Another voice

Poor Reggie

Auberon Waugh

Drink no longer water but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine other infirmities. I Tim. A 23 For we brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out. Ibid. vi 7 The will of Mr Reginald Bosanquet, the television broadcaster, who died of cancer six months ago, was published on Sunday. He left nothing. Cynics will sug- gest that this means no more than that he employed a good tax adviser in his lifetime, but I doubt that this is the true explana- tion. The best accountants always leave something for the tax man at the end of their complicated arrangements, if only out of respect for his amour propre. The simple truth, I fear, is that Reggie had no money left when he died, and no possessions, either. At the end of a week when the Inland Revenue announced it suspected there were a hundred new millionaires in the United Kingdom all called Patel, the news of Bosanquet's estate strikes a spe- cially poignant chord.

There are three families Bosanquet in the 1965 edition of Burke's Landed Gentry, not counting a Smith-Bosanquet formerly of Broxbornebury. There are no Patels at all. Among surviving Bosanquets one finds Deputy Lieutenants and Justices of the Peace in three counties — Northumber- land, Sussex and Monmouthshire — as well as chief executives of mighty corpora- tions, but none has ever achieved such fame as Reginald. His father won a certain amount of distinction as the English Test cricketer who invented the googly and so did his cousin, the Hegelian philosopher Ber- nard Bosanquet of Rock Hall (1848-1923), but for the most part it would be true to say that ,20 generations of county folk reached their consummation in Reginald, whose name was on every lip and whose face was known in every home in the land.

Richard Compton Miller, in his seminal Who's Really Who (Blond and Briggs 1983), recounts how, at Winchester, Reg- gie wanted to be Prime Minister, like so many other Wykehamists before and since, but an old family friend advised him to make his fortune and reputation first. So he joined Independent Television News as a political correspondent in 1955 after Oxford. Seldom can anyone have followed such disastrous advice. No prime minister has yet died penniless. No television repor- ter has yet approached closer to Downing Street than poor Mr Senn, whose own Westmonasterian tragedy has yet to un- fold.

The tragic disintegration of Reggie be-

gan with his departure from ITN in 1979 but for 12 months — 18? — he held the country in thrall. At the time, I maintained that the Reginald Bosanquet-Anna Ford partnership was the first original work of art which television had yet produced. Never mind that it was an accident, or that when the ITN authorities discovered they had inadvertently created a work of art, they moved in immediately to close it down. Since then we have seen one or two other television masterpieces — the Alan Bennet/Alan Bates production of An En- glishman Abroad springs to mind, and I quite enjoyed some of the bottoms in Brideshead — but these were little more than films such as might have been shown on a cinema screen at any time in the last 50 years. There was little in them which tied them exclusively to the medium of television, or made them a new art-form.

But that glorious stretch of ITN news presentation from 1978, when Anna Ford joined the team, to the moment in 1979 when Bosanquet left it, could only have occurred on television. It was a work of art for many reasons, chief of which was because it provided an utterly coherent, utterly complete and yet utterly English commentary on the world events being recorded.

It was not just that Anna Ford's ex- quisite beauty and Reginald Bosanquet's squiffy hairpiece and straining face offered us the familiar theme of Beauty and the Beast in a new version. Anna represented everything that was bright, liberal and perhaps I should say hopefully intelligent in Young Britain. She was not only lovely to look at, she was clean, she was decent, she was modern and unashamed. At the same time she was reticent and modest in her private life. Reggie, on the other hand, represented everything that was drunk and cynical and despairing in modern Britain. On top of this, there was the almost unbearable tension produced night after night by the audience's uncertainty about whether he would be able to get the words out.

To have the news — with its urgency and immediacy, its endless chronicle of disas- ters, crimes, personal tragedies and politic- al dramas — filtered through this Beauty and the Beast duo was the highest form of art which television has yet attained: a nightly Porter scene from Macbeth with a touch of Sade's Justine thrown in for good measure. Perhaps now the danger is over, ITN will issue a video of Highlights from Ten O'Clock News of this historic period. Part of the proceeds could go to Bosan- quet's widow and orphans. Bosanquet's will is only the closing act in a long-running tragedy. One of its most poignant moments came between mar- riages, when Reggie for some reason allowed himself to be photographed sitting on the floor of an empty drawing-room after his home had been stripped of all its furniture, presumably by a departing wife or girlfriend. He was alone in the world, like Betjeman's night-club proprietress quoted by P. J. Kavanagh at last week's Betjeman celebration: There was sun enough for lazing upon beaches,

There was fun enough for far into the night. But I'm dying now and done for, What on earth was all the fun for?

For I'm old and ill and terrified and tight.

This photograph inspired Tina Brown to write a television play about the tragedy of Reginald Bosanquet, but I am afraid that lawyers stepped in and killed it, or possiblY imposed changes which made it unrecog- nisable. It ended, I remember, with Reggie as the voice announcing train departures over the loudspeaker system at Paddington Station. Death is an infinitely more banal ending to the story.

My own last memory of Reginald Bosan- quet is almost equally unhappy. Long after his departure from ITN, after the collapse of his second marriage, he embarked on a ponderous, Levin-like trail of revenge against the gossip columnists whom he blamed for his marital problems. He, whose television screen image had been kissed in bedsitters all over London by countless lonely women, could not at that time find a single woman to spend the night with him. So he was making a television documentary about gossip columns, hop- ing to catch my friend Dempster, the man who will 'always cheat and always win, wh° washes his repulsive skin in women's tears'.

I said that if he wanted me to go t° London for a three-minute interview the BBC would have to pay £100, as it would mean a day off work. No, £30 was the maximum. So he came down to Combe Florey with his producer, the producer's personal assistant, the cameraman and assistant, the sound man and assistant, the lighting man and assistant, various other production assistants, five cars and a truck- ful of equipment. Did I not think Dempster the most frightful shit? he asked. 'No,' I said. 'The greatest living Eng- lishman.' I never saw the programme, and I do not know whether it appeared. Afterwards Bosanquet sat on the sofa, drinking whis- ky. My children, delighted to have 9 genuine celebrity in the house, watcheo fascinated as he sank to the floor. Perhaps future generations of Wykehamists

learn from his example that the way to become Prime Minister or millionaire in

modern England is not through television, but through running a corner shop. will