Still working, still speaking her mind… at 88, presenter JOAN BAKEWELL is busier than ever. Cole Moreton learns from her about the greatest love and most difficult lessons.
Joan Bakewell has just flown home. ‘I got back from Italy last night. This country must be quite difficult to enter. Honestly, it makes you feel like you’re a prisoner. I’ve done so many Covid tests, my nostrils are worn out.’
We can all sympathise with that, but here’s the thing: Baroness Bakewell is 88 years old and still working and travelling. ‘This trip mattered to me, because I have been cooped up. As long as you can hold the body together, what goes on in your head needs feeding too.’
Dame Joan’s longevity as one of the country’s leading television presenters is extraordinary. In the 1960s she was a bright young journalist who explored the moral and ethical issues of the time in shows such as Heart of the Matter. She also wrote books and columns, and joined the House of Lords. Joan hosts Portrait Artist of the Years with Stephen Mangan. In this show, artists are challenged to play celebrity sitters.
‘In the queue at Bologna airport, the man in front of me turned around and said: “It’s because of the show that I’ve started painting.” Isn’t that lovely?’ Can Joan paint? ‘I did buy an easel. Tai Shan Schierenberg [the acclaimed portraitist] provided me with special paper and a lot of encouragement,’ she says. ‘I also got an apron, because I wanted to have one of those aprons which people cover with paint. But I haven’t got the talent.’ She is fascinated with the way the portrait artists see other people. ‘I remember Ian Hislop sitting for us and when he saw the results he said: “I look just like my father.” He found that touching,’ she says. ‘We look in the mirror and see ourselves as we like to think we look, but it’s not how other people see us.’
Joan seems younger than her age, and it is the work she does that makes Joan look that young. ‘It’s my mainstay. If I hadn’t been working during lockdown I would have been seriously depressed. Being active in your skills is an amazing way to energize. I live on my own, so work is my contact with the world, largely.’
Her next big engagement is a talk at Oxford University about social mobility, a subject close to Joan’s heart. She was born to factory workers and her grandparents encouraged her, a 1933-born girl, to take the 11+ exam. ‘Grammar school made it possible for me to get a scholarship to Cambridge.’
After studying history and economics, she worked as a stage manager at the BBC before becoming the host of Late Night Line-Up in 1960s. That was when the late Frank Muir called her ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’ – although she has always dismissed that as ‘silly’.
‘Other men don’t cease to be attractive because you’re married’
Joan married TV producer Michael Bakewell in 1955 and they had two children, Harriet and Matthew. The affair was secret but it was revealed that Joan was having an affair with Harold Pinter. A photograph from 1969 shows Harold looking at Joan naked in a navy minidress and fingers ready to point. After eight years of marriage, Harold Pinter wrote the famous play Betrayal.
Joan was shocked to see her private life on display, but kept her own counsel until she wrote her autobiography The Centre of the Bed in 2003, and a play – Keeping in Touch – which was broadcast in 2017, nearly a decade after Pinter’s death. She said then: ‘I have quite a strong moral background that I was flouting, but who’s to say people shouldn’t have affairs? Other men don’t cease to be attractive because you’ve found the one you’re married to.’
Joan’s great strength has always been the courage to tackle subjects other people are afraid of. She has been applying that ability to her life recently, searching for the best ways to age well. ‘When I got beyond 80, I began to think: “What’s my life going to be like from now on? What percentage of this do I still have? Will I get infirm? Will I be able to travel?” If I couldn’t travel, I’d be very upset.’ That’s why she went to Bologna and it’s also why she recently wrote The Tick of Two Clocks, a book about selling up the family home in London’s Primrose Hill, where Joan had lived for 53 years. ‘There was a staircase up four flights.
It was a prideful thing to think I could do it, even though younger men were running behind me. However, the day came when I couldn’t. After my hip operation I found myself living on the first floor, with the remainder of the house empty. All those things converged to make me think: “You’ve just got to move.”’
Joan interviewed Harold Pinter as a playwright, in 1969 when their affair came to an end.
The move took her a full year to organize and write about. She now lives alone in the small studio that Arthur Rackham used as his studio. ‘If your house is too big to live in, sell the assets and use them to comfort you in old age,’ she says. Surely that’s a hell of a lot easier if you happen to have an elegant four-storey Victorian townhouse worth a fortune? ‘I am lucky, because the house in Primrose Hill cost me thousands and it sold for millions,’ she admits. ‘I did nothing to earn it. It was like I had a sudden fortune. Many people of my generation did; it doesn’t happen any more, sadly.’ How does she square this with being a Labour peer? ‘I still believe in equality and fair share. I did think there should have been a windfall tax on the fortunes made from homes.’
Joan once made headlines by suggesting she wouldn’t leave her house to her children, but surely the windfall meant she could help pay off their mortgages? ‘Yes. I’m happy to give them money. But it’s on a modest scale.’ For Joan, the right to make your own decisions as you get older extends all the way to the end. ‘There’s a bill coming up in Parliament for assisted dying, and I shall be supporting that. I’m drawing on knowledge of being at the bedside of people who are dying well, without the agony,’ she says. ‘I’ve also been with someone who was in great pain. That’s sad, because there should come a serenity at the end of life. If you’re racked with pain, how can you relax into the notion that you are moving from this earth? That seems to me an option that people should have.’ Is it an option she would like to exercise for herself, if necessary? ‘Yes, that’s right.’
We’re talking in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard, so I ask if things are really any better for women now? ‘She has inspired a movement. If it had happened in my youth, it would have just been a sad murder.’ So what has changed? ‘The general consciousness of women. It has become overwhelmingly strong in ways that I find amazing. I confess that I was hesitant to share my thoughts, but these ladies are confident in themselves. The statistics are clear and they can take on any male community. It is an amazing change.’ Men are changing too, she says. ‘Now we have a generation of gentle men. Dads who wash their kids’ clothes and who bring them along to the park. In my day, fathers didn’t do these things. It’s glorious to see that happening.
I’m happy to say my son is one of them.’ She sounds grateful for so much, but does Joan have any regrets? ’I made mistakes; I had two marriages that were successful to begin with but then went wrong [Joan and Michael got divorced in 1972 and she was married to theatre director Jack Emery from 1975 to 2001] – I wasn’t able to solve those. I’ve had ups and downs. But my life has been a mixture of luck, social opportunities and the changing world in which I’ve lived.’
What lessons has she learned? ‘To make the most of it. It must be worth every day. Then you will make the right choices.’ And to go on working as long as you can? ‘It’s more than a thrill, it’s essential!’
Portrait Artist of the Year airs Wednesdays at 8pm on Sky Arts channel 11 and streaming on Now