Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Journalist, star columnist for the Daily Express, self-styled First Lady of Fleet Street and highest paid woman journalist in Britain.
On the island
Eight records
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:19How do you know you're the highest paid woman in Fleet Street?
Highest paid columnists now because there are two women editors now, you know, two editors, women editing papers. And there was this myth for years, you know, that I wanted to be the first woman to edit a national paper. If I had edited any paper, Sue, it would have folded in a fortnight. I'm a lousy executive. I'm surely a person who likes to write. I'm surely a person who communi the great communicator with my readers.
Presenter asks
9:31Would you admit to having suffered from driving ambition?
Yeah. And asked, you know, at the time that I had breast cancer, when you think your life over, you think, oh, was all that worth it? I mean, should I not have had more sunshine, more horse riding, more tennis playing. Why on earth did I do all that? If I'm going to drop dead at the end of this, it's been a hard life. But if I had to do it again I would do it again.
Presenter asks
12:07What was your first memorable assignment [on the Sheffield Telegraph]?
Well, we had a news editor. We call him the Barnsley Bull and he had one of those eyes, you know, like a sheep dog. He was a bit wall eyed, and one of those eyes which go in outwards and one that goes straight at you. So you're never quite sure. Well, I did nothing for weeks, and then I came into my own because the drama critic fell ill. So he sent for me. He said, We're sending you to Bradford. They're doing the life of Christ the local amateurs are doing the life of Christ from beginning to end. So I said, Well, that'll be comprehensive, mister Taylor, but it was lost on him. So I got there and when I got out the deputy news editor whom I later married he took me to a private room at a pub. And he said, Well, I'll be back in half an hour and you know You'll have written five hundred words. And when he'd gone, I was so desperate I didn't know what to do. I started it he came back and he said, What have you written? and I said, Nothing. So he reversed the charges to the Sheffield Telegraph and he put the phone in my hand and he said, That, or your career's finished before it starts. And I remember dictating Jerusalem was builded last night among the dark satanic mills of the Bradford Woollen Industry, and I went on and on and on. Five hundred words. And the next morning as the paperboy was pushing the paper through the door, I was pulling it out the other side and it was there and my name was on it. You got the by line. The by line so I walked into the office, past the Barnsley bull, you see, didn't care, on air, and I said I had my first by line, mister Taylor, and I don't know which eye looked at me as he said I said we had to put your name on at last. He said we couldn't understand a bloody word of it.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
20:16What happened when three masked men came to call at your home in Kent?
Well, I had got flu. I just got back from Los Angeles with a bug. And I said to Jeff, my husband, He he was going to take the dog out at about ten and he said, Shall I come back in? and I said, No, no, no, don't I said, Whatever I've got you and the dog don't want. So I said, No, I'll I'll be fine and I fell immediately into a sort of feverish doze and I woke up and there was a torch shining in my face. And then this voice said, Do as I say, or I'll blow your effing head off. And so I realized that this was it. And all of the what was taken was my entire collection of jewelry. It was a collection of gold, but it'd been done over fifteen years from everywhere, China, Russia, and as they hurled it all into a pillar case, I thought, you know, there goes China, and there goes Japan, and there goes my life.
Presenter asks
25:18Can you remember the moment you discovered the lump in your breast?
Oh, distinctly. So we I've got a very, very tiny place in London, a very tiny flat. My son Gresby had hung his Marilyn Monroe posters either side of a full length mirror, and I said, Well, thanks a lot and he said, Well, there's nowhere else to put em. And I'm looking in this full-length mirror, not admiring myself, but thinking, Oh, Lord, time I had a bath and I thought, Wow, what's that blue bruise? Just sort of in the middle by the breastbone. Um I brushed my fingers against it and thought, Oh, And it's like a warmer. And it had not been there three weeks previously, because I had been in Dubai in a swimming costume, and I would have found it. I know I knew straight about. I mean it was so. Did you? Yes, I knew it was. Yes, Ms. Kent.
Presenter asks
31:43Why do you think star columnists like you are disappearing?
Yeah. It's the golden age is gone, but Alastair Burnett once said something to me which I think is so true and that was just before Prince Charles's wedding, and he said, You look a bit down and I said, Oh, Alistair I said, Tomorrow there you'll all be. You know instancy, movement, live and colour. And what do I do the next day? And he said, Look, He said, When I go to a cricket match, I watch it all but he said, What do I do the next day? Pick up my favourite writer to see if they saw it the way I do. And I went into the royal wedding thinking, Yes, my view does count, and it it but me up enormously. But you can't entirely do without good writing.
“I was incredibly dreadful. I looked absolutely horrendous. I had these round eyes behind owl specks. I had skinny plaits. I was terribly plump. Inside there was somebody longing to be glamorous and famous.”
“Oh, my father yes. My father was a very strange man. I mean, he was the last of the Victorians, and yet he had this idea about the future of women. He was the start of women's lib.”
“I said my goodbyes to Jeff before he went into a coma, and they told me then that he would never know me again. But I thought, well, hang about, old lad, if you're going to wait until our silver wedding anniversary, I will. And I did.”
“I thought, well, it had better be. Because Jeff would have said, Well, what are you going to do next week? You've stopped in your life here.”
“I'm too Yorkshire mean to pay sixty quid a time to jump the queue... I'll go on the National Health. And I'll find out what it's really all about.”
“People have always mattered more to me than anything. So I'm going to take the Eaton Boating song and have 1200 and odd young men who could once have been my lovers and now could be my sons.”