The Fellowship – Dame Joan Bakewell

Over a career spanning six decades, Joan Bakewell has offered viewers an erudite and distinctive voice, whether she is discussing the arts, current affairs or the big ethical issues of the day. Still working at the age of 86, the broadcaster, presenter and journalist has long been an inspiration to women in and outside television.

“Being awarded the Fellowship is extraordinary because it’s an acknowledgment by the people in the business that I’ve adored all my life,” says Bakewell, who already has a BAFTA – the Richard Dimbleby Award for her work on BBC One ethics show Heart of the Matter – proudly displayed in her office. “The idea of joining a fellowship is really something. On the night, I will be in the company of such illustrious talent.”

The Stockport-born Bakewell suffered a few false starts after graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1954. Looking for a way into the BBC, she moved to London and became a studio manager with BBC Radio. “I was terrible – I couldn’t do technical stuff and I still can’t,” she recalls.

She tried advertising, but couldn’t stomach the ethics of the business: “Copywriting involves selling people stuff they don’t need that they can’t afford.” Next came supply teaching at a primary school: “I was hopeless.”

Persistence, though, is a Bakewell trait. “I don’t take no for an answer, which is an enormous virtue in television,” she says, recounting how she “bombarded” producers with ideas for stories. Eventually, she began to get short items on BBC Radio, including one “about a south London man who had a pigeon coop in his garden to which his neighbours objected”. Naturally, as a woman who has always backed the underdog, Bakewell “sided with the man with the pigeons”.

She made her television debut in the early 1960s on Sunday Break, a series billed as “a Sunday club for teenagers”. Its role was to fill ITV’s quota of religious programming, with subjects often hurriedly given a religious angle. “On one show, I was doing this item about how unhappy drugs made people when someone rushed over with a card that said, ‘Mention God!’” she recalls.

Sunday Break got Bakewell noticed and she joined the roster of presenters on BBC Two’s live arts show, Late Night Line-Up. “Television at the time was open for young people – I hit the right moment,” she recalls. “We were making it up as we went along – there were no rules in the 60s.”

Bakewell became one of the defining television figures of the decade; “intelligent and the epitome of 60s chic – a Mary Quant for the chattering classes”, according to the British Film Institute.

Late Night Line-Up had its fingers on the cultural pulse, with items on everything from Hollywood movies to avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, via counter-culture writer Allen Ginsberg. “It was quite lively – and drink had often been taken, too,” laughs Bakewell.

The show was known for its trenchant criticism of artists. “We were pushing the barriers all the time – pushing our luck actually. We always said, ‘If we’re offending people, we’re doing something right,’” notes Bakewell. It also had a sense of fun: moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse was dispatched to review the nude revue show Oh! Calcutta!.

Years before ‘fake news’, one Late Night Line-Up prank showed how news could be fabricated. Bakewell takes up the story: “We paid an actress, dressed her in frumpy clothes and gave her an umbrella. [Director] Ken Russell and the Evening Standard’s [critic] Alexander Walker were discussing a film when she broke into the studio and started beating them up with her umbrella. It was front page news the next day – and then we revealed we'd fixed it. Of course, we got into terrible trouble.”

David Attenborough, BBC Two’s controller at the time, had the Late Night Line-Up team’s back. “We were constantly taking flak from inside the BBC. David protected us; he called us his ‘guerrillas’,” she recalls.

The 1970s saw Bakewell appear in an eclectic series of shows. She was on the presenters’ rota for Film ’72 and ’73 before the BBC settled on Barry Norman to front its movie review show permanently. “I loved cinema, even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I was a bit inclined to like everything,” says Bakewell, who also hosted BBC One’s longrunning Holiday programme.

Granada’s 1977 series Pandora’s Box was quintessential Bakewell, featuring all-women panels discussing the big issues of the day – with a young Victoria Wood writing and performing songs for light relief. “What you get now is Loose Women, which is cheeky and rude. Mine was terribly solemn and serious,” says Bakewell, who is always ready to poke fun at her earnest image.

In the 1980s, she was the BBC’s arts correspondent before joining Heart of the Matter in 1987, which covered “female genital mutilation, transgender people and gay priests – real headline stuff”. It also gave Bakewell her most remarkable interviewee, Nelson Mandela, shortly after his release from prison. “He was so impressive and I was a bit star-struck – it was the only time I’ve asked someone to sign a book, because that’s a bit cheesy.”

Bakewell has always been a fierce opponent of censorship – decades earlier, she had smuggled the banned Henry Miller novel Tropic of Cancer into England, tucked in her underwear. Who better to write and present the BBC Two series Taboo in 2001?

“In those days, basically, I believed sex was good and violence was bad,” she recalls. “You never saw – and still don’t see – an erect penis on television.” So, the show featured a nude model with an erect (albeit pixelated) male member, which Bakewell circled while discussing censorship.

Bakewell, who became Labour peer Baroness Bakewell of Stockport in 2011, continues to work in the media. Later this year, she will front Sky Arts’ series Landscape Artist of the Year. “I still adore the arts,” she says. “While I’m still on my feet, life’s too good to miss out on.” She also makes BBC Radio 4 shows; most recently, We Need to Talk About Death.

When Bakewell first appeared on television, she was notable for being one of the few women allowed to make serious programmes. Thankfully, things have changed a lot since those days.

“I’ve seen a huge change – I feel I’ve lived through the greatest social change of the century, which is the liberation of women,” says Bakewell. “I rejoice to see how many women are thriving in television now.” •

Words by Matthew Bell