The golden age of British journalism?

Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable
By Max Hastings
Harper Press £20, 278 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Rule One: the jobbing journo-columnist must pretend that life is unserious. Broken relationships and personal loss will be treated with bracing humour. What the reader wants is fun. In newspaper columns, life’s ragged realities are moulded into bright squibs. Disappointment is subbed out, failure rewritten as farce.

Max Hastings knows about all that. He can turn around a “why, oh why?” or a wry self-satire as featly as any professional writer in Britain. A quick thousand words on the unexpected joys of wet Februaries or the danger of custard? If the fee is there, Hastings is willing. The final words of this memoir quote from a play written by his grandfather in 1912, in which one character is challenged that “your plays are just prostitution”, and replies: “I’m not proud of them, but I’m proud of the fact that I can sell them.”

Hastings, as he reminds us, has written 20 books, mainly of military history, as well as editing both The Daily Telegraph and London’s Evening Standard. He has made numerous television films and produced a torrent of journalism. For anyone on a journey to understand the British newspaperman, Hastings is a good place to start. And in this slim, delightful book, he reveals himself as never before.

It would be easy to mistake Sir Max as some kind of aristocrat. Tall, with a booming voice and 1950s RP tones, a keen shot and avid fisherman, with a penchant for salmon-pink Jermyn Street shirts and well-cut suits, he has “handmade” stamped all over him. He once interviewed me for a job, in a St James’s club. He spoke very loudly, as usual, while all around elderly members lay supine on leather settees, with freshly ironed pillows under their heads, apparently fast asleep. One opened an oyster eye and grimaced at the spectacle. Hastings looks like a natural clubman but isn’t.

In fact his background was, if not rackety, then certainly Grub Street. An appendix lists 83 books written by three generations of his family since 1908, many with titles that make you want to seek them out: Faithful Philanderers, Dragons Are Extra or In the Mink. His paternal grandfather, the playwright, was a friend of Joseph Conrad. His uncle was an adventurer and, as Hastings puts it, a “sensationalist”.

But the book’s stars are his parents. Those of us brought up on the wonderful Eagle comic mostly know his father’s name, Macdonald Hastings, whose tales of learning to fly biplanes, riding camels and visiting far-off places thrilled millions of small boys. “Mac” was also one of the first stars of BBC television current affairs.

His mother, Anne Scott-James, is perhaps remembered now mostly as a writer of gardening books but she was one of Fleet’s Street’s female pioneers, editing magazines and writing columns, including “The Anne Scott-James page” in the Sunday Express, a forerunner of the mixed full-page columns so familiar today. She was famously fierce and, judging by a photo of her on the back of this book, wearing a man’s suit in a London pub, exceedingly sexy.

At which point, you might think you know exactly the kind of book you are getting – a romp through the “Street of Adventure”, peopled by hard-drinking, larger-than-life characters and studded with the stories of near-disaster journalists love to swap over that second – or third – bottle of lunchtime Chablis.

And yes, there are eye-popping tales here, from the African bush and the second world war, from the early days of telly and the final days of “high society” – hours of pungent anecdotage for long nights at El Vino’s circa 1975. Yet, to his great credit, Hastings has produced something much more interesting and darker than that.

Max Hastings aged 12, with his father in 1957

For it was not easy being the son of Mac and Anne. Married for long enough, they never seem to have either understood or much liked each other, and finally divorced after a madcap expedition by Mac to see whether he could survive alone on a desert island (technically he did but the real answer was “no”). Mac was a financially improvident, highly romantic, somewhat selfish man who wrote well and had adventures but seems not entirely fitted for adult life. (He also looked startlingly like his son.)

Anne was also mildly self-deluded, thinking herself a more maternal and loveable person than she seems to have been. An early female professional in a family-unfriendly world, she was endlessly caught between the demands of the magazine or newspaper office, and those of children’s bathtime and bedtime stories. The office won. More important, she was a fiercely critical woman, including of her son. Later in her life, when Max was awarded his knighthood, she merely snapped at him that she supposed his friend Roy Jenkins had fixed it for him: “I went away amazed that I still cared so much that she was pleased so little.” She found love later with Osbert Lancaster but the Hastings and Scott-James families seem unusually riven by feuds and dislikes.

Hastings seems to have spent much of his childhood relying on a comforting nanny, blowing things up and wondering why his parents weren’t around more. If he looks back on them now with a hard-boiled eye, this is also a journey to understand. He casts a sharp light but not a cold one. They were difficult people who produced (by his own account) a difficult son who struggled to like himself. But they also brought him glamour, wit, ambition and a rich comprehension of Englishness that has sustained him through a life of great success.

They taught him the value of accurate reporting, and not to take himself too seriously. And, partly through their own failures, they gave him a shrewd understanding of the need to make money, and keep making it. If he can seem on first acquaintance rather grand, there is nothing languid about Hastings; rather he has been one of the great, Tiggerish Stakhanovites of modern journalism. If he enjoys the good things in life, he has worked damned hard to have them.

Adornment to journalism though Hastings is, this is not really a journalist’s book. It is too honest. Life is not all fun, or funny stories. Public success cohabits with private failure. This memoir is regretful, wise and forthright. It deals with unnecessary cruelties and self-delusions and ends with a sense of completion and understanding. Had this reader not been Scottish, and not thinking so much about his reviewer’s fee, I suspect he would have turned its final pages in tears.

Andrew Marr is a BBC presenter and the author of ‘The Making of Modern Britain’ (Macmillan)