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| FEATURES | BY JOHN GULLIVER |
 Above: Harry Greene and below: Otto Preminger with Jean Seberg with her arm in a bandage after Harry rescued her from the flames on the set of the film Joan of Arc 
 Barry Cox  Harold Pinter  Jean Moorcroft Wilson |
But the 80-year-old, who has lived in Primrose Hill for 50 years, might not be alive today if his daring rescue mission on the set of 1957’s biggest Hollywood movie had gone wrong. The final, terrifying scene of Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, when Jean Seberg playing Joan of Arc is burnt at the stake, was not quite as well staged as intended. Harry, who played a minor role in the film, told me Seberg, who was only 17 and had been discovered in a massive Pop Idol style search-for-a-star by Preminger, “began to scream out because the stunt fire got out of control and was beginning to burn her”. He said: “Richard Widmark and I ran into the fire and pulled her out – nobody seemed to be paying attention and the people with the fire extinguishers were asleep. “You could say I saved her life – and she was certainly grateful, because Otto Preminger was a bully and treated her awfully.” Seberg’s tragic life thereafter – she committed suicide after being smeared by the FBI in 1979, having never really came to terms with her fame – stands in stark contrast to Harry’s. The proud father of a brood of three successful children – including former Blue Peter presenter Sarah Greene, he’s as sprightly at 80 as he was when he first moved to London from Wales in the 1950s. See book review Beeb will face a tough time at the switch-over THE BBC got strong support from the audience at a debate about it’s future I attended at the ICA on Thursday. Fully 95 per cent of those present said it was “more wronged than wrong” in its recent spat with the government. But Barry Cox, the deputy boss at Channel Four, may well have been right when he argued that the fallout from the Hutton report is a trifle compared to the difficulties the Beeb will face when analogue broadcasting is switched off in 2010. By then, the government expects us all to be getting around 50 digital channels beamed into our homes, free of charge. As Mr Cox said, it will be increasingly hard to defend a populist BBC1 funded by the licence fee when viewers have so many alternatives. And, in any case, with viewers increasingly expecting to watch what they want, when they want, the market for a generalist channel will decline. That’s bad news for “auntie”, as the corporation insists on calling itself, because the millions of viewers who love populist fare like Eastenders won’t stay tuned for the public service broadcasting that justifies the licence fee. It’s a much bigger problem than dealing with Downing Street and the new top two at Broadcasting House – whoever they turn out to be – must form a strategy for dealing with it. A rather slow start for Harold PLAYWRIGHT Harold Pinter was uncharacteristically mild-mannered when I caught him speaking at the British Library on Monday night. Introducing clips from his 40-year screenwriting career, he seemed to be going through the motions. But he shared some sensible, straightforward advice, given to him by legendary British producer Michael Anderson 40 years ago. He said: “Michael had asked me to work on screenplay for the Go-Between but I called him and said ‘I can’t start’. “He was very understanding and said ‘why don’t you take a walk around the park?’ “So I took a walk around the park but it didn’t help so I called him the next day and said ‘I took a walk around the park and I’m sitting here but I can’t start.’ “So he said ‘That’s alright, why don’t you sleep on it and have a go tomorrow.’ “I slept on it but in the morning I still couldn’t do it so I called him again and said: ‘I slept on it and I still can’t start.” “He said: ‘Then there’s only one thing for it.’ “And I said: “What’s that?’ “And he said: ‘Start.’ “So I did, and it was alright after that.” Don’t mention Iraq HOW far is the BBC getting twitchy over criticism of the Iraq war? It seems as if a new book published by the Mornington Crescent duo, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf, on the reaction of writers and poets to the war may have caused fast heartbeats at the Beeb. The book, entitled Authors take sides on Iraq and the Gulf War, bears the views of nearly 200 novelists, dramatists and poets on the two wars – both for and against. Apparently, BBC researchers heard about it and arranged for Beryl Bainbridge, who is defiantly opposed to the Iraq war, to appear on the BBC1 late show, This Week, on Thursday. Then, suddenly, Beryl Bainbridge’s appearance was cancelled at the last moment, without any satisfactory explanation. Was this because This Week realised Bainbridge could upset the BBC governors, as well as Tony Blair. Either way, out went Bainbridge and in came an interview with actor Tom Conti. All a bit mystifying for Jean Moorcoft Wilson, it seems. |
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