Below you'll read what John Freeman had to say about the two interviewees featured on this LP, namely Tony Hancock and Stirling Moss (who I thought I should include as well).

This interview with Tony Hancock has led to an enduring friendship. To my great enrichment and pleasure, Hancock is now part of my life; and we first got to know one another watched by millions in this interview. The irony of it was that I was sharply criticized for it in some quarters: I was said to be 'hostile' to Hancock, to have 'bullied' him, to have unkindly exposed him. Well, I hope I did expose him - that, after all, was the object of Face to Face; but 'hostility' and 'bullying' - no. I asked Tony searching questions, and, instead of turning them aside with a stream of wisecracks as most topflight comics would have done (and as Tony is entirely capable of doing if he'd wanted to), he took them seriously. He pondered them; he hesitated; and then - sometimes I think painfully - he answered with unexpected candour and without any trace of a public idol's vanity. Some people were disappointed that the wide-boy of Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, was not so wide as he had appeared; and they were resentful that I had somehow destroyed their illusion. But others - I think they were the majority, and they certainly included me - learned for the first time, and with delight, that behind the clown's mask was a serious human being who worries about the world and his personal share of the responsibility for it, who finds people sad as well as funny, who hates pomposity in himself as well as others, who has a thirst for knowledge and a deep respect for books, who can never be content with an easy success, whose 'only happiness . . . would be to perfect the talent that I have . . . however small it may be.'
John Freeman

If my professional judgment of interviewing is any good, this is technically one of the best interviews in the Face to Face series. Only a small part of the credit for that is mine. For, if the questions were pertinent (as I think they were) Stirling Moss's answers certainly came back with a speed, candour, confidence and self-knowledge rare among public men. The result was an interview which covered almost all the relevant ground and reached the bed-rock of truth at most essential points. On this record you will find the real Stirling Moss.

      Motor-racing is not my own favourite sport, but I have no patience with those who, sharing that view, go on to belittle racing drivers as if they were in some general way inferior to, say, footballers or long-distance runners or jockeys. Sport is designed to test brain and nerve and muscle. Stirling is one of the greatest racing drivers the world has yet seen and he has triumphed in a sport which makes the greatest possible demand on both physical and mental resources - and which tests as perhaps no other sport can the secret heart of courage. Those who seek to decry racing drivers must face the fact that the great champions like Fangio and Moss have fitter bodies, steadier nerves, quicker reflexes and greater courage than almost all other athletes. Moreover they are engaged as professionals in a contest where the standards of conduct on the track are still those of the unblemished amateur.

      I don't know what more can be asked of a sport. And I don't know what professional sport ever had a more plain-spoken and honourable champion than Stirling Moss.
John Freeman

 

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