Doctor in distress | 12 December 2012

The passing of Jonathan Miller’s father Emanuel Miller — a very distinguished psychiatrist — was terrible. ‘His last words, as he reared up on his deathbed, were: “I’m a flop! I’m a flop!” ’ One should be cautious about being Freudian here — Emanuel might approve; his son wouldn’t; his son’s biographer might, slightly — but that is a hell of a sentiment to inherit. As theatre and opera director, author of learned papers in medicine and neuropsychology, TV presenter and public intellectual, quotable crosspatch and lightning-rod for English anti-intellectualism, Jonathan Miller looks like someone for whom not being a flop consumes a lot of anxiety.

He came out of the traps as not-a-flop with some energy. His early success was astonishing. While Miller was still an undergraduate, Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times wrote that ‘if the whole world is destroyed, but Mr Miller preserved, it will be possible to start the entire adventure over again.’ He was offered a part in a West End show, appeared on TV variety shows, had a sketch pressed on vinyl and performed it on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. He was drawn by Ronald Searle and photographed by Jane Bown. All this well before Beyond the Fringe.

And, my God, he knew everybody. His infant self appeared (unflatteringly) in a Stevie Smith poem. He palled about with Lord Lucan as a boy (Miller seems to have been the naughty one) and Oliver Sacks as a teenager. As an apprentice book designer he contributed the cover to Cape’s first edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (and almost got sued by Bridget Riley in the process). And — which quite boggled my mind — while at Cambridge he appeared in a production of Bartholomew Fair alongside Sylvia Plath and A.S. Byatt, who at that point (can this be right?) went by the name of ‘Toni Drabble’.