Something for the weekend

Before joining Forest in 1999 I was a freelance journalist for 15 years.

I edited a number of in-house magazines which doesn’t sound very glamorous but I got to interview some interesting people, one or two of whom I interviewed more than once for different publications.

Gyles Brandreth, for example. In 1992, shortly after he became an MP, I interviewed him for Capital Account, the magazine of the London Society of Chartered Accountants.

I introduced a feature called ‘Money Talks’ in which a member of the editorial team would interview a businessman or celebrity about, er, money.

Prior to becoming an MP, Brandreth had an eclectic business background that included a teddy bear museum in Stratford-upon-Avon and a 'Royal Britain' exhibition at the Barbican in London. The latter was a costly failure but that made it more interesting than his many successful projects.

Ten years later I interviewed him again for The Politico, a short-lived magazine I founded with Iain Dale who was the owner and MD of Politico’s Bookshop in Westminster.

I’ve told this story before but after interviewing Brandreth at the Langham Hotel, opposite Broadcasting House in London, we met again a few days later at LBC and Brandreth invited me to be a guest on his Sunday afternoon arts programme.

I agreed but I was completely out of my comfort zone. At one point Brandreth asked his panel of guests to name the last film they had seen at the cinema and to review it.

My fellow guests were young, erudite and from the arts world, and the last movie they had seen was inevitably an independent art house production I had never heard of.

The last film I had seen was ‘Monsters Inc’ and my 'review' ended with the words, “My children enjoyed it."

Another person I interviewed for 'Money Talks' was The Spectator's 'Low Life' columnist Jeffrey Bernard.

I first met Bernard in the early Eighties when I was publishing a student magazine called Campus. I sought him out in the Coach and Horses, the Soho pub he drank in every day, and we had a brief chat before I was pushed aside by other customers who were equally keen to have a word with him.

Almost a decade later – following the success of 'Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell', a play by Keith Waterhouse starring Peter O'Toole – we met again at the Coach and Horses to talk about money.

Apart from Norman, the outspoken landlord, Bernard was the pub's main attraction so we kept getting interrupted by people wanting to speak to him or buy him a drink. I got the interview done but it wasn't easy.

The most difficult person I have interviewed was probably Ken Bates when he was chairman of Chelsea Football Club.

His 20-year reign was controversial from start to finish but without him the club might not exist, and certainly not as we know it today.

He had a reputation for being brusque with journalists and when I entered his office I was quite nervous. Thankfully he was fine.

The problem was his voice. He spoke so quietly I struggled to hear what he was saying and I worried that my tape-recorder wasn’t picking anything up.

Several times I nodded in agreement without having a clue what he had just said. Somehow I managed to decipher just enough from the tape and my notes to write the article.

Issues with tape-recorders were not uncommon so it was essential to have back-up. I learnt the hard way.

In the early Nineties I interviewed Bob Payton, an energetic American, founder of the Chicago Pizza Pie Factory chain of restaurants and the man credited with bringing American deep pan pizza to Britain in the Seventies.

We met at the company’s flagship restaurant in Knightsbridge. Instead of being interviewed in his office he suggested we talk over lunch. I loved Chicago Pizza Pie Factory pizzas so I wasn't going to say no but I soon regretted it.

The restaurant was busy and quite noisy, with a 1950s rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack blaring from the PA system. I enjoyed the atmosphere but later, when I tried to transcribe our conversation, all I could hear on tape was Elvis, Little Richard and Buddy Holly.

If I remember Payton agreed to be interviewed again, without the music. He was a marketing man more than a restaurateur and I liked him a lot. Tragically he died in a road accident in 1994, aged 50.

Anyway, I was going through some boxes last weekend and found some of the many magazines I edited in a 12-year period between 1990 and 2002.

Apart from Brandreth and Bates, I found interviews with film director Michael Winner and publisher Felix Dennis, both now dead, former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke and a certain John Bercow.

I also interviewed a man who was in the sixteenth year of a life sentence for murder:

The shock of his offence still haunts him. "I was devastated by having killed somebody. It was totally out of character. I am not inherently a violent person and the shock of having done it left me an emotional wreck for quite a while ...

“It took me three or four years to come to terms with [prison]. I used to wake up at nights and it would break into my thoughts during the day ...

"In prison you're up against the fact that the majority are dishonest therefore the staff have the attitude that everybody's dishonest ... That irritated me no end and I've thumped a governor's desk more than once!"

It’s a bit self-indulgent, I know, but over the next few weeks I’m going to post one interview each weekend. I'll start tomorrow with Tony Benn who I interviewed in Edinburgh in 2002, the year after he stood down as an MP.