Television Frances Wilson

Lipman had fun with Hollywood moguls’ voices – ‘She’s very talented but, Gahd, is she ugly!’ – and analysing the Streisand appeal: ‘Knowing instinctively how to time a line’.

Omar Sharif’s first thought, when cast with her in Funny Girl, was ‘How terribly unattractive she is … and then, day by day, I began to think, how very attractive; and I began to be a little in love with her.’

In 1985, Streisand finally got her chance to direct – Yentl. The screenplay was by Jack Rosenthal, Lipman’s husband. So, one day, Lipman met her idol (‘lovely skin, smaller than I’d expected’). What did Lipman tell Streisand, when asked how she liked her new record, Memory? Oh dear.

‘Sometimes in your life,’ said Lipman, ‘and I’ve done it often, you make a move that could lead to the guillotine.’

Lipman ended up lying on the carpet in the Berkeley Hotel corridor, groaning.

Matthew Parris’s Great Lives is such dependably good value that it never gets a mention here – like In Our Time, it’s just part of the fabric of life. But, after my second stab at a Great Life (way back in 2005, I nominated Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts; more recently, I played the expert on the Puffin Club founder Kaye Webb, as her biographer), I went along to Maggs Bros. There the Biographers’ Club was presenting Matthew with a lifetime achievement award for services to biography.

He was interviewed by another Radio 4 hero, Evan Davis of PM. Two gentle voices who soothe and disarm. It made for a demure, gentlemanly event. Also funny and insightful.

Matthew expressed mock alarm at the ‘lifetime’ bit, being only 72. Though he’s a superb memoirist (Chance Witness, published in 2003), he also admitted guilt: ‘Real biographers are distinguished by their knowledge. My whole job on Great Lives is really not to know anything about the subject.’

This is true: he asked me if Ronald Searle was ‘the one who did the little girls on little fat ponies’. (Er, no, Matthew – that’s Thelwell.)

As he wrote in his book Fracture (2020), he has a theory that a majority of people who become ‘great’ have had to overcome childhood loss, penury, jeopardy and misery. Take ‘poor little Edward Lear: epileptic, gay, depressive, the 21st of his mother’s 22 children’.

And here’s another discovery. His producer Sarah Goodman invites an equal number of men and women to nominate subjects. And what do they find? Women choose both men and women in equal measure, but men (surprise!) invariably choose men – with rare exceptions such as Michael Howard, who went for Elizabeth I. And, even rarer, Nick Danziger made an odd choice in 2007, of the fictional character Tintin.

Matthew could not resist pointing out that it was surely indisputable that Tintin was gay: ‘A callow, androgynous youth, with no women friends except an operatic diva, Bianca Castafiore – and he lives with an old sailor!’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

The theme of this month’s review is complicit wives, because television dramas can’t get enough of them. What complex thoughts stir behind those geisha masks? Are these mysterious creatures martyrs or monsters, victims or villains?

There’s a Little Britain sketch where a Tory MP called Sir Norman Fry (David Walliams), wearing a canary-yellow pullover, stands at the gate of his mock-Tudor home.

In it, he explains to the assorted cameras that, at 3am, he found himself needing to use a public toilet, where he met Carlos and Eduardo, who invited him into their cubicle to discuss government policy. Unfortunately, he slipped on the floor and the three men fell into a position which the arresting officer informed him was known as a ‘spit roast’.

Throughout this fiasco, Sir Norman’s wife (Matt Lucas) is by his side, her face a study of gnomic impenetrability. We can be certain that Lady F won’t be leaving Sir Norman any time soon – why fix what’s not broken?

Anatomy of a Scandal (Netflix) is a lazy MeToo tale, in which people are forever rushing down staircases, colliding in corridors and falling backwards in slo-mo through the air. James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend), Britain’s ‘most fanciable MP’, has an affair with Olivia, his ravishing researcher (Naomi Scott).

‘It was nothing,’ James tells spouse Sophie (Sienna Miller), who’s not bad-looking herself. ‘It was just sex.’

Most of it took place in his office but their final encounter, which Olivia claims was not consensual, was in the lift. The story is appearing in the Mail and so, once Sophie has finished throwing up over her mobile phone, she needs to start looking inscrutable. This she does with aplomb, especially when listening to Olivia’s testimony in court.

We learn in a flashback that James and Sophie first locked eyes across a crowded room in Oxford during a round of ‘anal chugging’, a game involving a bare bum and a bottle. James and his best friend, Tom (now the Prime Minister), were in a dining club called the Libertines, which got them into no end of trouble.

Today, the Whitehouses’ home, which is indeed large and white with a gold plaque by the front door saying ‘Whitehouse’, has wallpaper to make Carrie Johnson swoon.

When we’re not chez Whitehouse, we’re in the Old Bailey, Oxford University, the Palace of Westminster or Lincoln’s Inn. There Olivia’s barrister (played by Michelle Dockery, aka Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary Crawley) is somehow always caught in the rain while, at the exact same time, in the selfsame city, the fragrant Sophie floats beneath a cloudless sky.

While Anatomy of a Scandal is predictable until it becomes preposterous, The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe (ITV) is preposterous from the