PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Russell Harty: the despairing click of a finger
It is a mark of Russell Harty's insecurity that when I arranged to meet him at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, I arrived first to hear the loudspeakers saying: "Mr Harty regrets that he will be a little late for his appointment with the Daily Express. He will be along shortly." It looked to me like a ploy to gain attention. He arrived in seeming confusion several minutes later, apologising, and ushered me into the coffee lounge where we sat in a corner. There were few people at the tables. Here he was, the celebrity from Blackburn, the great communicator, a Lancastrian Parkinson in full possession of our senses, and the waiters took not a bit of notice. He waved, he nodded, he grimaced and he was ignored. Fame to shame at the despairing click of a finger.
It seemed to epitomise the lad. He did well. He was a schoolteacher who leapt blindly into high profile, and yet, through whatever he achieved, he retained the insecurity of the terraced streets. Some of the old people, who remember mills and bowlers and harsh bosses still say sorry if you tread on their feet. I saw Harty later at his country house, Rose Cottage - a bit remote and near Giggleswick School. He was a neighbour of Madge Hindle, of Coronation Street, and his pastime was to have a good bath before going along to the old place for supper with teacher friends. Someone at school with him in Blackburn told me that Harty, at Oxford, "got a certificate of incompetence in his chosen subject." Seemed a bit harsh, even if (and who am I to know?) true.
The only public appearance Russell Harty ever made at grammar school was in a play. He was one of two villains. A critic said of them: "They seemed to be a kind of cabaret turn on their own. " This early experience possibly encouraged him to expose himself to a much wider public -suffering criticism in the process -and at the peak of his profitable career he won for himself the cliche that describes any man who regularly appears on TV hosting a chat show - "Loved ...hated ...one of television's most talked-about personalities."
No-one has satisfactorily explained Russell Harty, whose close friend was a writer named Jamie O'Neill. By all the laws of the town from which he came he should be doing something constructive, like plumbing; or selling pies in the market hall which gave him his first hard work.
His "awful duty" on Saturday mornings was to be errand boy on the family stall. He had to go with a tin jug to the cafe and the heat burned his hands. He loathed it. . But there was something about him supporting the view that the only reality is unreality. How else could a man of such effusive, if ephemeral, talents haul himself out of the market place into the nation's consciousness?
English at Oxford; housemaster at Giggleswick School; two years lecturing at the "unnerving and invigorating" University of New York; teacher in American studies at Derby Training College; BBC radio producer of The World of Books." . Where did all that come from? In the doing, it was things concerned with schools that seemed to have burned themselves most into his consciousness.
"At Giggleswiclc I felt I had been lifted from whatever hell there was into whatever heaven there was," he told his Blackburn friends.
"The headmaster gave a dinner party for some great people. In those days, it was an autocratic regime. He had hired staff to serve dinner. It struggled out later that there had been a catastrophe. The dinner was being served magnificently until pudding, when one of the servers said, 'Headmaster, would you like me to take off my things now?' What could he.say? She had been having a few days off from a hospital."
As for his own embarrassments:
"I sent away for Ascent of Everest and back came The Happiest Years of Your Life. There were 300 or 400 kids there and this very soppy film ...people kissing each other ...and a voice said, 'When do we see Everest?' There was a kid watching, open-mouthed, and someone thoughtlessly fed him some rat poison that happened to be around and my last vision is of the boy leaving in an ambulance."
On to much fame and a little infamy. "I was interviewing Johnny Weismuller and he looked terrific. I was taking him to a car, and we walked down this corridor. We got to the door. I saw a kid with a sheet of paper. He said, 'Hey, which one of you is Tarzan?'"
Harty developed a personality that was pushiy and vulnerable at the same time. His accent was of the school of Lloyd Grossman and unique to the English language. When someone asked him about it he replied, "I don't know what kind of accent I have. I can't hear it. I know I am a chameleon. Is it offensive?" Eddie Waring never thought so.
Remarkable that the two best-known people in chat shows - he and Mike Parkinson - should both have emerged from Northern working-class backgrounds. There was a thought for the lads in Blackburn thinking of becoming plumbers. Or burning their hands on tin jugs at the market.
Russell Harty was a highly successful misfit. A bit solitary, like Alan Whicker. He wrote superbly well of his terraced houses and embarrassments. Of boarding-house holidays in Blackpool: "We went in the back of our veg. van and left it at the end of Albert Road so that we could brush off the potato dust and make a stately progress to the white front doors."
St Silas's Church in Blackburn has a web site boasting of its famous people - Harty (a former choirboy) and Kathleen Ferrier, the singer.
When I went to see his grave a year or so after his death from hepatitis B in 1988, I found it a bit remote from the others, on the edge, but windswept like them. That was the way of him, too. When he lay dying he was reported to have said, "Princess Margaret asked about me. Twice." That tells you a lot.
Geoffrey Mather © 2008
29 December 2007