You find me in the south of France, holed up in that inn of near perfection called La Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence. I escape here twice a year and marvel at how little has changed since the 1950s, when it was Mecca for artists of all types, painters such as Chagall and Picasso (Matisse was an early fan between the wars) and stars of stage and screen, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, all looking breathtakingly cool, smoking of course. One can still catch a glimpse of the fabulous Dame Joan C and her husband Percy sipping ice cold glasses of rosé. It is a place where the living is easy but civilised – not something one can say about London these days.
Oh London, what have we done to you? ‘To be tired of London…’ Hmm, sorry Dr J, but that is no longer true. Everyone I know is tired of London. The traffic congestion gets steadily worse, the litter and general filth and graffiti builds up daily, the constant tinkering with one-way systems makes driving almost impossible. I take my bike (and my life) in my hands, and attempt the now habitual slalom of e-bikes thrown down willy-nilly, muttering obscenities and longing for the moment when I can escape (if my train hasn’t been cancelled – but that’s for another day) back down to sleepy Wiltshire.
I’m guessing quite a few Spectator readers fall neatly into two categories, the Beatles or the Stones. I was definitely a Stones boy. It was a slightly more anarchic choice for someone with such rigidly establishment parents. Mick’s androgynous prancing around was exciting to a stagestruck boy back then. But in 1967 it suddenly became more personal. The boys got busted for drugs at a party at Redlands, the home of Keith Richards. It was huge news. My father was reading about it disapprovingly and harrumphed into his glass of sherry: ‘I hope they don’t ask me to defend them.’ An hour later the phone rang. After a couple of minutes, Dad returned: ‘I shall be defending the Rolling Stones!’ As he got to know them better, he became fond of them, and much more tolerant of the Swinging Sixties generation, including me. They lost their case initially, but Dad was determined to fight, and the famous Times leader by William Rees-Mogg, ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel’ (original words by Alexander Pope), became synonymous with the case. Dad got them off on appeal, and the rest is history.
This story has been part of my family legend from that date to this. It has been simmering in my brain for 50 years as something that has the makings of a great play. I have tried to get it off the ground several times without success, but now, finally, at last, eureka! The artistic director Justin Audibert and writer Charlotte Jones have turned it into a play – currently on at the Chichester Festival Theatre – and it is brilliant. I popped down there the other day to do a touch of TV reporting for The One Show. What a pleasure it was to interview a young actor who is playing me! The young cast inhabit the characters perfectly, even though obviously they can have scant knowledge of the Stones era, nor could they have ever experienced anything like the nationwide hysteria that the two greatest bands on Earth at that time induced in young impressionable fans. It was an enormous thrill to finally see a dream realised – and an example of the tenacity required to make a pipe dream take wings.
Autumn has arrived with a bang, the curtains need drawing and, dare I say it, we’ve had the odd fire already. Depressing in a way, but I rather like this time of year. I like kicking the leaves as I walk the dog through beech woods, wearing wellies and ever-increasing layers for warmth. I enjoy being back in a suit – oh yes, I do love a good suit – and suddenly there is an avalanche of new, exciting-looking television shows appearing to see us through those long cold nights. Of course, nowadays we can binge anything we fancy and I think back with great nostalgia to the days when we would rush home to catch the weekly episodes of The Forsyte Saga, Brideshead Revisited or Jewel in the Crown. If you missed an episode, that was it – gone for ever. I wonder how many times we nearly crashed the car in a frantic effort to get home and turn on the Radio Rentals 12in TV in time.
Many people have given us their memories of the magnificent Dame Maggie Smith. Sadly, I only worked with her once, on the Dame Maggie Show, otherwise known as Downton Abbey. I saw her relatively recently and greeted her by saying how marvellous she looked. ‘Clutching at straws, darling, you’re clutching at straws,’ she replied.
Comments