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Your subscription will end shortly. Mrs Ball was very old, and baked a lot. The only thing I can recall about Mr Ball was that he drowned kittens in a sack.
What little I remember of Dad — he was away at sea a lot — is of a curly-haired figure in loose trousers and lightly checked cotton shirt. There was a black-and-brown family dachshund named Dinah. My first education was at the redbrick Victorian primary school at the end of the village green.
Mum would walk me down to the playground, and was there at the gate when classes finished. The teacher sat at a raised desk, and the classroom was high-windowed and cavernous. My father, Keith, was stationed at the Royal Navy base in Portsmouth, and was away at sea when I was born. In the final days of her pregnancy my mother, Joan, took the train north to be with her family, and I was delivered in a nursing home near Leeds.
At the time, Yorkshire County Cricket Club operated a selection policy under which only those who had been born in the county were eligible for selection. While I failed to acquire any great skill with bat or ball, I never lost an unreasonable pride insufferable smugness? We were not a close family — as Mother told it when she was older, there was one occasion when Dad returned from sea service and I ran away screaming, because I had no idea who he was.
Given that Paxman does not often give interviews, it is hard to avoid asking questions about things that happened quite a long time ago. And it would be remiss not to mention the famous encounter with Michael Howard, when he asked the then home secretary repeatedly the same question: whether Howard had threatened to overrule the then head of the prison service, Derek Lewis. Paxman has been quoted as saying that he only kept repeating himself because he could not think of anything else to ask, but this was clearly nonsense.
What I meant was that I couldn't think of anything else that could be half as fecund or relevant. It has been suggested that, after the Hutton inquiry, such confrontational journalism was less welcome at the BBC. Indeed, the Tories complained vigorously about a report conducted by Paxman about a campaign visit by Howard to Cornwall - the complaint is with the BBC's programme complaints unit.
But, while Paxman admits that the BBC's journalists were rocked by Hutton, he says the corporation's journalism remains robust. There were certainly a lot of people that were exercised that it would prevent a certain type of journalism being done at all in future. I have to say I don't see any evidence that's actually happened. I've not had the pleasure of that yet. A year after Hutton, the debate still rages in journalistic circles about whether Gilligan should be cast as hero or villain.
Paxman weighs it up. Well, you've got to believe in finding things out, haven't you? But also, I think, if you make mistakes Paxman rightly points out that the issue came to be about much more than what Gilligan said or did not say at 6. Much of the burden of what Andrew Gilligan alleged has subsequently turned out to be vindicated by events.
Mostly right was not good enough, the BBC said at the time. But others have pointed out that mostly right can be good enough so long as you are honest enough to admit the bits you got wrong, and Paxman seems to agree: "My feeling about it was that had the BBC reacted slightly differently - had they had an internal inquiry - things would not have turned out as they did. Hutton is not the only issue about which Paxman is critical of his employer.
He is famously disdainful about the nightly minute Scottish opt-out from Newsnight: "I get emails all the time asking why the Scots aren't allowed to watch the last bit of Newsnight. I simply don't know the answer.
Maybe it's some kind of collective punishment. So far, he says, it has resulted in the removal from the hospitality room of the curly sandwiches and their replacement with Monster Munch. The inner rottweiler occasionally surfaced - he infuriated the notorious former US Secretary of State Dr Henry Kissinger when he suggested that he might feel ashamed to have been the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize. Kissinger swiftly left the studio. Paxman left the programme in , to be replaced by Andrew Marr.
Paxman, Jeremy
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