Film critic Barry Norman - who speaks at the Helix next week - tells Michael Dwyerhow, these days, he sees only the films he wants to see, and says whatever he likes about movie stars "I go to my local cinema in the afternoon when it's deserted. It's like the old days, when film companies put on films especially for me"
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 stayed with it until it reached Film 98, when he left 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.
He stayed with Sky for three years and since then does only what he wants to do. "I've been doing a lot of punditry, holding forth in a lofty manner on radio and TV programmes," he says with a laugh. He writes a weekly column for the Radio Times and has been preparing two BBC radio programmes: a four-part series on Sidney Poitier, to mark the actor's 80th birthday this year, and an hour-long documentary on the Cannes Film Festival, which celebrates its 60th occurrence next month.
"I used to enjoy covering Cannes, but I don't miss covering the Oscars," he says. And now he sees only the movies he wants to see, citing Gladiator, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Good Night and Good Luck as particular favourites in recent years. "I prefer to go to my local cinema, preferably in the afternoon when it's deserted, which is rather like the old days when the film companies put on films especially for me."
He has a touring stage show, Barry Norman's Favourite Films, which comes to the Helix in Dublin next Friday. For the first half he has chosen four classic movies: Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Dirty Harry and The Adventures of Robin Hood ("the Errol Flynn version," he hastens to add). He will discuss their values and production histories, as well as show clips. In the second half, "after the audience has a well-earned drink", Norman will engage in a question-and-answer session.
Despite the title of the show, he insists that the four films he has chosen are not his favourite films, adding that when he wrote a book on the 100 best films of the 20th century, he could have come up with 100 different films the following week.
Barry Norman had worked as a newspaper journalist in London and South Africa for 20 years, until March 1971, when he was show business editor at the Daily Mail and was made redundant in a purge that claimed 131 jobs and became known as the Night of the Long Envelopes. He was 37, married, with two children and a mortgage.
On reflection, he says it 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."
In his autobiography, And Why Not? (2002), he writes exactly as he speaks in private or on television - with enthusiasm, humour and honesty - and he allows himself to go public with the strong views he used to express only in private. He 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".
Nor does he pull any punches when it comes to recalling 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 that almost came to blows - with John Wayne, who had already consumed 15 bourbons on the morning they met, and with the "evasive and monosyllabic" Robert De Niro. And when he went to Paris for a TV interview with Madonna, which was delayed and delayed, he got fed up waiting after more than two hours, walked out and flew home.
Now 73, Norman is happy to spend more time with his charming and equally forthright novelist wife, Diana, whom
he married 50 years ago, and their daughters and grandchildren. He proudly notes that Diana's latest book, Mistress of the Art of Death, a medieval thriller written under the pseudonym Ariana Franklin, made the New York Times best-sellers list this year and will be published here next month.
Despite the title of his autobiography, he swears that he never, ever said, "And why not?" on television, that it was a catchphrase used in parodies of him by Rory Bremner.
Barry Norman's Favourite Films is at the Helix, Dublin at 8pm on Friday, April 20th www.thehelix.ie
