We binge-watched The Forsyte Saga and then dined with its stars
I don’t know where you went for your summer holidays, but we spent most of ours down Memory Lane.
It’s a great place to go. There is no airport hassle, and at the end of the day you get to sleep in your own bed. Apart from a day trip to Broadstairs (in torrential rain), we have stayed in London, going for walks in parks and streets I knew as a child 70 years ago, and visiting – or bumping into – old friends.
We had a particularly happy chance meeting with Gail Rebuck, now 73, a dame and member of the House of Lords, and a titan in the world of publishing, as chair of Penguin Random House. Gail and I went to the French Lycée in South Kensington as children and worked together in publishing in the 1970s.
Intriguingly, simultaneously, we both remembered the same moment from those early years: our first encounter with Germaine Greer – now 86, then a firebrand feminist in her thirties – whose first book, The Female Eunuch, had made her a global household name.
We were after her next book. It was going to be about fertility. But Germaine – who both Gail and I recalled being wonderfully wild and alarmingly strident – was absolutely determined that the cover of the book should feature a close-up photograph of female pubic hair – preferably her own, or if we thought her own might be ‘too grey, grizzled and unappealing’, then she would consider ‘a model’s pubes; a fine, full bush, something you can grab hold of’.
We have been tripping down Memory Lane in the evenings, too.
Mostly, we are doing that at home, in front of the TV. Our go-to channel is YouTube, where we have discovered 76 fabulous episodes of The Good Old Days, the entertainment show that evoked the music hall of the late-Victorian era. For 30 years, from 1953, it came from the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds, with the great Leonard Sachs in the chair and performers as brilliant as Arthur Askey, Ken Dodd and Roy Castle strutting their stuff and lifting our spirits.
My friend Dame Maureen Lipman wants to revive The Good Old Days, with cutting-edge contemporary singers and entertainers doing the old numbers.
If she gets it off the ground, I’ll be pitching for the chairman’s role.
For drama, we are binge-watching The Forsyte Saga – not the excellent 2002 Damian Lewis/Gina McKee version, but the great, original BBC 26-part serial from 1967.
There is no music, it is in black and white, and the filmed sequences and the studio scenes don’t always quite match as they might, but it is wonderful. You can understand every word and the story- telling has you on the edge of your seat.
John Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 and, unsurprisingly, his Forsyte novels have been adapted for the screen time and again, with three silent films in the 1920s and a famous Hollywood version in 1949, with Errol Flynn as Soames Forsyte and Greer Garson as Irene.
In the 1967 version we are watching, Eric Porter is definitive as Soames and Nyree Dawn Porter (no relation) ace as Irene.
That Nyree Dawn Porter should turn out to be really good (as well as very beautiful) surprised me because whenever I hear her name I think of the quip (often attributed to Noël Coward): ‘Ah, Nyree Dawn Porter – the three worst actresses in the business.’
That was an unkind jibe that stuck and, from what I’m seeing of Miss Porter in her prime, quite unfair.
By complete coincidence, while watching The Forsyte Saga, we had successive meals with two of its young stars, whom we are lucky enough to count as friends.
Susan Hampshire, 88, and Martin Jarvis, 84, are both still younger than springtime (in Susan’s case, mind-bogglingly so) and both still working. Susan is filming yet another take on the Forsytes: a prequel to air on Channel 5 later in the year.
Martin Jarvis is arguably our greatest voice artist. There is no one I would rather hear on the radio.
When my wife, Michèle, and I had lunch with Martin and his wife, Rosalind Ayres, the morning after our dinner with Susan Hampshire, we gossiped about The Forsyte Saga (and how Eric Porter had a crush on Michael York, another youth in the series, still with us at 83).
Martin, joining us on our perambulation down Memory Lane, suddenly recalled appearing with an actress whose name (I am ashamed to say) meant nothing to me: Marjorie Westbury (1905-89). Her fame came entirely from her work on the wireless.
Martin was in the cast in 1983 when she chose to celebrate the golden jubilee of her first appearance on the BBC by appearing in a radio adaptation of N C Hunter’s play Waters of the Moon.
Apparently, Marjorie Westbury’s voice was so well-known and so loved that a fan – who had never met her – left her a cottage in their will. Those were the days.
Gyles Brandreth’s Somewhere, a boy and a bear: A biography of A A Milne and Winnie-the-Pooh, is out in September
