Only agreeing
Sir: The hours we spent hanging around back stage at This is Your Life seem to have had dire effects on my colleague, David Starkey (Diary, 10 February). By the end of the recording, he was clearly hallucinating. I did indeed suggest an emollient formula for the appearance of the Moral Maze team but I certainly never made any remark of the kind David attributes to me at the show's finale. In fact, he turned to me as we stood up to encircle Michael Buerk and said, 'Isn't it extraordinary how people are willing to be choreographed?' And I agreed. That was it. Emollient I may occa- sionally be — two-faced I am not.
Janet Daley
15 Capel Road, East Barnet, Herts
David Starkey writes: I'm delighted to see that Janet has made a full recovery from her bout of emollience and is back to her usual form of putting the world — and other people in particular — to rights. And, as usual, she is half right. She did not utter the disputed remark dur- ing the finale. But she did make it earlier about the behaviour of the studio audience. With a diarist's licence I replaced my phrase with hers because hers was better. But why she gets steamed up about two- facedness is beyond me. Pavlov's dogs slavered at the bell, not because they were feigning, but because they were pro- grammed. As was the behaviour of all of us during that bizarre recording.
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