All of which makes me appear as a saintly soul whose only wish is to make this world a better place. The reality is that self-interest played a pretty large part in my calculations too. Experience told me that presenters tend to win more brownie points with the listeners if they are not seen to be behaving like total thugs. I’d had a taste of how much the good Today listeners disapprove of such behaviour following an interview with John Hume I did in my early years on the programme.
At the time he was the leader of the Social Democratic Party in Northern Ireland, a formidable and brave politician who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And I was rude to him. I interrupted for no good reason, told him he wasn’t answering the questions without giving him a chance to do so and generally behaved like a pub bore after one pint too many. Those were the days before emails when the postman arrived with the mail in a sack. The day after the Hume interview there were several sacks dumped in the Today office – almost all filled with letters from angry listeners. I survived – only just – and I’d like to think that I learned a lot from that ghastly interview. But that’s for others to judge.
I suggested earlier that I had a problem deciding on my ‘radio personality’ – assuming it existed outside my own imagination.
What I did not decide on my first morning in the Today studio was that I would set out to be the stroppiest Welshman on the airwaves. And, contrary to popular assumptions, I do not set out when I interview someone to have an argument – even if it’s with a politician. But I cannot deny that I enjoy arguing. Nor would I deny that I approach people in power – all of them – with a pretty strong dose of scepticism. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is for others to judge, but either way it’s not my fault. And I have that on pretty good authority. Aristotle is quoted as having said: ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.’ If he was right it must surely mean that our parents are bound to have a profound influence on us – one way or another.
A few years ago one of our leading universities offered me the chance to become ‘Professor’ Humphrys: a very tempting prospect for a grammar-school boy whose single academic achievement had been a handful of O levels. I even managed to fail woodwork. My father never quite forgave me for that. I accepted the university’s offer immediately but imposed one condition: I would close down the department in my first week. The offer was withdrawn. The department was (what else?) media studies.
Maybe my response had been a bit childish and maybe I’m wrong about the value of a media studies degree. I’m sure that many bright young people have left university with them and gone on to great things. I’m equally sure that they would have succeeded without a media studies degree. I simply do not believe that you can learn to be a journalist. I’m with that late, great reporter Nicholas Tomalin who said the only qualities essential for success as a journalist are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability. Tomalin wrote in a pre-digital age and he would have been forced to add to that list today the ability to understand and navigate the world of social media. I would add insatiable curiosity, and something else: a good journalist needs, in my book, to be contumacious.
Not a word, I concede, that one hears every day but it’s been around a long time and apparently we have St Benedict to thank for it. He applied it to people who ‘stubbornly or wilfully resist authority’. The punishment for it 1,500 years ago was excommunication – which is fair enough I suppose if you are in the business of founding the greatest monastery in history. You can’t have monks calling into question the supreme authority of the Catholic Church, can you? Equally, in my rather more humble view, you can’t have journalists who do the opposite: who accept supreme authority without questioning it. Or any other kind of authority for that matter. And that is not something you can learn. You are either contumacious or you are not. I am, and I have my father, George, to thank. Or to blame.
He was born into a working-class family in Cardiff in what we would now call a slum but was pretty standard housing for people like them in the early years of the last century: a tiny back-to-back terraced house with an outdoor lavatory and a tin bath in front of the fire. He was, by all accounts, a bright and rather wilful child who loved reading and running. But his disobedience was to cost him his eyesight.
Like most youngsters in those pre-vaccine days he caught measles – a particularly bad dose – and my grandmother was told that on no account was she to let him out of the house. He was to be kept in a bedroom with the curtains drawn. The next day she had to go shopping, leaving him in the house alone with strict orders to stay put. Obviously he didn’t. It was a glorious winter’s day – bright sunshine after some heavy snowfalls – and there were snowballs to be thrown and snowmen to be built. The temptation was too great for him. The sun reflected off the snow and that, coupled with the poor nutrition common in working-class families at that time, did massive damage to his optic nerve. For the next couple of years he was blind. His education effectively ended when he was twelve.
Gradually his sight began to recover enough for him to get an apprenticeship and he became a French polisher. He got a job with the firm where he’d served his apprenticeship and, confident of a steady income, promptly proposed to my mother. She accepted. The job lasted barely a week. My father took great exception to something the foreman had said to him, punched him on the nose and he was out on his ear. The dole was not an option – he was far too proud to take what he called ‘charity’ anyway – so he set about building up his own business.
There were always people in the richer parts of Cardiff who wanted a table or a piano polished and, one way and another, he made enough money to keep hearth and home together – with my mother doing the neighbours’ hair in the kitchen and me doing a paper round before school and my older brother making deliveries for the local grocer. We also tramped the streets of the posher suburbs sticking little circulars through letter boxes advertising Dad’s services. I’ve never been sure if it was worth the effort but at least it gave me an idea of how the other half lived.
Obviously we didn’t get paid for it but there was some compensation. I carried two bags – one for the leaflets and the other for any apples hanging temptingly near the garden walls. It’s always puzzled me that my friends and I would not have dreamed of stealing apples from a shop but I think we must have seen scrumping as a victimless crime. And anyway there were always far more apples than the posh people could possibly eat. Or so we reasoned. I also made a modest income from our own neighbours: selling them little bundles of mint door to door which I picked from the backyard where it grew in the ashes thrown out from the coal fires. Twopence for a small bunch: an extra penny for a bigger one. I always sold out. That was where my entrepreneurial career began and ended.
We were told endlessly what was wrong and what was right, and not just by our parents. For those of us who went to Sunday school, the vicar reinforced the message. There was a clear line of authority running through our tight little community, with the vicar and perhaps also the GP at the top. Perhaps it was a small-scale reflection of the wider world, in an age when we deferred to figures in authority, when elites told us what our responsibilities were.
My father had an abiding dislike and distrust of the clergy mostly, I think, because they thought they were a cut above ordinary people like him. That can probably be traced to an experience he had as a young man when he was staying with his aunt at her little cottage in a Somerset village, not long after the First World War. They were about to sit down for lunch when the door burst open and the vicar strode in. Without so much as a by-your-leave or a ‘Good morning’ he demanded to know why my great-aunt had not been at the morning service. She did a little bob and stammered an apology. She tried to explain that she seldom had visitors and that she’d been preparing lunch for her nephew whom she hadn’t seen for a year and who had come from a long way away. She said she would be sure to turn up for evensong. He was having none of it. He did not even glance at my father but barked at his auntie: ‘See that you do and don’t let it happen again!’ Then he turned on his heel and left.
Instinctive deference – unearned deference – is dying if not dead. Its defenders say it has taken respect with it but I doubt that. Over the years I have received countless letters (invariably letters) blaming me and my ilk but I suspect we were reacting to, rather than creating, a change in attitudes to authority. Richard Hoggart, who was one of Britain’s most respected cultural critics, thought that attitudes to authority, whether religious or lay, really began to change at the end of the last war – when the soldiers came home and the women, who’d been forced to work in the factories, decided they didn’t want to go back to the old ways.
I behaved according to the rules of my community when I was growing up, but I think (perhaps thanks to my father) it instilled in me not just deference to authority but a questioning attitude to it too. I don’t like being defined or told what to do, whoever is in charge. I even have a thing about wearing identity tags at work. Once, during the Gulf War, when BBC security was at its tightest, I was rushing to the studio with a few minutes to spare and a man in a peaked cap stopped me at the door.
‘You can’t go in there,’ he told me sternly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re not wearing your ID.’
‘But you know who I am and I’m on air in two minutes.’
‘Sorry. No ID, no admission.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘you do the bloody programme.’
Mercifully, he gave in. Yes, I know I was being petulant and he was just doing his job but I thought at the time I was striking a small blow for freedom. Today, I suspect I was just being difficult because I don’t like authority.
Mine was a childhood of smells: the horrible smell of the chemical Mam used for perms and the even more horrible (and probably dangerous) fumes from the chemicals Dad used when he had to polish furniture in the kitchen – which was often. One of the tricks of his trade – I was never quite sure why – was to pour methylated spirits onto, say, a tabletop, wait a few seconds and then set fire to it. There’d be a great ‘whoosh!’ Job done. Remember … this was in the kitchen where my mother cooked and the family ate. Even worse, because it was so noxious, was his use of oxalic acid. The crystals were boiled up in a baked beans tin on the gas stove and the liquid used as a very powerful bleach if he needed to lighten the colour of a particular piece of furniture. The fumes got into the back of your throat. God knows what they did to your lungs. My mother suffered the most and died a relatively early death. The doctor said her lungs ‘just gave out’. Unsurprising really.
Dad would have had an easier life had he been a bit less stroppy. He hated ‘snobs’ – a word that encompassed a vast range of people – and he hated authority in all its manifestations. Almost all. There was one exception. He did a lot of work at Cardiff and Port Talbot docks polishing the officers’ quarters on the banana boats and iron-ore carriers. I sometimes worked with him as an (unpaid) labourer and was always surprised to see how he treated the captain. He even called him ‘sir’. That was a word I’d never heard him use.
His politics were perfectly balanced. He hated capitalism – specifically those who got rich from it – and inherited wealth. And he hated socialism. When he turned up at a really grand house to do some work he would always ring the bell at the main entrance, and if he was ordered to use the servants’ entrance – which happened from time to time – he would tell them to bugger off and walk away. He was, as he unfailingly pointed out, a skilled craftsman. He was absolutely NOT a ‘servant’. The fact that he needed the work took second place to his pride.
He had a special place in hell reserved for the bosses of large companies, specifically the ship owners and the banks, who hired him to do a job and did not pay him for at least a couple of months. I decided long ago that when I become prime minister the first law I shall propose will be one that forces all companies to pay their bills within one month – except in the case of one-man firms like my father’s in which case it will be one week. Why not?
Dad hated royalty too. He was the only person in our street who did not go to see the Queen when she visited Cardiff soon after her coronation, even though her motorcade passed down a road only a few minutes’ walk from our house. ‘Why should I?’ he’d demand. ‘She’s just another human being … she’s no better than me.’ He was thrown out of his club because of her. It was a busy Friday night and the only spare seat was beneath a portrait of her. ‘Buggered if I’m sitting there!’ he announced. And that was the end of his club membership. He hated socialism equally. He regarded trade union leaders as dangerous and their members as dupes. The welfare state was an excuse for lazy men to live off hard-working men like him. He made an exception for women who had lost their husbands in the war or were struggling desperately to bring up their children. The Man from the Board, with his large notebook, intrusive questions and prying eyes, was hated by everyone in our street. If you applied for benefits you had to prove your need. One of our neighbours, who’d been widowed and was struggling desperately to bring up her two children, told my mother how he had demanded to know why she had four chairs around her kitchen table when there were only three in her family, her husband having died in the war. The Man from the Board said it would count against her when ‘the office’ reached a judgement on her case. Obviously my father hated him too.
The curious thing was that Dad never admitted we were poor – even when there was no work and we were really on our uppers. I remember one night – I was probably seven or eight – being woken up by him screaming when he should have been snoring. My brother told me he was having a nervous breakdown – not that he really knew what that meant. I understood much later that he was at breaking point because he didn’t know how he was going to put enough food on the table for all of us. I think what I understand now is that he regarded himself as a failure and that was more than he could handle.
In fact, we kids never really went hungry. We knew when times were hard because there would be lamb bones boiled for a very long time with potatoes and onions for dinner (meaning lunch) and sugar sandwiches for tea (meaning supper). In better times meals were strictly regimented. I can remember exactly what we had for dinner every day of the week. It almost never varied and it gave me my unshakeable conviction that the cheapest meat is the tastiest.
Scrag-end of lamb neck made the perfect stew, and point end of brisket the perfect roast – so long as you left it in the oven for about six hours. It was at least seventy per cent fat but that was fine because my father preferred fat to lean meat – especially when it was burned to a crisp. I can’t imagine it was terribly healthy food, but he made up for it by drinking the water the cabbage had been boiled in. And, yes, it was just as disgusting as it sounds.
Tea was slightly more flexible, especially in summer when the allotment was producing lots of lettuce and other salad ingredients. Funny how the middle class came to discover the joy of allotments for themselves in later years. Unlike the working class who grew the food because they needed it, the middle class grew it for the pleasure of it. Nothing was wasted in our house. I mean nothing. Stale bread was soaked in water and used to make bread pudding and, on the vanishingly rare occasion when one of us left some food on our plate for dinner it would be served up again for tea. Obviously there was no fridge, but that didn’t matter because nothing stayed around for long enough to go rotten. On hot days the milk stood in a saucepan of cold water. It worked.
My father’s nervous breakdown did not last long. He was not a man to show emotion of any kind. In the language of the time he ‘pulled himself together’ – almost as though his breakdown had been a fault in his character. I’m not sure the word ‘counselling’ existed in those days, possibly because there were so many men who had survived the war but were still suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. We had no language for PTSD then.
My favourite uncle, Tom, had fought in the Great War and was still suffering horribly. He had been gassed in the trenches, shipped back to Britain and put to work in the docks. Unbelievably, given the state of his lungs, his job was offloading coal. The coal dust completed the job that the gas had begun. His lungs were wrecked. He was never again able to lie down to sleep because his lungs would fill with fluid. His life had been hellish enough anyway.
He and Auntie Lizzie had one child, Tommy – or ‘Little Tommy’ as everyone called him even though he was a very large man. His brain and his face had been terribly damaged at birth and he had the mental age of a toddler and no speech. In fact, he had nothing – except an unlimited supply of love from his utterly wonderful parents. Whenever I went to his house Little Tommy would bring out the photograph albums and point gleefully at every picture of me and my siblings and parents and look terribly proud of himself for having made the connection. Then he would laugh uproariously.
Uncle Tommy and Auntie Lizzie had a hard life by even the harshest of standards. Desperate would be a better word. Their one constant worry was what would happen to Little Tommy ‘when we are gone’. But I never once heard them complain. Yes, I know that’s one of the oldest clichés in the book but so what? It happens to be true. Whether their lives might have been improved if they had complained we shall never know.
My father’s proudest possession was a medallion he won representing Glamorgan on the running track. He carried it with him in his jacket pocket everywhere. He was a first-class sprinter but two things held him back: his eyesight and his poverty. It’s not easy to race if you can’t see the man in front of you clearly. A friend of his told me how Dad once ran off the course and into a barbed-wire fence alongside the track. He kept going. He always did. But poverty proved to be a bigger problem. He had been selected to run for his athletics club in a meet some fifty miles from Cardiff. He had no money and so the club paid his bus fare for him. But those were the days when athletics was a strictly amateur sport and when the Amateur Athletics Association got to hear about his subsidised bus fare he was banned. Like Uncle Tom he did not complain. Unlike Uncle Tom he got angry.
I am sometimes told how remarkable it is that I made such a success of my career in spite of my poor background and having to leave school at fifteen. But of course that’s nonsense. I succeeded not in spite of it but because of it. And anyway I had some huge advantages. My mother was one of them. She left school at fourteen without a single qualification and had never, as far as I could tell, read a book in her life. Not that there was much time for reading with five children and no little luxuries such as a vacuum cleaner or washing machine or fridge. The only time I remember her sitting down was when there was darning to be done. Mostly socks as I recall.
She seldom expressed opinions – certainly never political ones. But she was utterly, single-mindedly determined that her children should have the education that was denied to her and my father. That meant that, unlike the other kids in our street, we were forced to do homework. It also meant that when the Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman came knocking on our door Mam made my father buy a set.
It cost a shilling a week and the salesman called every Saturday morning to collect the payment. It was the only thing my parents ever bought on the never-never. She told us one evening that the woman who lived opposite had paid for a holiday on the never-never. She could not have been more shocked if the neighbour had sold her children to the gypsies who came to the door every few weeks selling clothes pegs.
So precious were the encyclopaedias that my father built a bookcase especially to protect them. It had glass doors so the neighbours could admire them. Sadly, the doors had a lock and he was the key holder so when he was out – which was most of the time – we kids couldn’t use them. That might have seemed rather to defeat the reason for buying them, but even if we had never opened them they sent out an important message. Knowledge was important. It was empowering. My parents wanted their children to have something they could not have dreamed of in their own childhoods: access to everything they wanted to know beyond the grinding poverty of their own lives. Hence the homework.
There were two rooms downstairs in our house: the kitchen with a coal fire in it where we cooked and ate and washed (dishes and selves) and a tiny front room where no one was allowed except at Christmas and for homework. At least a couple of hours a night. That was when the encyclopaedias came out of the bookcase.
My parents were utterly determined that we would pass the eleven-plus and go to high school – we didn’t use the term ‘grammar school’ then – but beyond that, I don’t think they had any real ambitions for us. There was just the unswerving certainty that if we went to high school we would have a very different life from theirs. And we did pass – all of us. My younger brother Rob and I went to Cardiff High, which was regarded as the best school in Cardiff, if not in Wales. I hated it from the day I joined until the day I left.
The headmaster was a snob and I was clearly not the sort of boy he wanted at Cardiff High – far too working class for his refined tastes. I remember being beaten by him because I was late one morning. I tried explaining to him that it was because I had a morning newspaper round and the papers had not been delivered to the shop as early as usual because it was snowing heavily, which also made it difficult to get around on my bike. I tried to suggest I could not let down the shop’s customers and we needed the money from my job, but he was not impressed. The pain from the beating did not last long, but the anger never faded. Some years later, when I had started appearing on television and was considered something of a celebrity, I had a letter from the school. Would I accept the great honour of making a speech at the annual prize-giving? I replied immediately. Yes of course, I wrote, and then I added a few lines about what I proposed saying. The invitation was swiftly withdrawn.
By then the various chips on my shoulder had been firmly welded into place. Growing up in the immediate post-war years in Splott (an ugly name for a pretty ugly neighbourhood) I’m not sure children like me were really aware of being poor. We knew there were rich people, of course, but we simply did not come into contact with them. The man who owned the timber yard a couple of doors up from my house had a car, and that put him in a totally different class way beyond our own imaginings. It wasn’t, I think, until some of the neighbours got television sets and we were able to see inside the houses of middle-class people like the Grove Family (the first TV soap opera in Britain) that we realised the gulf between them and us.
I remember clearly the first time I was invited for tea in a middle-class home and how surprised I was that the milk came out of a jug rather than a bottle and the jam was in little cut-glass bowls. There was even a bowl of fruit on the table for anybody to help themselves. An old friend of mine, the brilliant comedian Ted Robbins, always says you could tell someone was really rich if they had fruit in the house even when no one was ill … and if they got out of the bath to have a wee.