I must stop you there

Matthew Parris

THE WALDEN INTERVIEWS edited by David Cox

Boxtree, £14.95, pp. 161

W alden', says LWT's David Cox — in a slightly sepulchral introduction to this book — would take away the 'flow-chart' of possible questions and answers (pre- pared for him by his devoted team) and in the hours that remained, pore over this, pacing about his room, until he had con- signed its contents to some deep level of his consciousness. There they would fuse with his own instinctive attitudes and equip him to engage his interviewee, without benefit of notes, in apparently spontaneous discourse.

Dear me! Mr Walden must have changed, then. I rather think that just as often in the old Weekend World days, Brian would nip off to the bar, consign a packet of crisps and a drink to some deep level of his consciousness, chat about the state of the world with a cleaner and two lift-attendants, fuse a couple of cigarettes with his own instinctive attitudes, get a bit of a kip, wander in the next morning, blithely ignore the notes and still come up with a smashing interview.

Transcripts of a selection of Brian Wal- den's recent interviews are prefaced by two introductions: one by my old ally, David Cox, and the other by the great Walden himself. The introductions are much more interesting than the transcripts. This rather undermines the exercise.

It would not, I think, be a helpful way of promoting a publishing venture in televis- ion transcripts to introduce it with the remark that a television interview is a strangely insubstantial thing: the creature of a political moment, made by the mom- ent, transient, fed by the juices of a salivating hour, past when the hour is past, dead when the moment is gone.

But it is true: Brian Walden: 'Okay, so if we summed Hattersley up, he would say he believes in the big idea of equality as being at the centre of socialism, and he expects . .

Roy Hattersley: 'Do I have to correct you again?'

BW: . . . and he expects . . . all right, with freedom and all that . . . and he ex- pects . .

RH: 'Yes, freedom and all that, it's a big all that, Brian.'

BW: . . . he expects Europe to be the agency of it.'

RH: 'Yes.'

BW: 'Yes, Europe, the agency of social- ism?'

RH: 'Europe can be . . . I'm sorry I thought you said equality in there. Ask me the question again.'

BW: 'All right, Mr Hattersley, I must stop you. Thank you very much indeed.'

If anything can bring back the moment, it is not the transcript. A commentator's assessment would be 'truer' than the arte- fact itself: 'In an ill-tempered exchange, betraying personal animosity between the two men, an insistent Brian Walden prod- ded Roy Hattersley over the latter's ill- defined domestic and European philoso- phy.' The transcript hardly adds to the report: indeed, the report adds to the transcript, for you cannot quite construct the hostility out of the printed words alone.

The book is fascinating reading, but not quite for the reason its editor intended. What fascinates is the curious flatness of prose lifted from its context and drained of the adrenalin which topicality injects. I remember, once, when we were planning a special edition of Weekend World to cele- brate its umpteenth anniversary, we de- cided to screen an anthology of 'most significant moments' from celebrated inter- views in our archives. We ran through dozens. We found the bits the newspapers had crowed over. But they didn't seem significant at all. Now that the excitement was over, they just did not stand up.

Today we look back — these transcripts do -- to two of the most 'significant' interviews of more recent years: Walden's encounter with Mrs Thatcher, then Nigel Lawson, at the time of the latter's resigna- tion.

Judge the transcripts for yourself: for my part I can find nothing which explains their power at the time. What most tellingly comes through is that the Prime Minister was very determined, far from frank, and not at all relaxed. Mr Lawson was just completely fed up. These were important truths, but truths which might have shone equally through an attempt by Walden to make Mrs 'Matcher admit that she doesn't darn Dennis's socks, or to persuade Mr Lawson to chat about his last summer holiday. On the issue itself, little emerged. I know, because I now know that the loss of her Chancellor had not hit Mrs Thatcher from the blue at all, but had been decided by her, and was not uncongenial to him.

I was never comfortable, in my two-year stint after taking over Weekend World from Brian, with the programme-makers' insistence on trying to make politicians sign, on the dotted line, statements which any fool could read between the lines anyway. It was done for Monday's press headlines. But it took up so much time and seemed to me to insult the intelligence of the ordinary viewer, who uses intuition and does not need signed statements, as journ- alists do. Worse, it over-valued the ingenuity of any politician who played that particular sort of political chess — and cared to — at the expense of men like Nick Ridley, who didn't.

Anyway, I was not much good at it. The politicians are getting wise, and interviews designed to extract, rather than tamely to enquire, more often turn into half an hour's boxing and coxing these days. Brian is one of the few who still meets with regular success in providing hard copy rather than simply 'colour'. Reading these transcripts I am struck with one of the rea- sons for this. It is not — despite the claims of this book — Walden's forensic skill as an interviewer, but his rhetorical skill as a rival speaker.

The reputation some of these interviews gained for being occasions when an MP 'spilled the beans' is hard to extract from the transcripts, for the text reveals nothing like the signed confession the press re- ported on Mondays. Where Brian scored was in persuading viewer and journalist alike that the implicit commentary he was giving as we went along, 'summing up' in that often deeply unfair and marvellously folksy way of his — 'you and I know what you're really trying to say, old chap' — was the truth. Usually it was: but that was in Walden's guesswork, and Walden's eye- brow, not the text! A man of his ability pointed in the wrong ideological direction could do a lot of damage.

Which is why, with every affectionate regard for David Cox, I think that in his cogently argued preface he takes the inter- views too seriously. Of course the team, the methodology, the groundwork, and the back-room boys matter. But if they mat- tered as much as the paleo-Birtean theor- ists sometimes suggest, then Weekend Work/ could have survived a presenter who lacked Walden's genius, and Walden's cheek. He and Mrs Thatcher are well- matched, as here:

MT: '. . . I held these passionate convic- tions . . . reasonably, firmly, strongly. . BW: 'Prime Minister, I must. .

MT: 'Britain. . . they knew what. . BW: 'I must stop you there.'

MT: 'No. . . No. . no, you must not.' BW: 'I must. Thank you very much indeed.'

MT: 'Strong leadership will continue.'