged, it soon got back to its main business of providing an enjoyably gossipy whisk through half a century of fierce rivalries, bruised egos, voting intrigue and judges’ fallings-out.

When the prize started in 1969, it went largely unnoticed outside the publishing world. Luckily, it didn’t have to wait long for its first controversy — or its second. In 1971, the chair of judges, Malcolm Muggeridge, denounced the novels he was obliged to read as ‘pornography’ and resigned. The following year, the Marxist writer John Berger used his winner’s speech to attack the Booker company’s exploitation of the Caribbean in its sugar business, and to announce that he’d share the prize money with the British Black Panthers. Before long, newspapers realised that they had a reliable, if unlikely new source of scandal — much of it supplied by the prize’s administrator Martyn Goff, who, when not holding stern meetings to find out who was leaking all those behind-the-scenes stories to the press, was leaking all those behind-the-scenes stories to the press.