FREE THE CENTRE OF THE BED PDF Joan Bakewell | 336 pages | 21 Jun 2004 | Hodder & Stoughton General Division | 9780340823118 | English | London, United Kingdom Review: The Centre of the Bed by Joan Bakewell | Books | The Guardian In the early s the BBC occupied the high ground. It could look down on its rivals - and there were few - from a position of lofty moral authority. Its reputation abroad was matchless; at home it may have been thought of, generally affectionately, as Auntie, but it offered an unrivalled selection of programmes on radio and television, informing and entertaining in equal measure, as The Centre of the Bed Reith had decreed that it should. Indeed Reith was still alive then, though huffing and puffing angrily against newfangled programme presenters who asked rude questions of politicians - particularly William Hardcastle of The World At One, a programme I was working on at the time. The BBC was rather like the civil service - quite sure of its importance in British society, a place where you could get a job for life, but not terribly liberated in its attitude to women. They weren't allowed to be regular newsreaders till the mids, lacking, as the head of presentation radio once declared, "consistency, authority and reliability". When Joan Bakewell, then a star presenter of Late Night The Centre of the Bedsought permission to write a book about television, one of the bosses advised his colleagues that "no one would regard either Joan Bakewell or her co-editor as being remotely qualified either by experience or intellect to produce a book of any substance". She The Centre of the Bed ahead and wrote it anyway. As her autobiography makes clear, there were some considerable hurdles to be conquered before Joan became one of the most recognised faces on television. Her mother, as she grew up in presciently Bakewell Road on the fringes of Stockport, was evidently a difficult woman - a perfectionist who suffered from depression. Joan was sent to elocution lessons to iron out, but happily not entirely, her northern accent. Frivolity and boyfriends were frowned on. It was a narrow and self-contained The Centre of the Bed. Cambridge in the s was a culture shock, but an exciting and liberating one. Young motherhood became a happy priority, though there were exciting things happening in the London theatre, and Michael's job meant plenty of first nights. It also meant, after the opening performance of The The Centre of the Bed, the first meeting with Harold Pinter. The affair with Pinter lasted seven years, and was apparently not known about by Pinter's wife, The Centre of the Bed Merchant, who reserved her fury for his next extramarital amour, Antonia Fraser. It is difficult The Centre of the Bed write of a love affair when you are "the other woman" - as I know only too well - without attracting vicious comments. Bakewell's own account of her relationship with Pinter is not the first - Michael Billington, the Guardian's drama critic, brought The Centre of the Bed to public attention in his biography of Pinter, published in the mids. She characterises the newspaper fuss at the time of Billington's revelation as "no more than a sudden eccentric irritation", for she was by now cushioned by a more stable life and grown-up children. Her account of the intensity of the relationship with Pinter is both believable and poignant, and told without any attempt to excuse the betrayals. It was an affair thick with all the old dilemmas about meeting in obvious places or obscure ones, though she points out wryly that their encounters were without the extra "stress" of mobile phones and itemised bills by which other halves can catch out the careless. A friend lent them a flat; eventually they found a place of their own. It was a complicated life: Joan's burgeoning television career made her instantly recognisable. There is little hint in the Harold Pinter she loved of the "other" Pinter - the irascible and egotistical character who loathed journalists and who once made menacing gestures at the then editor of the Today programme at the River Cafe, accusing him of being a spy. The affair ended in It had been known about for some time by Michael, who, as it turned out, had been having a dalliance of his own. Almost 10 years later, a copy of Pinter's play Betrayal came through Joan's letterbox. As she read it, it dawned on her that this was the story of their affair. She tried to persuade Pinter to change the title of the play, as The Centre of the Bed felt "judged and condemned" by it, but he refused. The marriage to Michael broke up. Joan married again, another theatre man, Jack Emery The Centre of the Bed and eventually they too agreed to part. The rest of the book is an account of what she calls her "rackety career". There are pokes at Birtism and ratings-chasing, and sorrow about the dilution of true public service broadcasting. There is a tinge of sadness in these memoirs, of regrets about how things might have been. But few women, indeed few broadcasters, who started out in the 60s can boast, as she could but doesn't, that they're still out there doing it today. Topics Books. Biography books Higher education reviews. Reuse this content. Most popular. The Centre of the Bed (June 21, edition) | Open Library Most of us don't feel that we live in the middle of history - it happens somewhere else, to other people, and it happens at a time lag. Our life is lived on the outer edges of the great events, and only later can we perhaps understand how they enter our lives. But for some people, history is happening to them in real time; Joan Bakewell, one of TV's first female journalists, seems to be one of these, conscious even as it was happening of how the war, the Fifties, the changing role of women, socialism, shaped her, and how in many ways she came to represent a certain kind of Englishwoman Karl Miller, reviewing her performance in a university production of Orphee, The Centre of the Bed of her 'playing a tart like the Virgin Mary'. Clear-voiced, The Centre of the Bed, clever, diligent, always polite and certainly very beautiful, she grew up with the Blitz and rationing, was liberated The Centre of the Bed education and contraception, empowered by feminism. She was a Cambridge graduate among adoring crowds of men; she was a Sixties icon; she was the Tampax girl, the 'thinking man's crumpet', the acceptable face of women's liberation. She had a glamorous marriage, a scorching affair with Harold Pinter; she sat at dinner tables with actors, writers, painters, directors, film stars. She was admired, loved, desired. She seems, at first glance, to be one of the The Centre of the Bed ones and the title of her autobiography, The Centre of the Bed, has an assertive, self-confident ring. Yet the tone of her book is elegiac and often painful. If history swept her along, its undercurrent tugs at her: she had it all, yet in the end never had what she wanted most. Her marriages have ended, her children have gone; she's lying alone between The Centre of the Bed sheets, listening to the silence. Bakewell grew up in Stockport. She had one sister, an adored father who is her 'ally' and whose death in old age capsizes her, an increasingly depressive and angry mother who is for much of her life her unspoken, beloved enemy - the person from whom Joan has to escape but whose shadow continues to fall over her life. She escaped by remaking herself: at her grammar school, she had elocution lessons which removed her northern speech today, she has a crisply modulated English that doesn't give away her childhood. She was the first girl at her school to win a place at Cambridge. She turned away from her parents in her politics increasingly left-wing and her personal life boyfriends, drink, sex, the familiar story of leaving home. She acted in plays, read Camus, dressed in black, wielded a cigarette holder. Yet the impression remains of a woman who remained careful and moderate. When she fell in love with Michael The Centre of the Bedthey married. The Centre of the Bed they had children, she dedicated herself to motherhood despite a burgeoning career. This carefulness pervades Bakewell's gallant autobiography, which is both intimate and yet oddly reticent, detailed and yet somehow still private. She fences sore moments with public contexts - the position of women, the state of politics, the currents in literature - as if she won't allow herself to give way entirely to the blaze of memory. Her marriages, first to Bakewell and later to the writer Jack Emery, ebb away in this book, the men disappearing like figures in a fog. Only her long affair with Harold Pinter has a real vividness, a sudden present-ness amid the memories. The Centre of the Bed met Pinter early in her marriage and the two began a passionate relationship that endured even through her second pregnancy. She recalls the bench where they sat and first acknowledged their feelings; she remembers the paint flaking from its wood, the feel of his fingers on hers, the calm elation of their first love. She remembers the way it came to its finish, the airport tunnel where she walked alone away from her happiness. The beginning and the end.