Betting heavily on yourself
William Feaver
FREUD EGO by Clement Freud BBC, £16.99, pp. 224, ISBN 0563534516 Given his wry way with words, his gourmand reputation and lugubrious demeanour, aired on many a game show, Clement Freud had no hesitation in selling himself at a premium when asked to name his fee for co-starring in dog food commercials: 'What the prime minister gets.' Parity with Harold Wilson sounded fair enough to the agency, so they signed him up and Minced Morsels, later known as Chunky Meat, became forever associated with Clement Freud and his canine dining companion.
'For £45,000 I was prepared to sit next to a dog called Henry.' For considerably less he was made to sit next to Kenneth Williams on the panel of Just a Minute and endure his catty remarks. Such as 'Was I sure I had had a bath this week?' Williams's whinnying egotism was insufferable, and almost as big a pain was Chairman Nicholas Parsons, 'of whom I was not very fond though I hugely admired his industry (there cannot be many folk in the profession who get that much work with that amount of talent)'. The Parsonical habit of explaining to the audience what Freud just said is, Chunky Freud explains, 'the certain way to kill humour'.
The humour in Freud Ego begins with the title and carries on ineffably. The youngest grandson of Sigmund Freud, he reveals that he likes money, food and drink, enjoys heavyweight wordplay and has to win, no matter what, particularly when winning involves proving others to be slow-witted. The by-election victory in 1973, when he won the Isle of Ely for the
Liberals by 1,470 votes, was all the sweeter for his having backed himself (The clever money appears to be going on Freud') at 33-1.
From earliest childhood in Berlin, Clement Raphael Freud was aware of not being the favourite. His eldest brother, Stephen Gabriel, was not the problem; his elder brother, Lucian Michael, was. Their mother gave them archangelic middle names and made no secret of preferring her middle son to the others.
When she came into the nursery she nodded to Stephen and me, and sat down with Lucian and whispered. They had secrets. I did not realise for many years that this is not what good mothers do.
Clement remembers little of his Berlin days they left when he was nine beyond waving at Hitler once, that sort of thing. 'I had also said "Heil Hitler", which was cool.' He seems to have forgotten that his brothers put him up to cadging cigarette cards off
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