Face to face

With the death of John Freeman at the age of 99, memories of Face to Face, the benchmark television interview series of half a century ago, come flooding back. These were real interviews - direct, probing, lucid, revealing, properly serious - with real celebrities. 

Everything fitted in, from the superb Felix Topolski sketches to the introductory music from Berlioz’s Francs Juges overture - “ what’s this?”, people continually asked as  the memorable strains kept unwinding. Then the first glimpse of the interviewee and the back of Freeman’s head - you never saw his face. Useless to say now  that he will be missed. He has been missed for fifty or sixty years,  after he went on to become a diplomat. 

But the interviews with Otto Klemperer, Evelyn Waugh, Bertrand Russell, Lord Reith, Tony Hancock, and Gilbert Harding linger on, and some of them, including the gloriously laconic ones with Klemperer and Waugh, can still be viewed on You Tube. Watch them and admire.

22 December 2014