OK, well, I can't pretend I haven't been negligent.  So apologies, and please forgive me.  I have had many kind and generous letters and emails about Kicking the Bar, and even a review or two.  One such called the book 'haophazard', which i rather agree with, and was perhaps somewhat intentional.  I do hope all of you who have actually read the damn thing have enjoyed it.  there are of courser all…

Letter from my father,  Captain H. P. Wheldon, to his brother Tomos Wheldon, who was working at the Department of Agriculture in Sierra Leone.

Sunday 25 June 1944

I missed your birthday – no matter.  Take this rather belated note in lieu!  I hope S.L. [1] is still going on nicely.  I always feel the breath of awful heat when I mention S.L. – I hope very much that it doesn’t get you…

I went last week to Bangor University to deposit my father's papers, and took the opportunity to visit the Wheldon family plot at Nant Peris.  The mountain in the picture is Snowdon. 

Sorry about this, but if you enjoyed my book, or even if you didn't but nonetheless feel well-disposed towards me, please  submit a glowing review on Amazon.  It makes a difference!  (Not least to my morale)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kicking-Bar-legacy-broadcaster-Wheldon/dp/1783522208/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465476753&sr=1-1&keywords=kicking+the+bar

I know Amazon is the unacceptable face of internet capitalism, etc, but forget that just for a moment - and WRITE ME A GLOWING REVIEW!!  Thank you.

Am aware that I have been neglectful of the Shed (although I am reluctant to call it 'the shed', bringin as it does memories of Stamford bridge - the football stadium rather than the battle), for which many apologies.  The book is now published and flying off the shelves - or at least being turned face out by my people all over the kingdom.  Today my media profile (I think that is what it is called…

So - today (Thursday) the book is actaully published. If you haven't yet received your copy, I'm sure you will soon. Excitingly it has already been spotted in Waterstone's in Cirencester.  It is practically a best seller. But enough of the world-beating. I have just spent the bank holiday weekend with my wife visiting our son Cal in Aberystwyth, where he is at University.  I spent two days watching…

I hope everyone has responded to the latest  'Action Needed' email from Unbound.  It is a request for confirmation of your address, so that the book gets sent to the right place.  In the meantime, here's a picture of Dad and my sister Megan (unless of course it is my sister Sian) discussing - maybe even debating - decorative motifs for a sandcastle. 

Interesting stuff here about Dad and Peter Watkins

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/SJqjSQ243JckRSr7Tpj2XZ/televising-the-revolution-how-peter-watkins-went-to-war

Publication date: 5 May. 7 May is Dad's centenary. The book is my birthday present to him.  I am full of nervous excitement about this.  I lie abed thinking of all the stuff I should have put in and all the stuff I should have taken out...  am I repeating myself here?  But enough of that - here is a picture of self and father in the days when I had hair.  

I do occasionally write a book review for the Spectator.  If you are at all interested (or perhaps concerned that you have purchased a book by someone who can't really write) I hope you'll find something here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/author/wynn-wheldon/

... to a welcome scrum of new pledgers, Alexander Mackay, Jane Morris, Eliana Tomkins, Lindsay brodie, Andrew Thompso and Luke Weston.  Thank you very much.  I hope you all enjoy the book.

Or rather the Society for Film and Television Arts as it then was (1975). David Niven as Stephen Fry.  It has only just occurred to me that this habit may have had something to do with a war wound.  Dad was shot through the buttock at Coesfeld during the crossing of the Rhine (Operation Varsity). 

It is not long now until it will no longer be possible to add a name to the distinguished list of supporters of tis book: you chaps. If you know anyone who might conceivably be interested in having the modern equivalent of their names carved in stone, please let them know of this last opportunity.  Grandparents are a good place to start.  Great Aunts and Uncles might be tapped.  Even Parents themselves…

OK, so what has been happening in the last few weeks is that I - or rather Ms Lupu at Unbound - have been strenuously trying to get permission to use various quotations and pictures.  The restraints are ridiculous.  Many of the quotes I want are actually my father's words quoted by others....  All very trying.  Still Ms Lupu and I have done pretty well, I think, and the book should have at least a…

Here is a curiosity. Dad's first show with Welles was 'Press Conference' http://www.bbc.co.uk/.../press-conference-orson-welles Usually subjects were politicians. Dad wrote to his father: “A really outstanding man, a singular & a great person, whose stature would not respond to the twittering tempo of what I had set up... I was doing … a shoddy injustice to one of the most remarkable people I have…

https://youtu.be/G_Sy6oiJbEk

Dad second from left.  Larry Adler, second from right.  Who is everyone else?  Could the handsome women in the middle be Mary Glasgow, Secretary General of the Arts Council after the war?  

I remember, I think, being behind the scenes at the Royal Tournament, sometime in the late 1960s, and Dad ascending a ladder and someone asking if he was Trevor Howard.  As you may tell, this is an extremely vague memory, and may even be one of those lies that Mnemosyne likes to tell every now and then.  They did bear a striking resemblance to one another, although this particular pairing doesn't…

earlier this year we were in Majorca for a family wedding.  While there I had to go to see Robert Graves' house in Deja, where my father conducted an interview with the poet - once Spanish customs had allowed the camera gear through that is.  Anyway, the long and short of it is that I wrote a poem.  Here it is:

LOOKING FOR SIGNS OF MY FATHER AT LA CASA DE ROBERT GRAVES

OK, enough shilly-shallying.  My book of poems, 'Private Places' is published today.  Please buy it here: indigodreamsbookshop.com/#/wynn-wheldon/4590544259 or on Amazon, or come to the launch at the Poetry Society at 22 Betterton St, WC2, on 19 November.  Here is what Cressida Connolly has to say about it: 

Illuminated by bright flashes of rueful wit, this is a collection to savour.  But don…

I am well aware that this is a bit of a nerve, but Needs Must.  I'd like you to seriously consider the puchase of my new collection of poems, entitled 'Private Places'.  It is to be published on 19 October by Indigo Dreams.  There is a website where you can read various nice things that intellegient people have said about the collection, as well as some of the poems themselves. You can then PRE-ORDER…

I read that the Museuam of Fine Arts in Boston is being picketted by anti-Renoir demonstrators.  In response i give you this little clip of Dad talking to Auguste Renoir's son, the great film director jean Renoir. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hmb9g

Dad on the 'permissiveness' that the Mary Whitehouse crowd objected to:

“The difficuitly on the programme side was seen, in the outside world… as being a matter of permissiveness… sex and violence and so on,  I actually thought they were never very problematical…. It was mediocrity and bad programmes that were killers.  Frankie Howerd’s show was a very bawdy programme but it wasn’t characteristically…

Many apologies for my silence (although perhaps it is appreciated by some). The book is now in the hands of an editor, who I expect will tell me precisely where I've gone wrong, what to cut out and where it needs muscling up.  I do keep remembering little tidbits of things that I want to put in, but it is pretty ancedotal as it is.   I have also been working on a book of POEMS - yes, POEMS - due out…

Ah, the old days.  Here is a telemessage to Dad from Linda and Paul following a televised debate on the future of the BBC (this is a battle that never ends).  It reads: WE THOUGHT YOU WERE WONDERFUL LAST NIGHT. KEEP IT COMING. FONDLY.  It is dated September 20. Dad died less than six months later.  I think the Corporation could probably do with him now.

Dad recounted something of his experiences in Normandy to Marshall Pugh in an article entitled "No Trouble Brewing" (you'll understand why by the end), published in the Daily Mail on the 3rd April 1958. It lacks Dad's fluency, but I can just about hear his voice, and I recognise it as a story. Note the "not all that healthy" - the only suggestion that perhaps there was an enemy intent on violence…

Sorry to read of the death of Owen Chadwick, who wrote one of my favourite books, 'Victorian Miniature' - a study of the relationship between the squire and the parson in the Norfolk village of Ketteringham, between 1838 and 1869.  Doesn't sound like a page turner, does it, but it did it for me. A little classic.

I need hardly add that it was brought to my attention by my father, who served with…

I have today come upon a stash of letters i had not previously looked at for some time - letters to me from my father.  There are a lot of them.  With one or two exceptions they are all hand-written.  He had a very attractive, expansive hand - lots of space and fluency - nothing crabbed or tight.  Anyway, reading through them I am reminded not just how funny he was - I never need to be reminded of…

Note left by Dad at my college in Oxford, 1978?  The drawing is a self-portrait with Mum.  Both pretty accurate actually.

from a letter written by Dad in Chicago to Mum in Notting Hill, 1959

Note: the art gallery here is stupendous.  At first, I was angry at the thought of all this splendour, the Rembrandts & the Picassos, the El Grecos and the Utrillos, all the wealth of pictures being here in this brutal town.  And I sneered at the hanging, the spaciousness, the smooth money-no-object presentation, and saw it as…

from 'The British Experience in Television', 1976 Dimbleby Lecture

David Attenborough on Huw Wheldon: "His presence... was certainly both audible and visible. His laugh - famously loud and unmistakable - echoed round that huge and labyrinthine building [Television Centre]. And he was seen everywhere in it - in the corridors and in the conference rooms, in the canteen, where he chose to eat rather than in the more select senior staff dining room, and, for a few minutes…

Very pleasantly indulgent long documentary about Melvyn Bragg, well worth watching.  Melvyn and Humphrey Burton were Dad's most obvious and successful successors as arts broadcasters.  Melvyn's curiosity has tunred out to be ceaseless (Dad had interviwed everyone he was interested in within 4 years).   http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b063f1qd/melvyn-bragg-wigton-to-westminster

Actually, two photos.  One from 1959, Dad and Graves talking across his desk; and one of me not being allowed anywhere near his desk.  The first is fairly extraordinary, as the ceiling is not that high at la Casa de Robert Graves at Deia, Mallorca.. 

Film, I think by David Jones, of Robert Graves reciting The Face in the Mirror for Monitor.  The interview Dad did with Graves is lost, i think, other than in printed form in the book 'Monitor'.

https://youtu.be/JcJXrfwUiS4

The transcript of Dad's interview is printed both in 'Monitor' and in 'Conversations with Robert Graves' (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Conversations-Robert-Graves-Literary…

Off soon to Majorca, where Dad interviewed Robert Graves at his home in Deja.  Now a museum.  Looking forward to visiting.  i think David Jones filmed it.  dad did the interview.  Unlike Durrell, whom he thought meretricious, Dad liked Graves.  Kingsley Amis visited around the same time and had this to say:  "I have never again encountered a group of people so radically opposed to falseness, meanness…

It behoves me - or indeed behooves me - to keep y'all posted on developments.  At the moment the manuscript is with Unbound.  They are thumbing through, I daresay umming and ahhing, and making notes as to what is libelous, unjust, improbable or downright wrong.  I, in the meantime, have been in Heidelberg marrying off a son to a wonderful woman from Luxemburg, attending to another son's final schooldays…

Boswell, who knew a thing or two about biography, wrote the following in the dedication of his Life of Johnson, to Joshua Reynolds:

 

"...though I tell nothing but the truth, I have still kept in my mind that the whole truth is not always to be exposed.  This, however, I have managed so as to occasion no diminution of the pleasure which my book should afford; though malignity may sometimes be…

Went, last Friday, to the bash at BAFTA to celebrate the work and life of Nancy Thomas, who died in January.  I was privileged to be able to escort her friend and colleague Anne James to and from the occasion.  I knew of Nancy Thomas because she directed many of Monitor's best films, and was my father's right hand man in the famous team of talents that Monitor was.  I learned yestrday that her office…

Well, my gast is well and truly flabbered.  Thank you everbody.  I am now in the process of polishing, picking nits, humming and ha-ing, panicking, wondering, prevaricating, deciding, not knowing this, definitely knowing that, and so on and so forth. Shall keep all posted by way of these missives.  Again, thank you very much.

Were he alive, my father would be 99 today.  Despite being a busy man, he was a very present father.  For no particular reason, I am going to mention some of his culinary likes and  dislikes.  Sometimes he cooked for us.  His signature dish was spag bol.  On the weekends he liked to buy Hungarian salami.  If he had come into possession, by gift or purchase, of something he particularly liked, he would…

Citizen Kane was released 74 years ago today. Welles spoke about it for the first time in this Monitor interview.

https://youtu.be/S7UQhC2n9QA

Landslide of derision for my new titles.  Am reverting to current.  A new possibility has emerged: Huw Wheldon, A Filial Biography.  Not bad. Not bad at all.  Why didn't I think of it?

Shock, horror.  I am considering changing the title of the book.  Should anyone reading this have strong views, do let me know them.  

Kicking the bar was something Dad and I did together if he didn't have time for a walk.  We strode up and down the terrace overlooking Richmond Hill, and 'kicked the bar'.  It was a tradition imported from Aberystwyth, where the phrase and practice originated (Aber…

There is a chapter in the book about my mother.  Here are a couple of paragraphs from that chapter.

In a letter written shortly before her death she wrote that her life “started with an arrival, inauspicious, at the LSE.  She had been discovered by Professor Harold Laski after she had invited him to talk at the Ealing branch of the Labour League of Youth of which she was chairwoman (or “charwoman…

Thank you to everyone who has pledged , of course, but this particular thank you goes to those who have pledged in the last week or so.  As you will all have noticed I have all but done away with any fiction of good breeding, and am now simply demanding pledges.  If you know of anyone who could do with a nudge, or perhaps an aged aunt who loved TV in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, NUDGE!  I have 42 days…

Liberated on 15 April 1945.  My father passed through on or around the 17th. He wrote to his father:  "I have seen stick-thin children of five, born to an unspeakable world, playing King of the Castle on a heap of naked and rotting dead women". Words did not often fail him, but this was as much as he could manage. 

This I have pinched from David Orr and David Truesdale's excellent account of the Royal Ulster Rifles' second world war, 'The Rifles Are There' (Pen & Sword 2005)

This I have pinched from David Orr and David Truesdale's excellent account of the Royal Ulster Rifles' second world war, 'The Rifles Are There' (Pen & Sword 2005)

Haven't shedded for a bit, for which apologies (or not as the case may be).  This is to say that approaching completion I've little excuse but to get down and finish the book.  At the moment I have a good ish draft, but there are corrections to be made, stories to be added and chunks to be shifted about.  And then it all needs polishing, the permissions sought and, I hope, granted, and the illustrations…

Dad garnered many awards and gongs of one kind and another, from the Military Cross to a golf prize won at Gleneagles (no idea how that happened), but perhaps the most precious of all was the Python Award for the Best Huw Wheldon, won against stiff opposition in 1971. Here is a picture of the magnificent trophy, missing, I regret, its middle, precious dymo-tape.  The whole thing used to read: 

On 24th March the battalion was off again from a Transit Camp in East Anglia, bound for Germany, which Dad insisted would be “a welcome change from Bloody B[urford]”.  It wasn’t though.  Richard Rees, RUR MO, and later to be my Uncle, later wrote:

It was in Coesfelt that Huw was shot.   As a railway town and junction, Coesfelt had received more than passing attention by the RAF.   He had…

We have now passed the 70% mark, which I'm told is very good news, but we need a few extra pushes to get over the line (and increase the number of pictures in the book - very important).  I also have to finish the thing.  I have written the second half only once, and it takes at least three attempts to get anything close to right, so I need to buck up.  I'd be delighted to hear any stories or anecdotes…

From The Guardian, March 15, 1986:

"He was, without doubt, the most accomplished raconteur I have heard.  He never told jokes but translated his own experiences into long tales of such hilarity that his listeners laughed until they ached."

Huw went on liking my films for many years, some more than others, but whatever his personal feelings he always helped polish my rough diamonds till they glittered.  And when I disappointed him with a paste job, he worked even harder to make it shine - shaping and reshaping, cutting and chipping away until it was ready for his spakling commentary. To start with I just used to sit next to him over…

Peeps! Attend! We are creeping towards our goal.  A final push is required.  I am therefore asking all of you to try and bring one more soul to the table.  That should get us damn nearly over the line.  The difficulty really has been to get the information out to the general public.  If anyone has any ideas about how to do this, please do let me know (short of taking out full page ads in the national…

My Mum, Jacqueline Mary Wheldon, 1924-1993.  

Mysterious and complicated and curious and clever and wise - what I imagine a genius to be like. 

And what's more, a loving mother and wife.

On the occasion of England's humiliating exit from the World Cup, I offer this extract from Dad's Dimbleby Lecture, delivered live to air in January 1976.  It concerns the very invention of one-day cricket.

"There are in the BBC, as there are in the IBA, advisory committees and advisory councils on every conceivable subject; and they include a Central Religious Advisory Council, known - I am…

Many thanks to T. Rodzianko, Luke Beachamp, Matthias Schwaab, the Frazers, Carol Long and Amro Gebreel for your support.  It is much appreciated.

Catherine Dove, in a previous biography of my father, maintained that Dad was “not keen on women as equals at work… and… not intellectual at all”[i]. I don’t recognize either of those assertions.  Were I a cynical sort of chap, I’d say that in the first place Dad wasn’t keen on either sex as an equal at work, but he had a high regard for Grace Wyndham Goldie (who was unimpressed by most of her own…

Rather unexpectedly Brian Blessed dedicated the first chapter of his biography to Dad: "Sharing half an hour with Huw in his home was a privilege. Free from the demands of Television Centre and with the phone off the hook, he relaxed and waxed lyrical about all he loved and believed in. With grace, wit and vision he expressed his boundless love for the British Broadcasting Corporation". He goes on…

I walked up many Welsh mountains with Dad, but never Cader Idris (I finally did this lovely mountain with my own son Caleb, on a day unmarred by cloud or cold).  This is an excerpt from a letter Dad wrote during the war, while on leave:

"Up Cader Idris the other day, smacking big mountain, and saw two kestrels, five buzzards & many many herons, dropping lazily into flight as we interrupted their…

“Huw Wheldon was a most remarkable man, and his son Wynn has written a remarkable book about him in the great tradition of books by sons about their fathers. Huw’s impact at the BBC and the Arts in the country in the 20th Century was immense. He was a brilliant man, serious and funny at the same time, and able to interview on television some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. This is a bold…

From his Foreword to the book:

"His presence…was certainly both audible and visible.  His laugh – famously loud and unmistakable – echoed round that huge and labyrinthine building [Television Centre]. And he was seen everywhere in it – in the corridors and in the conference rooms, in the canteen, where he chose to eat rather than in the more select senior staff dining room, and, for a few minutes…

Slowing somewhat now, so please, anyone reading this, pass on the news of my book's imminent (one hope) existence.  If you want examples of my inimitable prose style, you'll find some here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/author/wynn-wheldon/

One of the few surviving interviews from Monitor.  Really rather good.

http://youtu.be/c9PO-767D8I

I am most gratfeul to the following, to whom I cannot respond personally, for their support:  Matthias Schwaab, Michael and Pamela Frazer, Carol Long, Robert Eardley, Amro Gabreel, Colin Mclean, Amanda Bloore, Andrew Wiggins, Catherine Warner and Wendy Knox. THANK YOU!

Some of the most companionable times I spent with my father were those watching Wales play rugby.  He himself had played while in the army, and afterwards occasionally for London Welsh B.  Outside half.  

He was invited to give the speech at the dinner celebrating the centenary of Newport Rugby Club.  He told me that he had had to speak to Presidents and Prime Ministers and Popes and what have…

Here is a photograph of my father, Tom Sloan, Jack Hampshire and David Attenborough helping to clear up after a charity cricket match on Kew Green, some time in the late 1960s.  I present it in evdience of my assertion that Tom Sloan was a dapper chap, which i think I made in connection with Nick Hornby's latest novel, in which Tom Sloan is, rather oddly, a character.  It is not at all a bad book…

This year's Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture is to be given by Michael Dobbs, onely begetter of smash hit political thriller House of Cards.  As any fule kno, the original (British) is far superior to the campy American version that the massed ranks of Sky Atlantic owners (gnashing of teeth) so enjoy.  Michael - Lord - Dobbs is talking about Public Service Broadcasting.  If Dad…

I do apologise.  I initially posted part of a letter written by Dad to his father, describing what he had seen at Belsen.  It is included in the book.  Having posted it, however, I felt uncomfortable using it here, which although an informal space and one for posting interesting tidbits, is, in the end, part of a campaign to sell a book, and I didn't think it right to use that particular clip in that…

If you haven't read it there is a good Churchill story on the main page (in the second excerpt http://unbound.co.uk/books/kicking-the-bar) 

At the beginning of the war my father didn't have much time for Churchill, or for the British army - he thought the officers were largely "English half-men... clerk types who say 'endeavour' instead of 'try' and 'require' instead of 'want'"".  But by the war…

The Daily Telegraph has recently done one of those 'best of' lists that causes conniptions in everyone.  This time it is a list of the best TV adaptations of books.  I am connipted by the absence from this top 20 of Jack Pulman's quite brilliant War and Peace, with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre.  I remember Dad telling me that the BBC hired the Yugoslav Army for the battle scenes.  I'm sure there must…

If you click on the 'supporters' icon, it would appear that I am pledging towards the cost of my own book, but actually I have been attempting to buy on behalf of someone who has no computer.  Unfortunately, his name will be absent from the Great List of contributors at the back of the book, which seems a shame.  

It is heartwarming receiving so much support from friends, and it has been incredible; another part of the gratitude neurons is cheered by the support of those I do not know, so among other sI'd like to thank Marilyn Anderson, Phil Smith, Naomi Trodden, Keith Moss, Christophe Sander, Emma Medd and Hazel Wright.  You are all most generous.  I'd also like to than Leslie Megahey, who made the Omnibus…

I note that an exhibition of cartoons by Mark Boxer has just opened at The Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury.  I think the Gallery has missed this one, of Dad, drawn for Clive James's satirical poem Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media.

I've hit the wall at 23%.  I'm doing my best to get the information out to the wider world, but I am going to need the help of others to do so. Among these others are you, dear reader.  If you have a fallow moment during your busy day, I'd be greatly indebted were you to use it to pass on details of the book to anyone you think might be interested, particularly among the older generations.  Your mums…

I've been tweeting to various D-Day tweeters, who have very kindly been retweeting, but with no practical result as yet.  I suppose I ought not to be impatient.  Dad landed by glider on D Day.  All he ever bothered to say about it was that as soon as the aircraft landed, the company lined up along the nearest hedge and relieved themselves.  They had been cooped up in the gliders for an age, and encourgaed…

Just watched a short film about T.S. Eliot in Compayne Gardens in West Hampstead.  Eliot was the first poet I ever read.  I'm not sure I understood much but i liked the sound of it.  I liked street lamps muttering and so on.  During the Festival of Britain my father dated a young woman who lived in Compayne Gardens.  Several decades later I did as well, but I ended up, I am delighted to say, married…

Just back from seeing Testament of Youth.  Very moving with an excellent central performance by Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain (despite a slightly wobbly posh English accent).  If you want anti-war, this ought to do it.  I wept copiously, almost  losing it when the father broke down after waving his son off to war.  Gulp.  One of Vera Brittain's children was Shirley Williams, with whom - in the…

Nancy Thomas, Anne James and Humphrey Burton all worked on Ken Russell's first film for Monitor.  It was called A Poet's London, and was about John Betjeman (who watched the film in the company of Graham Sutherland).

Nancy Thomas, a great TV producer has died.  She made a good number of 'Monitors', and was responsible for persuading Dad to 'do' Duchamp (Duchamp became one of his gheroes) and she shot the famous Henry Moore film. But please go here to read Humphrey Burton and Anne James's obituary in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/15/nancy-thomas?CMP=share_btn_link

OK, so Day two.  teatime.  Up to 9 %.  I've no idea if this is good or bad.  I assume that there is a large initial rush as the family all log on, and then friends, before it splutters into the teens.  We shall see.  it is rather nerve-wracking.  I feel a little like one of those tight shouldered performers from the Eurvision Song Contest, who look so comfortable on stage (despite the appalling nature…