Barry Norman was one of those people who always seemed wryly amused by life – so much so that on TV he came across as an agreeable friend who had just been to see some films he thought we might like to know about.
Film criticism wasn’t a life and death matter, he seemed to be saying, and, even though sometimes a film might be considered a work of art, he understood, too, that overwhelmingly, for you and me, movies are also about entertainment.
He loved films, and viewers who also loved films, loved him. It’s absolutely no exaggeration to say that when he died in his sleep on Friday, at the age of 83, six years after the loss of his wife Diana, a genuine sense of loss was felt in millions of homes across the country.
Happy to puncture both the balloons of Hollywood hype and over-weening art house pretentions, he was for twenty six years cinema’s Everyman – the guy on the BBC’s Film ‘72 right through until Film ‘98 who you could trust to give you an honest opinion.
He made reviewing films look easy and fun, but his pleasant screen persona belied a massive movie knowledge, much hard work and a journalist’s sharp editing mind.
Barry didn’t plan to be a film critic. But films were in his blood, from his birth in 1933. His father, Leslie Norman, was one of the stalwarts of Ealing Films, who rose up the movie ladder from the editing room (where Barry’s mother also worked), to become the successful producer of Mandy and The Cruel Sea and then the producer/director of Dunkirk – three of the most popular British film of the Fifties.
So, while other boys of Barry’s generation would only see the finished, polished results at the cinema, he would be down at Ealing Studio or Elstree or out on location in his school holidays, watching how, often unglamorously, a small army would come together to get the performances and images on to the screen.
He didn’t know it then, but he was having the best possible apprenticeship for a realist’s view of movies. After seeing his father struggle over the nuts and bolts of getting a film made, in no way could he become a glossy-eyed movie fan lavishing unctuous praise and devotion on the very idea of Hollywood, as some TV critics did. Nor could it be his style to be the cineaste bore desperate to show off his knowledge of the latest obscure movie auteur.
He knew from childhood how movies were put together by writers and teams of dedicated technicians, not by one ‘genius director’. And he knew, too, that stars, much as we might love them on the screen, could be a right pain in the neck when the camera stopped rolling
No doubt remembering some of his father’s rueful stories about the selfish vanity of fame, Barry would, deep into his own career, never take any nonsense from anyone no matter how big their name.
When at a Press conference he heard John Wayne suggest that perhaps the US should Moscow he laughed so loud that Wayne lurched threateningly out of his chair and called him ‘a goddamned liberal pinko faggot’. Which must have amused Barry even more.
As for Madonna – when she kept him waiting for an interview for an hour and forty minutes outside the Ritz in Paris, he simply walked away and cancelled the interview.
His parents had made a comfortable living out of films, but it could be a precarious living, as Barry saw his accomplished father, become, later in life, grateful to find regular work directing episodes of TV series like The Avengers.
So when it came time for him to leave Highgate School in North London, he elected not to go to university, but joined a weekly newspaper in Kensington, before moving on to newspapers in South Africa and Rhodesia. Back in London by 1957 he was a gossip writer in Fleet Street where he met his wife to be, Diana Narracott.
Everything seemed to be going well for him throughout the Sixties, with a happy marriage and two young daughters, Samantha and Emma. Then in 1971, when he was the show business editor of the Daily Mail, he suddenly found himself made redundant. It was a surprise, not only to him.
He didn’t fret for long. A natural freelance, soon he was contributing regularly to two other national newspapers, and writing the story lines for the Daily Mail’s strip cartoon, Flook. Then out of the blue he was asked if he would like to try fronting a new BBC film programme called Film ’72.
His new career was off and running. With his baggy eyes (the result he would say of watching over 15000 films in his life) and his slightly ruffled look and quiet humour, he was a natural for TV. His genuine niceness shone through the screen. But more than that, he knew all about making movies, not just watching them/
He was criticised by some as being too middlebrow. But his critics were missing the point and his appeal. As Alfred Hitchcock is said to have pointed out, anyone could make an art film for a few thousand people. It was a lot more difficult to make a good movie that would be seen and enjoyed by millions of people around the world.
Barry’s job was to review commercial cinema for a mainstream audience. And he was brilliant at it. Soon he was wanted everywhere. He wrote eleven novels and various books on film, was a presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, a director of the film Film Finance Corporation and a governor of the British Film Institute.
Then in 1981 he was presented with the Richard Dimbleby BAFTA Award ward for his contribution to cinema, as well as becoming a Spitting Image puppet with the catch phrase, ‘And why not?’ He was a star, as universally recognised as any actor appearing in a British film.
But what was most important to him, he always said, was his rock solid marriage, his children and grandchildren, always mentioning that his wife Diana was a far better writer than he was. While he had been celebrated on TV, she had been quietly building up a reputation as a historical crime fiction novelist under the names Diana Norman and Ariana Franklin.
Then in 2011 Diana died of heart failure ‘The pangs of bereavement have never got any easier,’ he wrote three years later. Diana had been to him ‘the best friend a man could ever hope for’.
He had met her when she was twenty, and they had both been covering a Charlie Chaplin Press conference at Shepperton Studios for their newspapers when they had got talking. After which he had driven her back to London.
‘She was beautiful witty, highly intelligent, quirky, stubborn and always immense fun to be with,’ he would write of her. He missed everything about her. It bothered him that she was known for many years simply as ‘Barry Norman’s wife’ because, he felt ‘she deserved far more recognition than that’. But it never bothered her. She was proud of his success.
Three years ago he wrote a memoir, See You In the Morning, The Life, Love and Loss of my wife, Diana. It was mainly about his time in newspapers and television, but others considered it ‘a love letter to Diana’.
When he reached 80, he said he had no fear of death. He’d had his ‘Biblical three score years and ten’ and was, he considered, living on borrowed time. Although very well known, he hadn’t become fabulously rich through television in that his great days had been before TV stars were paid in Monopoly money.
But with his lifelong love of cricket, a rather strange, late profitable business venture in pickled onions doing well and his daughters and their children to see and think about, his eighties ‘were pretty blissful. If Diana was still around they would be ideal.’
Did Barry still consider the current film industry into which he had put so much of his life as ideal. Possibly not. As his good friend and great admirer, producer David Puttnam said sadly yesterday: ‘With cinema subsuming its cultural potential to a spasm of sequels and masked heroes, he probably chose a good time to leave.’
Personal Footnote: Much as I usually agreed with his opinions, Barry didn’t always get it right. Early in his TV career he reviewed, rather negatively, a film called That’ll Be The Day which was my first foray into screenwriting. I was a big admirer of Film ’73 and was devastated. It was the first review the film got and I was in despair.
Luckily for me, his judgement wasn’t shared by other critics, so when asked by a friend a little later, what I thought of the reviews I said: ‘Well, everyone seemed to like it apart from that **** Barry Norman’, using the rudest word I knew.
A few weeks later I was at a party when Barry, whom, I’d never met, approached me, and introduced himself, smiling broadly. ‘Hello, Ray. I’m that **** Barry Norman.’
We both had to laugh, and I took him to his train in my car that night. We would remain good friends whenever we met over the succeeding decades.
Because, he really was a lovely man.
