‘This isn’t my sort of show at all,’ said Alan. ‘But I don’t look down on it. You have to make things which appeal to everyone. Everyone’s entitled to their bit of fun.’
They finished off by turning over to BBC2 and watching a series called Ooh La La! adapted from the farces of Georges Feydeau. This one starred Donald Sinden and Barbara Windsor. Hilary fell asleep halfway through, and woke up just in time to catch the end of an astronomy programme presented by a peculiar man in an ill-fitting suit.
‘So there you have it,’ said Alan proudly. ‘News, entertainment, comedy, documentary and classical drama in equal measure. There’s no other country in the world which could offer you an experience like that.’ With his gentle, melodious voice and greying bushes of hair he was beginning to look and sound, to Hilary, like the worst sort of parish priest. ‘And it’s all in the hands of people like you. Talented youngsters whose task in the years to come will be to carry the tradition forward.’
At the end of the holiday, Roddy and Hilary took the train back to their parents’ current home in Sussex.
‘I thought old Mr Beamish was a bit of a sweetie, actually,’ said Roddy, taking out a cigarette. ‘And yet Henry told me that he’s frightfully left wing.’ He lit up. ‘Hasn’t rubbed off on Hugo, thank God. Anyway, you’d never guess it, would you?’
Hilary stared out of the window.
From THE 10 MOST LIKELY: colour feature in Tatler, October 1976
Lovely Hilary Winshaw is a recent Cambridge graduate who intends to make quite a splash in her new job at — Television, where she will be training as a producer. Hilary already has strong views about the work which lies ahead of her. ‘I think of television as one of the fibres which holds the country together,’ she says. ‘It’s brilliant at collapsing distinctions and building a sense of identity. And that’s definitely a tradition I hope to encourage and foster.’
In this picture Hilary is all ready to keep the winter cold at bay with a Royal Samink cape from Furs Renée, 39 Dover St, Wl (£3,460), sweater with roll-neck in camel cashmere by Pringle, 28 Old Bond St, Wl (£52.50), gloves in camel wool, medium-length from Herbert Johnson Ladies Shop, 80 Grosvenor St, Wl (£14.95), and boots in beige leather, mid calf, with stacked heels, from Midas at 36 Hans Crescent, SW1 (£129).
— Television plc. Extract from minutes of Executive Board Meeting, 14 November 1983. Confidential.
… It was reiterated at this point that nobody undervalued Ms Winshaw’s contribution to the company’s programming successes over the last seven years. However, Mr Fisher insisted that her decision to purchase TMT, the American production company, for £120 million in 1981, had never been offered to the board for proper scrutiny. He asked for clarification on four points:
i) was she aware that, at the time of purchase, TMT was running up losses of $32 million a year?
ii) was she aware that her weekly flights to Hollywood, the purchase of her flat in Los Angeles, and the running expenses of her three company cars had all been cited as major contributing factors in the assessment, by independent management consultants Webster Hadfield, that the company’s costs were currently 40 % too high?
iii) was she aware that her policy of purchasing low-cost drama from TMT, and then insisting that it be re-edited by the addition of previously deleted sequences (in order to expand the running time — often by as much as thirty minutes — and thereby increase the cost-effectiveness of the purchase) had significantly influenced the IBA’s recent judgment that the company was failing to meet acceptable quality thresholds?
iv) was the doubling of her salary to £210,000 p.a., agreed upon by the board in February 1982, a fair and accurate reflection of her increased workload since the acquisition of TMT?
Mr Gardner remarked at this point that he would have thought twice about accepting this job if he had known that he was joining a sinking ship, and asked whose idea it had been to employ this bloody woman in the first place.
Mr Fisher replied that Ms Winshaw had joined the company on the recommendation of Mr Alan Beamish, the distinguished producer, formerly of the BBC.
Mrs Rawson requested, on a point of order, that Ms Winshaw stop playing with the grapes as somebody might want to eat them and there was no longer scope for waste in any area of the company’s activities …
At 4.37 p.m. it was agreed by a vote of 11–1 that Ms Winshaw’s contract should be terminated forthwith, and that she should be compensated with a lump sum which took realistic account of the present state of the company finances.
The meeting adjourned at 4.41 p.m.
From the Guardian, Diary, 26 November 1983
RAISED eyebrows all round at the news of Hilary Winshaw’s recent departure from — Television. It’s not so much the fact that she was ousted (most observers had been predicting that for some time) as the size of the pay-off: a cool £320,000, if rumours are to be believed. Not a bad reward for reducing this once-profitable outfit to a condition of near-bank-ruptcy in a couple of years.
Could such unprecedented generosity have anything to do with her cousin Thomas Winshaw, chairman of Stewards, the merchant bank which has a hefty stake in the company? And could it be true that the multi-talented Ms Winshaw is about to land herself a plum job as columnist on a certain daily newspaper whose proprietor also just happens to be one of Stewards’ most valuable clients? Watch, as they say, this space …
Hilary’s reputation had preceded her, and she found that on her first day she did not receive much of a welcome from her new colleagues. Well, she thought: fuck them. She was only going to be coming in one or two days a week. If that.
She had her own desk with her name on it in a far corner of the open-plan office. All it contained, so far, was a typewriter and a pile of the day’s other newspapers. It had been decided that the title of her column would be PLAIN COMMON SENSE. She had to fill up most of a tabloid page, leading off with a longish opinionated piece and following it with two or three more personal, gossipy items.
It was March 1984. She picked up the first newspaper that came to hand and glanced over the headlines. Then, after a couple of minutes, she put it down and began to type.
Underneath the headline THE POLITICS OF GREED, she wrote:
Most of us, still tightening our belts in the wake of the recession, would agree that this is not the time to start banging on the government’s door and asking for more money.
And most of us, with images of the dreadful ‘Winter of Discontent’ still fresh in our minds, would agree that another wave of strikes is the last thing the country needs.
But we would have reckoned without neo-Marxist Arthur Scargill and his greedy National Union of Mineworkers.
Already Mr Scargill is threatening ‘industrial action’—which of course means inaction, in anybody else’s books — if he and his comrades aren’t showered with yet another round of pay rises and perks.