Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - the very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed snub-nosed, ox-eyed, hen-pecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife, shopping and consciousness'.
Thomas untutored
Volume 16 Number 2, Hilary 2004
Oxford Today
A fascination for Oxford briefly held the Welsh poet enthralled, says his biographer Andrew Lycett.
A jotted reminder in a notebook - 'Find exact modern duties of Proctors and Bulldogs compared with 19th century' - is hardly the sort of penny-plain line we might expect from a major lyrical poet. But in late 1946 Dylan Thomas was researching a radio talk about Oxford. He was living in the grounds of Magdalen College. And he was fascinated by the University, which played a background role in the unfolding of his career.
Most of his notebooks were crammed with his own poems. The State University of New York at Buffalo possesses four exercise books with fair copies of all Thomas's teenage verse. Later, he would draw on this early material, which provided models for half his published output.
Thomas's youthful creativity held him back from the undergraduate career that his schoolmaster father wanted for him. Thomas père was a prickly alumnus of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. Having gained a first-class degree, he would have liked to proceed to Oxford. Instead, he ended up teaching English at Swansea Grammar School. His son Dylan, born in 1914, went to the same establishment. But clever though he was, his temperament was unsuited to sustained academic effort and, at the age of 15, he rejected the classroom for the 'craft or sullen art' of poetry.
Nevertheless, for Dylan Thomas Oxford was always a chimera. In the 1930s, he is said to have visited the city to talk about James Joyce, although I have found no evidence of this. In 1937 he wrote an enthusiastic review of Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood for a short-lived undergraduate publication, Light and Dark. He clearly had admirers in Oxford, for he suggested the English don, Lord David Cecil, as a subscriber to a 1938 edition of his poems.
At the start of the Second World War, Oxford poets such as Sidney Keyes regarded Dylan Thomas as a welcome antidote to Auden and his circle. They invited him to address the University English Club, an undergraduate society, in November 1941. Thomas had been working with John Davenport on a novel, The Death of the King's Canary, which interwove an unlikely story about the murder of the poet laureate with brilliant parodies of contemporary poets. Philip Larkin (St John's) noted appreciatively: 'Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices. He remarked, "I'd like to have talked about a book of poems I've been given to review, a young poet called Rupert Brooke - it's surprising how he has been influenced by Stephen Spender ...". There was a moment of delighted surprise, then a roar of laughter. Then he read a parody of Spender entitled The Parachutist which had people rolling on the floor.'
Later in the war, Thomas and his wife Caitlin were back in Oxford, staying with the historian A J P Taylor and his wife Margaret. It was an unexpected encounter, unwittingly engineered by pianist Natasha Litvin. She used to play at lunchtime concerts in Oxford organised by Margaret Taylor, who one day asked her to bring some guests along for the weekend. In all innocence, Litvin and her husband Stephen Spender invited the Thomases.
They did not know that Thomas had already met the Taylors, and had not endeared himself to them. That was in April 1935, six months after reaching London from Swansea. During that short time, Thomas had befriended the poet Norman Cameron, an Oriel graduate who had been a key figure in Oxford's English Society in the late 1920s. Anxious because the sparkling young poet was over-indulging in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, Cameron arranged for him to take time off for what was essentially a rest cure with his former Oriel friend A J P Taylor, then teaching history at Manchester University.
Recently married, Taylor was not impressed by the poet who, invited for a week, contrived to stay a month. In his memoir, A Personal History, Taylor recorded how he had to ration access to his beer barrel, since his guest drank 'fifteen or twenty pints' each day. As Thomas was leaving, he announced he had lost his return ticket and asked to borrow two pounds. The historian reluctantly agreed, hoping never again to see a man whom he described as 'cruel' and 'a sponger'.
A decade later, the dynamics of the Taylor marriage had changed and Margaret, bored with academic life, was ready to be impressed by the romantic young poet. After Thomas advised her on her own verse, she took pity when in March 1946 he was having difficulty finding accommodation for his young family. She invited them to stay at Holywell Ford, the house where she and her husband lived in the grounds of Magdalen, where Thomas slept in a one-room summerhouse beside the river Cherwell or in a gypsy caravan. So began one of the great acts of modern literary patronage. For eight years, until his death in New York in November 1953, Thomas looked to Margaret Taylor to bail him out of financial difficulties. She was besotted by him and he exploited her. After allowing him to stay at Holywell Ford, she bought him a series of dwellings in South Leigh, Oxfordshire (1947-9), Laugharne, South Wales (from 1949) and in Camden Town, London (a short-lived bolt-hole in 1951-2). She also arranged for his son, Llewelyn, to attend Magdalen College School.
Taylor's biographer Adam Sisman described Margaret as 'a sort of middle-class Lady Ottoline Morrell'. At her Holywell Ford salon one might meet authors Louis MacNeice and Graham Greene or the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. Dylan Thomas would appear as a poetic turn; John Betjeman, then secretary of the Oxford Preservation Trust, expressed delight at his reading of Thomas Hardy's 'To Lizbee Brown'.
But all too often the Welshman was tired and emotional after a day at the BBC in London. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper recalled how Thomas 'overturned a full decanter of claret - good claret too - drenching the fastidious Lord David (Cecil). That dinner party was not a success.' And Thomas could be embarrassingly rude about his patroness: after she had laboured over a dish of jugged hare, he wavered before condescending to 'eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me.'
Nevertheless, Thomas enjoyed life in Oxford. Undergraduates used to see him in the Turf, Gloucester Arms or White's, a club near St Aldate's. With Caitlin or Margaret Taylor in tow, he drank with friends, such as John Veale, a young composer whose father was University Registrar; Ernest Stahl, a German don at Christ Church; Dan Davin, an energetic New Zealander at the University Press; and Enid Starkie, who taught French at Somerville and with whom he discussed Rimbaud. Although dismissive of his education, she loved his conversation, declaring she would have been happy if he 'had read the telephone directory'.
Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - the very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed snub-nosed, ox-eyed, hen-pecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife, shopping and consciousness'.
Intrigued by the University, Thomas adopted it as a subject for his radio talk in late 1946. This was part of an exchange with an American station, which provided a piece about Princeton, but sadly neither Thomas's script nor the tape survives.
Along with the memo about proctors and bulldogs, Thomas inscribed gobbets about the University and its lore - potted biographies of luminaries including Benjamin Jowett and Charles Dodgson; a list of quotations about the place from Wordsworth, Swinburne and others; even a section devoted to 'Eccentric Figures' such as Martin Routh, President of Magdalen, described as the last man in Oxford to wear a wig, who died in 1854 in his 100th year. Although not formally involved in the University, he did participate in literary events, particularly at the Poetry Society.
After moving to South Leigh, near Witney, in August 1947, Thomas became less prominent, but whenever he returned to Oxford, he made up for lost time. As he informed the Scots writer Hector McIver in February 1949, '[Hugh] MacDiarmid is coming to lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society next month. A party is being arranged.' Seeing Thomas swaying down the High Street, Kenneth Tynan (Magdalen) asked if he could help. 'Get me some more bloody crème de menthe', Thomas screamed.
The poet Michael Hamburger (Christ Church) welcomed Thomas's authentic Bohemianism in grim post-war Oxford and novelist Francis King (Balliol) wrote of the Welshman's 'voluble, dangerous charm'. However, younger undergraduates were sceptical of his wordy lyricism in an age of austerity and the atom bomb. John Wain and Kingsley Amis (both St John's), for example, wanted a more robust, ironic style, as was later associated with the Movement group of poets.
By this time, Thomas was experiencing a difficult, even barren, period as a poet. His recognition of this change of mood spurred him into looking, during his last few years, for new artistic challenges in radio and in America. In South Leigh in 1948, he first began to knock some shape into his 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood.
Soon his Welsh yearning for home, or hiraeth, began to tug at him. A year later, he went to live in Laugharne, though another longing - for academic respectability - remained evident in the contract he signed with the Oxford University Press in early 1953 for a book about Welsh fairy tales. Although these two desires struggled within him, there was no doubting which was the stronger. Walking along Broad Street, Martin Starkie once asked him if he would like to have been at the University. Thomas replied: 'In some ways, yes; in most ways, no.'
Monday 16 June 2008
Sally Belfrage for The Crack
Obituary: Sally Belfrage
Independent, The (London), Mar 16, 1994 by JESSICA MITFORD
Sally Mary Caroline Belfrage, writer: born Hollywood, California 4 October 1936; married 1965 Bernard Pomerance (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1983); died London 14 March 1994.
IN 1955, we were all more or less on the lam. My husband Bob and I arrived in London using revoked American passports; our friend Cedric Belfrage had just been deported from the United States to his native England as a subversive alien. America was going through the convulsions of McCarthyism. Cedric, a long-time US resident and editor of a left-wing national weekly published in New York, had fallen afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Birds of a feather, Bob and I often visited the Belfrage household in London. As we sat plotting the overthrow of the US government by force and violence - or, more accurately, discussing what London plays might be worth seeing - a stunningly beautiful creature would dash into the sitting-room, give her Dad a kiss, and be off quick as a wink to a party. This was 19- year-old Sally, long of leg, blonde of hair, blue of eye.
We were in London again when Sally, then aged 21, once more darted into view. She was writing A Room in Moscow. A vivid memory: Cedric told us, 'Sally has got no idea what it takes to be a writer. She's too damn popular, out every night until Lord knows what hour, and then of course she sleeps until noon. I keep explaining to her that she'll never get the book done that way, one has to be disciplined to write . . .'
A year or so later the book was published to great critical acclaim in England and the United States. Sally was feted everywhere, brought by her publisher to New York for interviews. I remember reading an article in Reynolds News - I think that was it - in which the writer interviewed father and daughter. He thought that the daughter had surpassed her paternal mentor.
Sally, who adored her father, might have disputed that. But to me, the writer did have a point, as evidenced in her next book. In 1964 she joined the intrepid band of civil-rights volunteers from all over America to make the dangerous journey into Mississippi as part of a bold, and ultimately historic, challenge to the most murderously racist state in America.
Out of this brave effort at least a dozen worthy books emerged. Of these, only Sally's Freedom Summer (1965) has the authentic ring of an enduring classic.
Leafing through it today, I still feel the chills and thrills of first reading, as each character springs alive from the page. In a typical Sally-ism, she describes fear as 'a condition, like heat or night or blue eyes. You had to arrange your fear as a parallel element in the day and night, to exist beside it and to function without its interference.'
Over the years, Bob and I got to know Sally Belfrage better and better - first as a contemporary of my daughter Constancia Romilly, when they would wheel their respective babies in prams around New York together, and later as an indispensable London friend whose welcome was always unalloyed joy.
My last letter from Sally came just a few weeks before she died. We'd been corresponding about the possibility of a book tour for her forthcoming autobiography, UnAmerican Activities. She had been diagnosed some months before with incurable cancer, but 'What the hell?' was her attitude.
Well - I can just see her wowing them with this on the chat shows.
It just so happens that Un-American Activities is the best, the most profound and the most amusing account ever written by a former Red Diaper Baby. Stay tuned for reviews this August.
Independent, The (London), Mar 16, 1994 by JESSICA MITFORD
Sally Mary Caroline Belfrage, writer: born Hollywood, California 4 October 1936; married 1965 Bernard Pomerance (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1983); died London 14 March 1994.
IN 1955, we were all more or less on the lam. My husband Bob and I arrived in London using revoked American passports; our friend Cedric Belfrage had just been deported from the United States to his native England as a subversive alien. America was going through the convulsions of McCarthyism. Cedric, a long-time US resident and editor of a left-wing national weekly published in New York, had fallen afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Birds of a feather, Bob and I often visited the Belfrage household in London. As we sat plotting the overthrow of the US government by force and violence - or, more accurately, discussing what London plays might be worth seeing - a stunningly beautiful creature would dash into the sitting-room, give her Dad a kiss, and be off quick as a wink to a party. This was 19- year-old Sally, long of leg, blonde of hair, blue of eye.
We were in London again when Sally, then aged 21, once more darted into view. She was writing A Room in Moscow. A vivid memory: Cedric told us, 'Sally has got no idea what it takes to be a writer. She's too damn popular, out every night until Lord knows what hour, and then of course she sleeps until noon. I keep explaining to her that she'll never get the book done that way, one has to be disciplined to write . . .'
A year or so later the book was published to great critical acclaim in England and the United States. Sally was feted everywhere, brought by her publisher to New York for interviews. I remember reading an article in Reynolds News - I think that was it - in which the writer interviewed father and daughter. He thought that the daughter had surpassed her paternal mentor.
Sally, who adored her father, might have disputed that. But to me, the writer did have a point, as evidenced in her next book. In 1964 she joined the intrepid band of civil-rights volunteers from all over America to make the dangerous journey into Mississippi as part of a bold, and ultimately historic, challenge to the most murderously racist state in America.
Out of this brave effort at least a dozen worthy books emerged. Of these, only Sally's Freedom Summer (1965) has the authentic ring of an enduring classic.
Leafing through it today, I still feel the chills and thrills of first reading, as each character springs alive from the page. In a typical Sally-ism, she describes fear as 'a condition, like heat or night or blue eyes. You had to arrange your fear as a parallel element in the day and night, to exist beside it and to function without its interference.'
Over the years, Bob and I got to know Sally Belfrage better and better - first as a contemporary of my daughter Constancia Romilly, when they would wheel their respective babies in prams around New York together, and later as an indispensable London friend whose welcome was always unalloyed joy.
My last letter from Sally came just a few weeks before she died. We'd been corresponding about the possibility of a book tour for her forthcoming autobiography, UnAmerican Activities. She had been diagnosed some months before with incurable cancer, but 'What the hell?' was her attitude.
Well - I can just see her wowing them with this on the chat shows.
It just so happens that Un-American Activities is the best, the most profound and the most amusing account ever written by a former Red Diaper Baby. Stay tuned for reviews this August.
Film maker Midge Mckenzie
Alan had given Jill a cameo of Shakespeare. He then gave it to Midge, after Jill died. Midge was a great party giver. We went to her memorial in Highbury.
Shoulder to Shoulder with Midge MacKenzie
Ellen Shub a freelance photojournalist, and friend of Midge MacKenzie's, whose work over the past three decades has focused on social justice issues and activism in the US.
Filmmaker Midge McKenzie at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA in April 2000 after a screening of John Houston: War Stories
Photo © Ellen Shub
MacKenzie, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose life's work focused on feminism, peace, human rights, and social justice, died in January. She was 65 and died at home in London of cardiac arrest after a lengthy battle with cancer.
A crusading social activist with flaming red hair, characteristic wide-brimmed Stetson hats, turquoise bracelets and rings, and cowboy boots, she campaigned with relentless tenacity and insight to document women's history in the United States, Great Britain, and the world. She was tirelessly dedicated to creating a more just, peaceful world that respected the human rights of women and the value of authentic community.
She is perhaps best known for her 1975 Masterpiece Theatre television series and book, Shoulder to Shoulder, enlivening the history of the British women's struggle for suffrage.
For me personally, that series and book, with images of women being force-fed while on hunger strikes in prison, made feminism real to me. It has inspired me to photograph women's issues in America for over 30 years.
Mackenzie documented the women's movement, and allied social justice movements, in film. Women Talking Betty Friedan and Kate Millet talking about raising consciousness. She filmed Jane Fonda testifying about her trip to Hanoi, and created the film As I Stand Here Ironing on the stories of Tillie Olsen. She also threw tomatoes at Bob Hope at the Miss World contest in London, and as an ardent anti-apartheid activist, staged a reenactment of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre on London's Lyceum stage.
Mackenzie collaborated with Amnesty International to create The Sky: A Silent Witness human rights abuses seen through the eyes of women. It follows the journey of Guatemalans to reclaim the remains of 180 massacre victims and features women from across the globe, including a Tibetan Buddhist nun, a Tiananmen Square demonstrator, and an African-American civil rights worker, testifying about human rights abuses in their own countries.
She created a strong anti-war film, John Huston: War Stories, in 1999, which centered on an interview with director John Huston and the footage, banned by the US War Department at the time, he shot in World War II in Italy,
She was a founding member of the New England Chapter of Women in Film and Video, taught film history at the Carpenter Center for the Study of Visual Arts at Harvard, created multimedia events with the Joffrey Ballet, Prisoners of Childhood based on the work of psychologist Alice Miller, and films on remote communities in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
A memorial attended by friends from London, New York, and Massachusetts was held April 17th at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, where clips of her films and personal remembrances were shared.
Shoulder to Shoulder with Midge MacKenzie
Ellen Shub a freelance photojournalist, and friend of Midge MacKenzie's, whose work over the past three decades has focused on social justice issues and activism in the US.
Filmmaker Midge McKenzie at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA in April 2000 after a screening of John Houston: War Stories
Photo © Ellen Shub
MacKenzie, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose life's work focused on feminism, peace, human rights, and social justice, died in January. She was 65 and died at home in London of cardiac arrest after a lengthy battle with cancer.
A crusading social activist with flaming red hair, characteristic wide-brimmed Stetson hats, turquoise bracelets and rings, and cowboy boots, she campaigned with relentless tenacity and insight to document women's history in the United States, Great Britain, and the world. She was tirelessly dedicated to creating a more just, peaceful world that respected the human rights of women and the value of authentic community.
She is perhaps best known for her 1975 Masterpiece Theatre television series and book, Shoulder to Shoulder, enlivening the history of the British women's struggle for suffrage.
For me personally, that series and book, with images of women being force-fed while on hunger strikes in prison, made feminism real to me. It has inspired me to photograph women's issues in America for over 30 years.
Mackenzie documented the women's movement, and allied social justice movements, in film. Women Talking Betty Friedan and Kate Millet talking about raising consciousness. She filmed Jane Fonda testifying about her trip to Hanoi, and created the film As I Stand Here Ironing on the stories of Tillie Olsen. She also threw tomatoes at Bob Hope at the Miss World contest in London, and as an ardent anti-apartheid activist, staged a reenactment of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre on London's Lyceum stage.
Mackenzie collaborated with Amnesty International to create The Sky: A Silent Witness human rights abuses seen through the eyes of women. It follows the journey of Guatemalans to reclaim the remains of 180 massacre victims and features women from across the globe, including a Tibetan Buddhist nun, a Tiananmen Square demonstrator, and an African-American civil rights worker, testifying about human rights abuses in their own countries.
She created a strong anti-war film, John Huston: War Stories, in 1999, which centered on an interview with director John Huston and the footage, banned by the US War Department at the time, he shot in World War II in Italy,
She was a founding member of the New England Chapter of Women in Film and Video, taught film history at the Carpenter Center for the Study of Visual Arts at Harvard, created multimedia events with the Joffrey Ballet, Prisoners of Childhood based on the work of psychologist Alice Miller, and films on remote communities in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
A memorial attended by friends from London, New York, and Massachusetts was held April 17th at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, where clips of her films and personal remembrances were shared.
Oxford days, Mike Hill, Isis & Deal, Kent
Alan didn't know Mike had died.
From The Times April 9, 2008
Mike Hill
BBC writer and producer who remained fiercely anti-Establishment
Mike Hill was a much-liked and sometimes quirky presence at BBC television in a golden period of its satirical - and serious talk show - heyday.
He was the deputy to Rowan Ayers for the groundbreaking Late-Night Line-up presented by Joan Bakewell and Michael Dean, and went on to be executive producer of a late-night discussion programme Up Sunday in 1972-73 which featured a glittering array of talkers and performers, including John Wells, John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, Barry Humpries, Clive James, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. The initial format of the show was to discuss the week's news critically and entertainingly, with a regular slot featuring James Cameron and Willie Rushton. Up Sunday was, in the words of a former BBC executive, so successful that “naturally, the corporation took it off”.
Hill subsequently became executive producer of The End of the Pier Show, transmitted in 1974-75, which was a mixture of satire and musical, with guests John Wells, John Fortune, Carl Davis and Madeline Smith, Peter Sellers, John Laurie, Ivor Cutler and John Bird. This was the first TV programme to mix cartoons with live performances and was thought of as pioneering in its time.
During the 1970s and 1980s Hill continued to be involved with subsequent programmes of a similar genre, mixing satire, current affairs and music, including In the Looking Glass, Rutland Weekend Television, and fantasy programmes such as The Snow Queen, The Light Princess - which won the Royal Television Society's Most Original Programme Award in 1978, Jane of the Mirror (a strip cartoon which won a Bafta for artwork), and two hour-long Angela Brazil-type schoolgirl films, Schoolgirl Chums in 1982 and St Ursula's in Danger in 1983.
Hill had an unlikely background for a media man, having been in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War - he flew Spitfires in a reconnaissance task over the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, and was a brave and sometimes reckless pilot. He had also seen service on Russian convoys during the war.
He was born in Yorkshire and, originally called Denys Michael Ryshworth-Hill, was the second of two sons. He first attended school in Ripon, Yorkshire, and then went to King's School, Canterbury. While at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, from 1945-48, he wrote the sports column for Isis. He never completed his Oxford degree as he was rusticated for insufficient attention to studies, or, as a contemporary remembers, for being a “general drunk and layabout”.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hill lived the kind of Bohemian life in London that was possible in those days when there were cheap lodgings in Chelsea and a man could survive somehow on the small fees paid by a series of fringe magazines. He was pleased to wangle a job as editor of Flight Deck magazine, for the Fleet Air Arm - especially, he told a friend, because the publication only came out four times a year. In this capacity Hill was employed by the Admiralty. He was subsequently employed as a journalist by Amalgamated Press.
In the 1960s Hill was introduced to the BBC by his wartime friend Rowan Ayers. He did some research work on The Great War, written by Correlli Barnett, which was broadcast in 1964. He worked on the Tonight programme and went on to become Ayers's deputy on Late-Night Line-up, a legendary live discussion programme which mixed the serious with the provocative, and was finally taken off the air in 1973 after 3,000 memorable transmissions. He also worked with Ned Sherrin on That Was the Week that Was.
Hill's naval background earned him the nickname “The Commander” at the BBC. Joan Bakewell considered him a warm and encouraging presence in the Late-Night Line-up studio, as did many colleagues. A BBC colleague, Ian Keill, remembers Mike Hill as “optimistic, witty and cheerful - even when everything about us seemed to be falling apart at the seams”. Those with a more corporate view of BBC structures were more inclined to judge Hill as genial but irresponsible: yet the presenters and performers felt he protected them somewhat from “the less encouraging noises emanating from the sixth floor at TV Centre”.
Hill certainly had his eccentricities. Despite, or perhaps because of, his background he was chronically anti-Establishment, and all but concealed his family's double-barrelled name (or his own true given name, Denys). He had an obsessive hostility against Wykehamists, whom he considered snobbish, Civil-Service-minded and having an insufferably superior air. This may have derived from an adversarial view of Alasdair Milne, sometime Director-General.
In his bohemian days Hill had been an habitué of such Soho shebeens as the Colony Room and the Gargoyle drinking club, but in his middle years he curbed his drinking habits and latterly he eschewed alcohol altogether.
Hill retired to Deal, Kent, in the 1980s, prompted by the presence there of his friends Alan Brien and Jill Tweedie, and where his sometime neighbours included Simon Raven and Charles Hawtrey. He retired from the BBC mainly to care for his wife, Patricia Montague-Brooks (neé Ferguson), who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Despite - or perhaps again, because of - a reputation in earlier days as a ladies' man, Hill was devoted to his wife and her two daughters from a previous marriage, whom he came to regard as his own family. He was devastated when Patricia died in 1984, from a bout of pneumonia.
In retirement he maintained a cheerful friendship with pals from his BBC days, and particularly with Ned Sherrin - a loyal friend from Oxford days. He had always wanted to be a writer, and privately he wrote poetry as well as several unpublished novels. He published three books, including Duty Free: Fleet Air Arm Days, drawn from his diaries kept during the Second World War, and a word-of-mouth success with military veterans; Right Royal Remarks - 1066 to 1996, from research done with Ned Sherrin on strange quotations from royalty through the centuries; and A Little Local Difficulty, a roman à clef about life at the BBC, which he self-published, and which featured, barely disguised, characters such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Grace Wyndham Goldie.
Michael Hill, BBC producer and writer, was born on June 17, 1923. He died on March 16, 2008, aged 84
From The Times April 9, 2008
Mike Hill
BBC writer and producer who remained fiercely anti-Establishment
Mike Hill was a much-liked and sometimes quirky presence at BBC television in a golden period of its satirical - and serious talk show - heyday.
He was the deputy to Rowan Ayers for the groundbreaking Late-Night Line-up presented by Joan Bakewell and Michael Dean, and went on to be executive producer of a late-night discussion programme Up Sunday in 1972-73 which featured a glittering array of talkers and performers, including John Wells, John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, Barry Humpries, Clive James, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. The initial format of the show was to discuss the week's news critically and entertainingly, with a regular slot featuring James Cameron and Willie Rushton. Up Sunday was, in the words of a former BBC executive, so successful that “naturally, the corporation took it off”.
Hill subsequently became executive producer of The End of the Pier Show, transmitted in 1974-75, which was a mixture of satire and musical, with guests John Wells, John Fortune, Carl Davis and Madeline Smith, Peter Sellers, John Laurie, Ivor Cutler and John Bird. This was the first TV programme to mix cartoons with live performances and was thought of as pioneering in its time.
During the 1970s and 1980s Hill continued to be involved with subsequent programmes of a similar genre, mixing satire, current affairs and music, including In the Looking Glass, Rutland Weekend Television, and fantasy programmes such as The Snow Queen, The Light Princess - which won the Royal Television Society's Most Original Programme Award in 1978, Jane of the Mirror (a strip cartoon which won a Bafta for artwork), and two hour-long Angela Brazil-type schoolgirl films, Schoolgirl Chums in 1982 and St Ursula's in Danger in 1983.
Hill had an unlikely background for a media man, having been in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War - he flew Spitfires in a reconnaissance task over the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, and was a brave and sometimes reckless pilot. He had also seen service on Russian convoys during the war.
He was born in Yorkshire and, originally called Denys Michael Ryshworth-Hill, was the second of two sons. He first attended school in Ripon, Yorkshire, and then went to King's School, Canterbury. While at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, from 1945-48, he wrote the sports column for Isis. He never completed his Oxford degree as he was rusticated for insufficient attention to studies, or, as a contemporary remembers, for being a “general drunk and layabout”.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hill lived the kind of Bohemian life in London that was possible in those days when there were cheap lodgings in Chelsea and a man could survive somehow on the small fees paid by a series of fringe magazines. He was pleased to wangle a job as editor of Flight Deck magazine, for the Fleet Air Arm - especially, he told a friend, because the publication only came out four times a year. In this capacity Hill was employed by the Admiralty. He was subsequently employed as a journalist by Amalgamated Press.
In the 1960s Hill was introduced to the BBC by his wartime friend Rowan Ayers. He did some research work on The Great War, written by Correlli Barnett, which was broadcast in 1964. He worked on the Tonight programme and went on to become Ayers's deputy on Late-Night Line-up, a legendary live discussion programme which mixed the serious with the provocative, and was finally taken off the air in 1973 after 3,000 memorable transmissions. He also worked with Ned Sherrin on That Was the Week that Was.
Hill's naval background earned him the nickname “The Commander” at the BBC. Joan Bakewell considered him a warm and encouraging presence in the Late-Night Line-up studio, as did many colleagues. A BBC colleague, Ian Keill, remembers Mike Hill as “optimistic, witty and cheerful - even when everything about us seemed to be falling apart at the seams”. Those with a more corporate view of BBC structures were more inclined to judge Hill as genial but irresponsible: yet the presenters and performers felt he protected them somewhat from “the less encouraging noises emanating from the sixth floor at TV Centre”.
Hill certainly had his eccentricities. Despite, or perhaps because of, his background he was chronically anti-Establishment, and all but concealed his family's double-barrelled name (or his own true given name, Denys). He had an obsessive hostility against Wykehamists, whom he considered snobbish, Civil-Service-minded and having an insufferably superior air. This may have derived from an adversarial view of Alasdair Milne, sometime Director-General.
In his bohemian days Hill had been an habitué of such Soho shebeens as the Colony Room and the Gargoyle drinking club, but in his middle years he curbed his drinking habits and latterly he eschewed alcohol altogether.
Hill retired to Deal, Kent, in the 1980s, prompted by the presence there of his friends Alan Brien and Jill Tweedie, and where his sometime neighbours included Simon Raven and Charles Hawtrey. He retired from the BBC mainly to care for his wife, Patricia Montague-Brooks (neé Ferguson), who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Despite - or perhaps again, because of - a reputation in earlier days as a ladies' man, Hill was devoted to his wife and her two daughters from a previous marriage, whom he came to regard as his own family. He was devastated when Patricia died in 1984, from a bout of pneumonia.
In retirement he maintained a cheerful friendship with pals from his BBC days, and particularly with Ned Sherrin - a loyal friend from Oxford days. He had always wanted to be a writer, and privately he wrote poetry as well as several unpublished novels. He published three books, including Duty Free: Fleet Air Arm Days, drawn from his diaries kept during the Second World War, and a word-of-mouth success with military veterans; Right Royal Remarks - 1066 to 1996, from research done with Ned Sherrin on strange quotations from royalty through the centuries; and A Little Local Difficulty, a roman à clef about life at the BBC, which he self-published, and which featured, barely disguised, characters such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Grace Wyndham Goldie.
Michael Hill, BBC producer and writer, was born on June 17, 1923. He died on March 16, 2008, aged 84
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