First viewed : Autumn 1980
While ITV were luring away some of the Beeb's big hitters ( Yarwood, Forsyth , Morecambe and Wise etc ) there was some movement the other way. Harty, a former public school teacher in Yorkshire , had come up in the wake of Simon Dee's demise as a chat show host on ITV and established himself as their main rival to Parkinson . The two guys couldn't have been more different in their approach with Harty's camp insinuation the antithesis of Parky's bluff Yorkshire blokiness. Quite why it appealed to Harty to switch to interviewing B-listers on BBC 2 mid week while Parky reigned supreme on Saturday nights , I'm not too sure. Perhaps with his educational background he felt the Beeb was the more appropriate environment for his talents. He was not always deferential to his guests and his rather hostile questioning of David Bowie in the mid-seventies was much-criticised.
I've no recollection of who the guests were on the shows we watched but I remember that we didn't see the infamous encounter with Grace Jones, three episodes in , which ended with her pummelling him for turning to another guest. ( Jones has recently admitted she was off her head on cocaine at the time ). That gave the show a priceless publicity boost. Two years later it switched to BBC 1 in the post-Nationwide slot where it was just called Harty.
At the beginning of 1985 Michael Grade replaced him with Wogan but he remained a popular presenter with the BBC on both TV and radio and had a stint replacing Barry Norman as host of Film 87. Harty actually appeared as a guest on Wogan ( although Sue Lawley was standing in for Terry ) where he joined in the ridiculing of Vivienne Westwood's designs in one of his last public appearances.
He died just a few months later aged 53. He had tried to keep his private life secret but his death from AIDS -related Hepatitis B threw an unwanted spotlight on his partner , the future author James O'Neill , who hadn't told his parents about the relationship. I hadn't realised it was quite that long ago to be honest.
No comments:
Post a Comment