Books do furnish a TV series

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When I was younger, I used to think, ‘If ever you become famous, on no account agree to be interviewed by Lynn (“Demon”) Barber.’ The call never came; but, if it had, I hope my resolve would have remained adamantine, whatever her blandishments.

You can see what she made of her victims in her collected profiles, Mostly Men (1991). Richard Harris has ‘a very surprising habit’: he ‘plays pocket billiards’ throughout the interview. ‘He puts his hand down inside his tracksuit and sort of rearranges things.’ Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, is in floods of tears most of the time, even blubbing into his meat pie at lunch. Most savage of all — one can only gasp at the woman’s originality — is her taking the cut-throat razor to Melvyn Bragg:

Melvyn Bragg has an awful lot of friends, and I seemed to bump into dozens of them while writing this article. One after another, they all said the same thing: ‘I hear you’re doing Melvyn. You’ve got to like him, haven’t you?’ I found myself asking, ‘Why? Why has everyone got to like Melvyn?’ Smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails when he is supposed to be asking questions, exuding his awful smug, matey blokiness (‘Look! I have the common touch!’), he makes me almost weak with longing for Russell Harty.

(In case there are readers who don’t remember him, Harty was a somewhat unctuous chat-show host, at his most watchable when being slapped round the chops by the Bond girl Grace Jones.)

Bragg is nobody’s patsy, as he proved on the Parkinson show in mid-April. Parky, interviewing him about this book, caustically challenged his view that football had helped to reduce racism and said it certainly hadn’t worked in Barnsley. Bragg shot back, with menacing geniality, ‘12 Books that Changed the World — and it comes down to Barnsley!’ So no one was very surprised when Crystal Rooms (1992), the next novel Bragg wrote after the Barber attack, contained an unlovable character widely thought to be based on her.