Fragment 32: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment

Those Were The Weeks Those Were - Saving John Bird.

Aug 30, 2024

Image: BBC

Writing down one’s own story is an extraordinarily revelatory activity. At least, that’s my experience. And it’s despite the fact that, for decades, I’ve kept an every-so-often journal that, although it tends to get greater attention when things are not going well, I have always assumed logged a reasonable overview of my life.

Anyway, although I long since recognized that the late 1970s and early ‘80s were confusing for me, this autobiographical hindsight-searchlight now shows me what a tumultuous period of my life it truly was and, not least, how remarkably stupid I could be.

By the way, before I continue I want to apologize for my recent tardiness in keeping up with this account. The previous fragment was published over two months ago. That sort of gap is too great. Will do better.

A brief recap is perhaps in order.

If you have read other fragments you may recall that, in 1968, I met Libby - Libby Baker as she then was - while she was still honing her concert pianist skills at the Royal Academy of Music. It transpired that both she and I benefited from the pastoral care of the Reverend Rupert Bliss. Actually, ‘met’ is nowhere near powerful enough a term: I was bowled over, and a love affair began and continued until, out of a clear blue sky, she announced that she was going to marry someone else.

Then, subsequently, when I did meet and marry someone, and despite the fact that we had a lovely daughter, my wife upped and went off with another chap. So, at the start of 1978 I was again single.

In the Spring of 1978 I moved to Chiswick in west London and, a little later, came a business rift that resulted in my leaving the advertising agency I was with. Another form of divorce, I suppose. It wasn’t just me that bailed out. My colleagues Bill, Pete and Caroline did so too and the four of us set up a new marketing and design company, initially working out of my Chiswick home.

One of our clients was Trusthouse Forte Hotels (THF) where I had worked before making the gamekeeper-to-poacher switch from client company to agency. A THF project at the time related to a new management contract that THF had signed to run a new-build hotel, the Hannibal Palace, at Sousse Nord, Tunisia.

The manager appointed to this project was a splendid Roman and good friend, Marcello. In the summer my daughter and I spent a couple of weeks there, staying at Marcello’s home. Diana, Marcello’s wife, baked a cake for my daughter’s fifth birthday.

My daughter and I must have flown back to London on 04 August 1978. I know this because, the previous night, we stayed in a hotel in downtown Tunis and I didn’t get a wink of sleep. All around there was continuous celebratory noise - from people, from car horns and from any other form of racket that they could create. Why? Because it was President Bourguiba’s birthday. A lot of people did seem to like him.

Back in the UK I entered into a relationship with a lovely young woman who I had met through my friendship with Maureen, the photographer Herb Schmitz’s wife. But after just three months it bloody well happened again. She announced she was going to marry someone else!

In fact, it gets worse, because my next girlfriend was not like the others. A young woman from California, working as a nurse at a London hospital, she was lovely in every respect. We were together for about a year … then I put the kibosh on it! Consciously or not, I think I adjudged the relationship to be so free from angst that there must be something wrong with it.

And, oh, somewhere along the way, because our business was doing okay, I’d acquired a bright red Jaguar V12 E-Type. Can’t imagine what that was all about!

Anyway, you get the picture. To say that my relationships with the fairer sex were confused and confusing would be an understatement of rather substantial proportions. And, again with hindsight, I can clearly see that there was still a way for me to go before I learned properly from the experiences.

On the business front, things were rather more straightforward. Caroline, Bill, Pete and I were soon able to afford an office in London’s Drury Lane and, a little later, move to new offices in Earlham Street, Covent Garden. Around this time we also added a couple of staff members.

As far as we were concerned, we were fully paid-up members of the Covent Garden creative community. To prove it, we drank vast quantities in Rumours, the trendy bar of the time on the corner of Wellington Street and Exeter Street.

Our main clients included Trusthouse Forte Hotels (THF), a Swedish office furnishing company, and a health spa in the English Midlands called Ragdale Hall.

This latter client came to us after an introduction by one Mike Gold who, at the time, was - ahem - friendly with Caroline.

When I was first introduced to Mike he was really hacked off. At the start of the 1970s he had started an advertising agency with Richard French and David Abbott - unsurprisingly christened French, Gold, Abbott (FGA). They did quite well but not spectacularly so because the personalities appear not to have been too well aligned. Which meant that, in 1977, the FGA business was sold and for contractual reasons Mike was thrust into I think a three-year limbo where he couldn’t directly engage in advertising. He had made a fair amount of money and had many of the trappings of success, but he was still a young man and complained that the combination of luxuries and contractual limitations imposed on him somehow made him feel decades older than he was.

Anyway, when a client approached Mike with a press ad brief, Mike recommended us. The client was Tom Eyton who, with his wife Audrey, had founded Slimming magazine and subsequently acquired Ragdale Hall, intending it to become a sort of temple to the philosophy that Slimming promoted.

We did produce an ad but we were a marketing and graphic design agency, not an advertising agency, so out of this little diversion came our appointment as marketing agency to Ragdale Hall.

Meanwhile, on the home front, things were about to get surreal.

Although I had promised my godfather, the Reverend Rupert Bliss, who had conducted the wedding ceremony for Libby and Anthony Crandon (or Crandon-Gill as I think the surname was originally given), that I would stay away from her, contact was re-started after the break up of my marriage. But perhaps not in the way you might expect. She telephoned me,

“I’ve met someone,” she announced. “It’s John Bird. The John Bird who appears on TV. I know John.”

I certainly was aware of John Bird. Who could not be at the time? Bird (1936-2022) had entered the public consciousness as a key figure in the British satire boom of the 1960s. He was an important part of Peter Cook’s Beyond the Fringe team, in both the UK and the U.S., and is credited with coining the title for a TV show That Was The Week That Was that became essential viewing in 1962 and 1963. I think he was meant to be its anchor but, because he was away in New York at the time, that role went to David Frost.

Anyway, towards the end of the 1970s, it transpired that, after a glittering couple of decades, and a not-so-glittering couple of marriages, things for John had turned rather sour.

As John himself wrote about his fellow Cambridge graduate and friend, Peter Cook:

A factor not to be underestimated was the arrogance of Cambridge undergraduates: we thought it was only a matter of time before we took over the world; a world or at least a Britain creaking under a long-established Conservative Government and stifled by rigid social conventions. It was one thing, however, to sit in Cambridge coffee-bars imagining ourselves at the centre of London showbusiness and another to fix it up. Cook did it. He left Pembroke College in 1960; exactly a year later Beyond the Fringe had opened in the West End, and in October 1961 the Establishment started in the premises of a Soho strip-club, with a pre-opening membership of 7000 people, many of whom had paid for life membership. It was a ridiculous success.1

It had been a great ride but, by 1978, the world according to John was looking and feeling very different.

Good things were still happening: for example, in 1978, John was one of seven adults who memorably played children in a TV play by Dennis Potter, Blue Remembered Hills2, that aired in January 1979 on BBC Television.

But he wasn’t happy. Far from it, in fact. He was deeply depressed. Suicidal, even. A condition exacerbated by an addiction to amphetamines.

He started taking drugs, he explained to me, to enable him to function through extended periods of writing for television. Write for several days without any sleep. Crash. Write. Crash. Write. Repeat ad infinitum.

It had taken an inevitable toll. Then he met Libby. An event that perhaps saved his life?

When, a few years earlier, Rupert had asked me, and I had agreed, to step aside so as not to disrupt Libby and her husband’s marriage, it did not occur to me that the marriage might still fail. In fairly short order, Libby gave birth to two fine sons and I think I assumed that the family was secure.

Not so.

When Libby said that she knew John I instantaneously understood that she meant that they ‘knew one another’ in the biblical sense. This was confirmed when she added that John was going to get help for his addiction and then asked me if I would help keep an eye on him because she had a concert schedule that would prevent her being as available as she would have liked.

Wood Lane runs between Shepherds Bush Green to the south and White City to the north. John’s house was off Wood Lane. He lived there, he told me, because it was close to the White City Television Centre which, from 1960, was the headquarters of BBC Television and, at one point, the centre of his personal universe.

I visited John’s home and straightaway took to him. He was a lovely man.

Then he was admitted to St. George’s Hospital, Tooting, for rehabilitation. I think it helped that the doctor in whose care he was placed was a real fan of his.

Libby called me regularly to check on the frequency of my hospital visits. If I hadn’t been for a couple of days she would tell me off and I would point out that I did have work to do as well.

After a period of, if I remember right, several weeks, John was to be released back into the world with instructions to avoid all drugs including alcohol.

His own home had been or was being sold - I think a necessary part of the unwinding of his second marriage - and I had agreed that he would come to stay at my house. Consequently, I collected him and we headed back to Chiswick.

John and I then lived under the same roof for several months. A distinctly odd couple.

As was only to be expected, John was on an emotional roller-coaster but I recall a great deal of laughter as well as tears. Despite the fact that we had different political opinions - he really was extremely left wing! - we got on very well.

I remember, for example, that he introduced me to the Marxist historian Christopher Hill’s (1912-2003) book, The World Turned Upside Down, and that we had some earnest discussions about the English Civil War.

There were also, I remember, some quirky anecdotes - as, for example, when John was involved in some TV project or other that took a bunch of actors to Blackpool in north-west England. Among their number was Barry Humphries (subsequently best known for his Dame Edna Everage character) who, late one night, burst in on a bunch of guests in their hotel lounge and enquired: “Can anyone here point me in the direction, please, of an all-night library in Blackpool; specifically the all-night library that specializes in the works of the minor Lakeland poets?”

The good news was that the rehab had worked and, when his resistance to temptation was tested, he held up well.

One evening, a black cab drew up outside the house. Out stepped Peter Cook. He had come, he announced, to take John out for a few drinks. Although harangued for an hour and a half, John held firm and refused to go. Cook left, disappointed, and got back into the black cab that had waited there throughout.

One evening, Libby called … from a phone box. (How strange it is, these days, to think back to the times before the ubiquitous mobile phone.) She was distressed. There had obviously been one hell of a row and she had quit the family home. We scooped her up.

Subsequently, John and Libby set up home in Surrey. I visited several times but after the millennium our contacts reduced to an exchange of Christmas cards. The obituaries show that, at some point, John and Libby married and that Libby died in 2012 and John in 2022.

During our months together in Chiswick John frequently declared his love for Libby - his golden girl as he styled her. Given the history she and I had, I found it bitter-sweet. But it was wonderful to see how much it gave John the will to live.

So, did she save his life? Oh, yes, I believe so.

Aargh! by David Pinder

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