What was remarkable about it was not only that every word was so carefully chosen, but that he broke the old, cold-blooded, dispassionate BBC mode, the "on the one hand this .. on the other hand that .. only time will tell". If he was shocked by something, you knew that he was shocked. I met him when he was chief Washington correspondent and I was one of the firemen coming in for the 1968 democratic convention. Charlie Wheeler was the first television news reporter who came over as a real person and I admired his style. "And it's a bit of a thing to write for a paper that you don't read any more!"Richard Ingrams' first column for The Independent will appear on SaturdayAssess your suitability as an Oldie reader at www.theoldie.co.ukMy Friend Footy, by Richard Ingrams, is published by Private Eye, £9.99. He's now considering doing a biography of G K Chesterton.And his memoirs, possibly? Probably not, as he says that he doesn't keep a diary and his memory is too poor - even for the memoir of Foot, he occasionally needed the help of Francis Wheen, Private Eye's deputy editor, famous for his total recall.For 18 years, Ingrams also wrote a column for The Observer, but, from this weekend, his byline will be appearing in the Saturday edition of The Independent. "For some time, I've had a semi-detached feeling about The Observer. I just feel the paper hasn't had the necessary editorial bite that it used to have," says Ingrams.
And in the summer, there was his biography of William Cobbett, the radical journalist of the early 19th century (and a hero of Ingrams'), which received considerable acclaim. Just out is My Friend Footy, an account of his long friendship with the campaigning journalist Paul Foot, who died last year. And that, after all, is exactly what The Oldie was intended to do.As for Ingrams, although the biographical blurb on his first book (God's Apology, a biography of three literary friends, Hesketh Pearson, Hugh Kingsmill and Malcolm Muggeridge), in 1977, stated, "this is his first full- length book, and probably his last", he has published two books this year. Its eclectic embrace of the variety of human experience is a monthly rebuke to the formulaic and narrow concept of features in newspapers and magazines, where the lives of celebrities and what happened last night on television constitute the major source of ideas. No editor at any other magazine would have commissioned those pieces, and few editors would have published them unsolicited.
(Ingrams gratefully acknowledges the accomplished and rapid editing skills of Jeremy Lewis, the veteran publisher and biographer, who is the magazine's commissioning editor.)Indeed, unsolicited articles are among Ingrams' favourites: an account of a year spent as Rebecca West's personal assistant by Gill McLaren Rowe, and an astonishingly funny article by Iain Topliss about his attempt to confirm a piece of information that he first found in his 1953 Schoolboy Pocket Diary: that the fastest creature on the planet is the deer botfly, supposedly clocked at 818mph.To read The Oldie is to get the sense that it is owned by its readers. Once he had established such regular slots as, "I once met...", readers eagerly submitted their own contributions, which, after suitable editing, were published. The trouble with that is, if it turns out to be unpublishable you have to pay a kill fee. That's fine if you're at Cond?ast, but not at somewhere like The Oldie."Ingrams prefers to let writers come to him with what they want to write about, and the writers needn't be famous or even professional.
