Potty Training with Russell Harty

"So what was your first impression of Russell Harty?"

It wasn’t a trick question, and I should have seen it coming – on Thursday, ITV brought me all the way to London for an interview about the late chatshow host. But it still caught me unprepared.

Amazing Grace Bashes Harty Shock

I’d carefully rehearsed in my head all my usual anecdotes about Diana Dors, Oliver Reed, Dirk Bogarde and the myriad other celebrities Russell had interviewed during the years I was his producer. I had a store of tales of encounters with Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and other long-deceased comedians, or prickly meetings with Hollywood super-egos like Shirley McLaine. I’d rehearsed in my head what I would say about Russell’s national notoriety following the Grace Jones incident, about the rent boy story in the News Of The World, and his subsequent illness and death.

I wanted to talk about his humanity and humour, his vulnerability and honesty. But recalling an image of when we first met? I couldn’t even picture where it was. At the BBC? In a Notting Hill restaurant? In Russell’s basement flat with its bachelor-yellow walls and walnut grand piano? Memory plays such tricks with your brain, it’s hard to be precise about events of thirty years ago. That’s when the BBC summoned me back from a year’s sabbatical in India to become Russell’s producer.

At that time my first son Ben was barely an embryo: Russell later became his godfather. By the end of the third series of chatshows, he was talking in sentences and just about potty trained – Ben that is: Russell never used a sentence when a whole paragraph would do. Potty-training Ben was easier than producing the mercurial Mr Harty: though, sadly, I can’t recall any of that process either, to my wife’s frustration.

Izzy relaxes after a long session of potty-training

Right now, Izzy is talking fluently, saying American words like cookie, sneaker and diaper in a posh English accent. Especially the last, for now the time has come for her to cross the divide and cast away the Pampers. Yet I find I have absolutely no recollection of how to achieve this vitally important stage of parenthood.

I can clearly picture Ben’s white disposable nappies – no cartoon characters or triple layers in those days – but the fog of forgetfulness won’t let me recall how we banished them. As a result, I’m distracted from my writing by the sight of Izzy running across the lawn, shorts round her ankles and Jo in hot pursuit carrying a plastic pink Peppa Pig potty, urging her to sit down. She catches her, too late of course. The dogs witnessing this display appear to be laughing as much as I am: I just hope the image stays in my brain for long enough for me to be able to share it with Izzy’s first boyfriend.

Back in the ITV interview, I suppose I could have invented some neat anecdote. That’s what they do on talk shows. Nicely honed stories, told to the researcher beforehand, noted down on the question cards. “You’ve had some strange acquatic experiences haven’t you?” comes the host’s unsubtle prompt, and out pops a pat answer about scuba-diving with David Jason.

Russell hated all that. He liked to interview people, not names. Celebrity didn’t make people interesting, personality sometimes did. Which is one reason his interviewing technique was often criticised: he liked people, not reputations or press releases. At times that could sound curt, even rude, but his bluntness derived from interest, not sycophancy.

Russell Harty 1934-1988
(with faithful M&S pullover)

So instead, I descended into the blank of my memory, and pulled out Russell’s dark blue Marks & Spencer pullover and his blue-grey sensible shoes. He wore them every day, in the office, in restaurants, at home. Not at all the garb of a star. So I said he appeared to be, well, "unstarry". It sounded most inadequate, but it was absolutely true.

Train-wreck celebrities and me

This Wednesday the University of East Anglia stages a symposium on train-wreck female celebrities. Academics from all over the world will consider such learned papers as “Britney’s tears: the abject female celebrity in post-emotional society”; “From queen of the jungle to tabloid folk devil: Kerry Katona as white trash mother”; and “Lindsay Lohan and the culture of celebrity notoriety”.

Britain is fascinated by self-destructive female celebrities. But then we do seem to have more than our fair share of them. Naomi Campbell’s sentence of 200 hours of community service is probably less than she deserves. I just hope none of those hours are spent in my community. The woman is, quite clearly, a nightmare. But why is it that women seem to be more prone to spontaneous self-combustion than men?

For years I produced Russell Harty’s chat shows on the BBC. As a result I came across quite a few celebrities – eight a week to be precise. We met out of mutual need: I wanted the biggest names for my shows, and they wanted to plug their books and movies. We used each other without shame.

Over hundreds of episodes, two women stood out. One was Shirley MacLaine. She was the ultimate Hollywood star, surrounded by lackeys and publicists. She was also one of the most unpleasant women I have ever met. She was demanding, unreasonable, and reduced our young researchers to tears. When she stormed off in a rage into the London night because her driver had turned up at the front of the studio rather than the stage door, we were glad to see the back of her.

Then there was Diana Dors. Her life was chaotic, her career in a tailspin, yet the audience adored her, and so did we. She would have won “I’m a Celebrity” hands down. One day she rang me at home: “Tom darling, it’s Diana. You’ve got to come and see my new addition”. I duly went round to her house in Sunningdale, and there she revealed an indoor swimming pool with chandeliers, Grecian pillars and black marble panthers guarding the shallow end; it was the most outrageous lido I’d ever seen. Three weeks later we brought eight million viewers live into her home with Adam Ant, Duncan Goodhew and, absurdly, the entire British Olympic synchronised swimming team, who bobbed round in tiny circles in the deep end. Now I can’t imagine Naomi Campbell letting us do that.

Diana laid her heart on the outside of her not inconsiderable bosoms, and the public loved her honesty. But she was also grounded. She knew where she was from, and never forgot her real name, Diana Fluck, which the studios made her change in case she ever had it up in lights and one of the bulbs went. She was so unlike the humourless celebrities of today’s OK-obsessed world. She’d have charmed the BA captain into finding her lost bag.

But why is it women who get all the bad press nowadays? Surely there are just as many train-wrecked celebrity men? Look at Pete Doherty and Owen Wilson. It’s true that tabloid newspapers and magazines write far more about women. But this isn’t sexism, for the readers of OK are mostly female. The fact is, women only enjoy reading about men through the eyes of another woman: through marriage, a baby, or, best of all, a nice juicy breakup. So Coleen is the star of this week’s OK, not Wayne.

Of course, male stars can be just as unpleasant as female ones. The worst guest we ever had on Harty was Oliver Reed. He arrived at the studio drunk then, five minutes before transmission, declared he wouldn’t go on. When I pleaded with him he said, “Get down on your knees and beg me”. I meekly complied – in front of the entire audience. Now he was a real gent.

Russell Harty and Grace Jones: My Fault

So Fabio Capello appears to have survived his first weekend with the British press.

Apart from photos of him holding a wooden spoon (!) in his “favourite” Rome restaurant and dancing in a tutu, England’s new manager is still “Fab” in the tabloids. I’ll give it a fortnight.

The first time I came across the tabloid press was when, at the age of 19 at York University, I made a little student film called Corridor. It cost just £200, funded partly by the Arts Council, but mostly by a whip-round in the Students Union bar.

It was a typically self-indulgent piece of undergraduate nonsense: a lonely student walks down a corridor in a hall of residence and the camera reveals various cameos behind the doors. As he passes the bathroom, we see a buxom blonde trying to persuade a nervous nerd to join her in the bath. It was supposed to be funny: no naughty bits were shown, and the entire scene lasted about ten seconds.

The few days before the premiere (it was being shown in a double bill with Barbarella), I received a call from a freelance journalist who seemed to be interested in my creative achievement. I spouted on about alienation in student life.

I heard nothing more until the following Sunday, when I had a call from my mother in Tynemouth. Anxious relatives were telephoning her from all over the country. For emblazoned across an entire page of the Sunday Mirror was the headline “Students In Sex Film Shocker”.

All next week I received hate mail from Christian fundamentalists. At least the premiere was packed – albeit with a strange collection of men with raincoats. They were very disappointed.

I used this experience later in life when I was the producer of the Russell Harty chatshows. The series had been put in a slot on BBC2 normally reserved for arts programmes. Three weeks into the run, with the audience figures languishing at about a million, I booked Grace Jones.

It was my fault she hit him. I’d never produced a chatshow before, so I decided to ring the changes by arranging the guests on either side of Russell, rather than using the traditional formation of host on one side and guests lined up down the other. As a result, when he finished talking to Grace, who I think had arrived from another planet, Russell turned to the next guest and in doing so, faced away from her. “Don’t you turn your back on me!” she screamed, and bonked him on the head.

It was only a gentle tap, but two minutes later, the BBC press office rang. At the end of the show, the street outside the theatre was full of flashbulbs. The next day we were on every front page. The following week we had three million viewers.

So I decided then and there to forge an alliance with the devil.

Hercules the Bear had gone missing off a Scottish island. When he was found, I brought him to London to wrestle with Russell. Then we had the newsreader Jan Leeming singing (if you could call it that). Each time we tipped off the papers and staged the “event” a few hours ahead of the live show so we could hit the deadlines, and the front pages.

The tabloids and I were, literally, joined at the hype. After a few weeks the ratings hit six million.

A few weeks ago in my Journal column I casually mentioned that I had had a meeting with Peaches Geldof. The following weekend one national paper had blown up the story into two full pages about how we were bringing The Tube back to Newcastle. How they made that connection, I’ve no idea. It would be nice, but it’s not true: we just had a meeting. But it’s good to know they read The Journal.

So “ello” Fab. Welcome to our crazy world. Just be wary of ageing blonde TV presenters and fake sheikhs.