Face to Face edited and introduced by Hugh Burnett
Portraits by Feliks Topolski

Introduction

When I was a boy I once cycled to Ayot St Lawrence to interview Bernard Shaw for my school magazine. It was a warm summer's afternoon and Shaw's Corner dozed in the sun. On the way to the front door I passed a window. Inside sat Shaw, his feet up, in an armchair, closely scrutinizing the current copy of Lilliput.
Shaw gave me the interview. He pretended to be gruff and commented on the reckless quality of the questions. He got rid of me by saying that he had work to do, which I had interrupted.
When I got home I checked on that magazine. Far from working, Shaw had been studying a set of portraits of himself drawn by Feliks Topolski. That was my first glimpse of the face behind the public face and it looked interesting. In a way that was when Face to Face first began. Since then I have seen many public men and many public faces. Without exception the private faces have proved to be very much more interesting than the public faces. And it was the elusive private face we were trying to capture in Face to Face.
The television programme started life as a series of B.B.C. short-wave radio broadcasts to listeners in the Far East. To show aspects of British life and character, a number of differing and interesting people were interviewed in their homes. In these recordings they answered many personal questions concerning their backgrounds and beliefs, and far from shrinking from the probe they seemed to enjoy the experience. Lord Birkett, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, Henry Moore and Evelyn Waugh were among them. Indeed, the visit to Mr Waugh at his home in Gloucestershire was followed by the account of Gilbert Pinfold's preoccupations with questioning voices and sounds in the air, which Mr Waugh later identified with himself.
The patterns of questioning in these programmes provided a blue-print for the television series. And television brought a new, vital dimension-the opportunity to study in close detail faces and reactions of people under pressure. This close-up television situation was matched with a third vital ingredient, the searching comments in line by Feliks Topolski, the portraits which opened and closed the programmes.
It was a live transmission, as were most Face to Face broadcasts, and much of the character and success of the whole new series depended on his candour and co-operation. We plotted together as we had often done in the past. He enjoyed broadcasting and he liked the challenge of attempting something new. He promised to be frank, and, in line with his candour, the cameras pushed in close, to carve his wise old head against the black velours, the back hairs rising characteristically away from his scalp in a gentle arc.
After the transmission was over, we were all sitting together discussing the way things had gone when the door burst open and in came Gilbert Harding, puffing and blowing. He had rushed out from his flat in London to offer congratulations at first hand. And as he did so the telephones rang again and again as viewers packed the switchboards.
From then on Face to Face gathered momentum. The pattern was varied to bring a wide variety of people and professions to the screen. Sometimes visitors were caught as they passed through London - Adlai Stevenson and King Hussein were invited in this way. Sometimes people were flown in from abroad. Martin Luther King came in from Alabama, Simone Signoret from Paris. Sometimes cameras were taken abroad when people were out of reach. Professor Jung was filmed at his lakeside home outside Zurich. Jomo Kenyatta was finally persuaded to come before the cameras in Nairobi. Normally each programme was preceded by a portrait sitting at Feliks Topolski's studio, but sometimes this procedure had to be varied. Kenyatta was drawn under conditions of great difficulty as the filming took place, Feliks, with pad, moving silently through the grass to get new vantage points. Jung was the only one who refused to be drawn, which is why no portrait of him appears in this book.
Face to Face was fortunate in having a brilliant interviewer. And the programme had a new formula for his role. Usually a television interviewer, in programme terms, is psychologically and visually equal to the man he is addressing. The Face to Face back-to-camera technique gave a new interpretation to this function. While the interviewer was the spokesman for the uninterrupted scrutiny of the guest. This alignment helped everybody. It gave the speaker a reason for being on the screen. It freed the interviewer from unnecessary attention and scrutiny. And it brought the viewing public face to face with distinguished men and women under circumstances of particular interest and candour.
One of the most important functions of television is the honest display of human beings to one another. When this happens, it becomes possible to judge whether the standards and beliefs being held up for approval are really as valid and generally supported as we are led to believe. Social progress is slowed by isolation, and one of the great advantages of good television is that people are exposed to wide varieties of views and attitudes quite different from their own. Face to Face kept on demonstrating that people were not as they were supposed to be-that a public face had been obscuring them from view.
One incident pinpoints the purpose of these programmes. Standing in his garden beside the lake at Zurich, Jung was watching us trying to film the floating captions in the water. This was his favourite place by the jetty, where he came in the mornings to feed the moorhens that lived in the rushes. He leaned on his stick, grinning and puffing his pipe as the pieces of paper sank or floated out of reach.
'Professor Jung,' I said, with a straight face, 'I would like to start this film with a shot of you coming out of the lake from your morning swim.'
'Ah, yes,' said Jung, pulling himself erect, 'emerging from the unconscious!'

Here are some fragments of Face to Face. They are set out in a manner akin to the mood the programme tried to convey. This is not intended to be printed television. These are some of the highlights, some of the glimpses of other people's lives, taken from their eye-levels, with their prejudices and opinions. This book is a permanent record of a few of the infinite and marvellous moments of human experience and belief, as seen by a rare and remarkable group of men and women. I hope they have done themselves justice.
Hugh Burnett

What one is trying to do is to relax a man enough so that he will show himself as he really is.

The notion that television interviewers have great power, I think, is much to underrate the intelligence of the viewers.

Any effective interview to be done toughly must be done either from an opposite point of view or, at any rate, from a carefully thought out position which tests the validity of the other man's position as ruthlessly as can be.
The interviewer John Freeman
 
People appear on this programme by their own choice; nobody has ever been subjected to any sort of improper pressure; the names of those who, being invited, have preferred the haven of discreet obscurity have never been divulged-nor yet those of that more sanguine company who hopefully press their claims to public exposure.
Is it desirable to remove the wrappings from our public figures? I think it is. I think that, in an age which is perhaps contributing more to the art of packaging than to any of the deeper seated virtues, responsible public opinion is strengthened by the ability to meet public figures without their masks.
Face to Face has set out, not only by its methods of questioning, but also by the unwinking scrutiny of its cameras, to enable the viewer in his home to meet the famous with an immediacy and intimacy possible in no other medium and to pass his own judgments on them.
Occasionally the process of unwrapping will reveal a private reality shocking to those who value cosiness above all else in their viewing; but that risk is inseparable from the process itself.
I think without exception I always tried to ask questions in a courteous manner.
John Freeman

The edited interview, as it appears in the Face to Face book, with Tony Hancock, without the questions.

If you'd like to read the full interview transcription including all the pauses, ers, erms and repetitions in the speech, which have been included to give the reader a feel for the atmosphere and mood of the interview and, more specifically, of Hancock, then go here:

The interviewee Tony Hancock
 
I think the world is both funny and sad, which seem to me to be the two basic ingredients of good comedy.
The character I play isn't a character I put on and off like a coat. It is a part of me and a part of everybody else I see.
The secret of my work is a knowledge of what constitutes living in general, I think. You take the weaknesses of your own character and of other people's characters and you exploit them. You show yourself up and you show them up.
I have no religion now. I'm deeply interested and I'm trying to find a faith. But I've had to throw away the initial faith that I was brought up in and therefore am now starting again from scratch. I began to see first when I was about fifteen or sixteen. I think I was fairly deeply Christian before that and it just failed. It was no longer believable.
The only use I have for money really is to travel and to have the luxury of independence to choose what work I do and to read and to learn, and to put something back into my own profession. The two things go together. The more you expand as an individual, the more you see, the more you read, the more you learn, the more you have to offer.
I love France. I find it very relaxing. I relax there better than anywhere, I think, partly because of the licensing laws. People say why do you go to Paris to rest? But I do rest there, because you can go to sleep six hours in the afternoon, you can get up and go out all night if you want to.
I read history, philosophy, and all the things that come off it. It seems as if for the first thirty years my eyes were closed and then I became interested and found a real thirst for knowledge, and now I fortunately have the opportunity to put right this lack of education. Once I read Wells's Outline of History. Simple, maybe, but it put the thing into perspective. It put one into an entirely different position. Viewing your own sort of ego and personality in terms of this vast time. That really started me reading many other things.
I'm entirely interested in comedy. I read practically all the newspapers. I also think it's necessary to watch nearly all television, for instance. It's hard to bear, isn't it? If you want to see something that needs burlesquing or something you want to have a go at, you have to see it all.
Reluctantly I read the critics' opinions of myself. That hurts. I try and eliminate that but it's not possible. You think about the point anybody makes. It would be nice to say you were beyond that, maybe, but you never are.
Sometimes I spend money extravagantly. I like staying at big hotels in a suite occasionally for a couple of days. I like to travel, to travel in considerable luxury, maybe.
Generally I don't sleep well, and take sleeping pills.
I don't worry much about my weight. I've got it more or less sorted out now. Well, within reason. I was about two-and-ahalf stone heavier than this at one time. For a time I diet and then after a show is over, after a series is over, I do anything, whatever I want, and then I pull right down. I think being fat makes you sluggish generally. Your mind is sluggish and I think that's a bad thing.
My father was rather like me in a way. He had a lot of moods, he did all sorts of things. He was a laundry owner, a pubkeeper, a hotel keeper, a boxing referee-all sorts-also a semi-pro comedian. He fluctuated a great deal.
My names Anthony Aloysius St John are not true. They were created by the scriptwriters. My real name is Anthony John Hancock.
My father and mother tried to give me the best education they possibly could, which I think was a fine thing for them to do because neither of them had an education really, you know, and I didn't want it. I felt being at a public school was making the thing too much in a mould, and I left there myself at fifteen. It was one of the best decisions I made, I think. I wanted to get into the theatre. I'd shown no particular sign of ability at that time, but I felt that I could do it somehow. I don't know why, really. Then I went to a technical college and learnt shorthand and typing, did a few sort of odd jobs for a short time and then when the war started I went into troop entertainment.
I started making a living at the Windmill. We did six shows a day, six days a week, and you learnt to die like a swan-you know-gracefully. I mean I used to go on-the show used to start at 12.15, one used to go on at 12.19 to three rows of gentlemen reading newspapers, and nothing, you see, absolutely nothing, but you'd learnt to die with a smile on your face and walk off. Then you came back again at two o'clock to the same people, and you died again you see. But it was a great experience. I didn't enjoy it at the time, but it's been a great benefit afterwards. The best thing was when the drunks used to come in about twenty past three, when the pubs were closed. They were quite lively-sort of made the day go. After the Windmill there were quite long gaps. There were a lot of summer seasons and things that were valuable experience to me during this time, and only a few broadcasts.
An individual performance is a bit of hell just before it starts. There's a lot of champing around and trying to get the right edge so that you are relaxed but also have a kick, so that you're going to be alive and also relaxed. It means a great deal of concentration and hold upon yourself to do this. It's a little too quick to really enjoy, I think. But there you are, it's very challenging. It is enjoyable as a whole.
I've been very fortunate, I think. I have everything that anybody could want to make them happy. The only happiness I can achieve would be to perfect the talent that I have, whatever it may be, however small it may be. That is the whole purpose of it, and that is the whole purpose of what I do.
I wouldn't expect happiness. I don't. I don't think it's possible. But I'm very fortunate to be able to work in something that I like. I think to work in something that is pleasure is all anybody can ask. If such a time came that I found that I'd come to the end of what I could develop out of my own ability, limited however it may be, then I wouldn't want to do it any more.
Tony Hancock

As you can see, from the picture at the top of this page, there were two publications of this particular book. They date from: 1964 to 1965, and are as follows:

1st, Jonathan Cape, hardback, published in 1964 (first UK edition)

2nd, Stein & Day, hardback, published in 1965 (first US edition)

The Jonathan Cape publication of this book is the hardest of the two editions to find, and may well need to be sourced from the US - maybe via the Internet. This UK edition is very rare in the UK, and ironically can be found easier in the US, via one of their great antiquarian (second-hand) book stores. The Stein & Day edition is easier to find - again if you use the Internet. Both can be imported direct from the US. Expect to pay between $35 - $50, for a very good copy of either, inclusive of shipping to the UK. Both books are beautifully bound (made in an era when they knew how to make a good book). Not that either were particularly cheap originally. Indeed, the US edition, when first published, would've set you back $10.00! And that was way back in 1965 (the year I was born, in actual fact). Just for the record, they both come with a dust jacket. You can see the one supplied with the US edition (top of page, right). The UK edition came with a clear plastic dust wrapper, so can't be seen. It is however pretty rare to find the UK edition with the dust jacket still intact / attached. Both are great additions to any book collection, and come highly recommended.

 

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