MEMOIR: In 1971 Barry Norman was attending a lunch for television critics at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Afterwards, in the men's toilet, he found himself standing next to an old friend, Martin Jackson, who asked, "How do you fancy going on television?"
"What for?" Norman asked. "Oh, I dunno," Jackson replied. "Twenty-five quid, a few gin and tonics, a couple of sarnies and a car home, I suppose." That conversation led to Norman making regular appearances on the arts discussion show, Late Night Line-Up, and a year later he was offered the job of presenting the BBC movie show, Film 72. He worked on that show through its annual reincarnations until it reached Film 98, when he left the BBC to go to Sky. Such was his impact on the show that his departure from the BBC was the second biggest story that night on the BBC news, just after a report from the conflict in Kosovo.
Norman's book - which he describes as "not so much an autobiography as a memoir, a collection of reminiscences" - is on page 198 by the time he reaches that fateful meeting in the Dorchester toilets in 1971. There is, after all, a lot more to Barry Norman than pontificating about the week's new cinema releases.
The book's preface begins earlier in 1971, on the night in March when he was made redundant at the Daily Mail, during a purge that claimed 131 jobs and became known as The Night of the Long Envelopes. He was the paper's show business editor at the time and suddenly finding himself out of work came as a shock to the system to a man who had been working as a journalist for 20 years in London and South Africa. He was 37 at the time, married with two children and a mortgage.
On reflection, however, he says that losing his job at the Mail was "the best thing that could have happened me at the time". It forced him to explore new areas, one of which, the Film 72 series, made him more famous than many of the actors whose movies he was reviewing.
Having enjoyed his company many times down the years, I can vouch for the fact that he wears his fame lightly, and it helps that he was never starstruck. His father, Leslie Norman, was a film editor turned director - whose many notable credits included Dunkirk, The Shiralee and The Long and the Short and the Tall - and Barry, from childhood, was "accustomed to the company of famous actors who would come to my parents' house". He was, he says, "always aware that even movie stars are just people". He writes exactly as he speaks in private or on television - with enthusiasm, humour and honesty. Now that he has retired from his film reviewing chair on television, he allows himself to go public in his book with the strong views he used to express only in private. The result is a commendably candid and keenly observed journey through an eventful life lived well.
Norman clearly despairs at the standards of British journalism today, when accuracy is reduced to "a laughable concept", when the tabloids are "brutish and sadistic" and full of "all those orgasm by orgasm revelations by the discarded boyfriends or girlfriends of minor celebrities".
A long-disillusioned former Labour supporter, he is dismayed by the lowering of standards in politics, and he reserves a particular detestation for Margaret Thatcher.
Nor does he pull any punches when it comes to recalling all the many movie stars he has interviewed. He devotes a whole chapter to his experiences of meeting Peter Sellers, who misled him time and again. Norman concludes: "He was a very disturbed and egocentric man whose empathy with other people was virtually non-existent and whose vision of the truth was whatever suited his own purposes best. So, 'fuck him' - yes I would certainly say that." Charlton Heston is damned with merely faint praise in the book: "You can't help feeling a certain affection for a movie star who wears a wig as bad as his." Bruce Willis, he decides, is "a fairly considerable plonker". And Arnold Schwarzenegger "is quite as fond of himself as Willis appears to be".
Norman recalls a couple of uncomfortable encounters with John Wayne, most unforgettably one when the Duke was promoting True Grit, which would win him a sentimental Oscar. Wayne was doing press interviews aboard a train bound for Utah and just before noon, as Norman was about to take his turn in the press queue, a waitress informed him that Wayne had already consumed 15 bourbons that morning. When Norman asked Wayne about the war raging in Vietnam at the time, the notoriously right-wing Duke offered his solution: "It's easy to stop that war. All you have to do is call up (Russian premier) Kosygin on the hot line and say, 'You send one more bullet, one more gun to Vietnam and we'll bomb Moscow'." Norman, who assumed he was joking, had the misfortune to laugh. The interview came close to ending in blows being inflicted on Norman before nervous Paramount publicists intervened with more bourbon for the star.
Decades later, an interview with the "evasive and monosyllabic" Robert De Niro also turned into what Norman describes as a face-off that could lead to fisticuffs.
In 1992, Norman and his BBC crew went to Paris for an interview with Madonna, who was plugging her wretched new movie, Body of Evidence. The interview was scheduled for 5.30 p.m. at the Ritz, and then was postponed by a half-hour and then another. At 7.40 p.m. "an American PR woman oozing self-satisfaction . . . breezed in to announce, 'We're running late'." At that point, Norman says, he "rather lost it". He told her it was disgraceful to keep people waiting so long without a word of explanation or an apology - to which the publicist responded, "Gee, I'm not sure I wanna bring my artiste into all this hostility". She didn't need to worry. Norman wasn't having any more of this nonsense and he just walked out and flew home to London.
Having once walked out on a television interview I was trying to conduct with an unco-operative Oscar-winning American film director, and having given him a lecture on professionalism on the way out, I can share Norman's therapeutic sense of relief at releasing such frustration. It is also easy to understand why he describes covering the Oscars in Los Angeles - with all its endless fawning and phoniness - as the job he disliked most.
The best and most approachable people in the film business, he believes, are those who are confident of their own abilities, and he cites, among others, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, David Lean, Richard Attenborough, Alan Parker, and Michelle Pfeiffer, the one person who came close to making him look starstruck.
When Sky wooed Norman away from the BBC in 1998, he found it easier to leave than it would have been in the years before John Birt was appointed director-general "and within six months made the entire workplace fearful and unsettled". Norman tactfully makes no mention of Jonathan Ross, his successor at what is now Film 2002.
Now the Sky show is over, too, and Barry Norman will turn 70 next summer. He still reviews movies for the Radio Times, but only the ones he wants to see, drawing the line at the likes of American Pie, which, he says, he would not go and see at gun-point. He is happy to spend more time with his charming and equally fortright wife, Diana - whom he married in 1957 - their daughters and grand-children, and to pursue his lifelong passion for cricket.
Towards the end of this lively, entertaining book, he notes gratefully: "I'd been given the opportunity, denied to probably 99 per cent of the world's population, to earn my living doing what I wanted to do". And despite the title of the book, he swears that he never, ever said, "And why not?" on television, that it was a catch-phrase used in parodies of him by Rory Bremner.
Michael Dwyer is Film Correspondent of The Irish Times
And Why Not? Memoirs of a Film Lover. By Barry Norman. Simon
& Schuster, 349pp. £16.99.