This Is Your Life article

By MOIRA PETTY

When Michael Aspel joined BBC Television in 1957, strict Reithian morals pervaded the Corporation, although the first director-general had long since moved on.

The diktat on dress codes meant that the 24-year-old Aspel read the news in a dinner jacket and when, four years later, he got divorced, a department head told him his career was over.

"People had been sacked if they got divorced, even if they were the innocent party. There wouldn't be anyone left if that applied now," says Michael.

"Luckily, times were beginning to change. I had begun young, but it wasn't much fun because everyone felt it was an honour to work for the BBC. I was afraid of upsetting anyone."

"Now everyone in television walks around with this inexplicable confidence. I can't help thinking that a little more humility might be in order."

If anyone is well-placed to comment on television's evolution, it is surely Michael Aspel.

He marked 50 years in TV recently by announcing his departure from Antiques Roadshow, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

The storm over ageism in broadcasting, which lately involved newsreader Moira Stuart and Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross, has drifted Michael's way, with the mistaken assumption that, at 74, he is retiring.

This may have been fuelled by the fact that, five years ago, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, cancer of the white blood cells of the lymphatic system.

He had one course of chemotherapy but refused a stronger dose, despite his specialist's warning that his cancer was unpredictable and could return in a few months.

"My cancer has never made me feel ill," says Michael. "I feel a bit of a fraud when I turn up at the hospital every six months for a check-up."

"It's like having a misshapen toenail which isn't beautiful but is of little consequence. What has dismayed me is that people think I'm retiring. I'm not."

"I'm moving on from this show because I think you should go when people might miss you. I've made a point of saying that no one retires until the phone stops ringing."

"I shall be honest when people ask me what I am doing; if the answer is nothing, I shall say that."

"I've never felt sad about leaving a programme before, but I am sad this time as we all get on so well."

"My gut instinct tells me, though, that it's right to finish with this new series, my eighth."

"Antiques Roadshow is a great format and will endure. I may have been nudged out. There is a keenness in television to attract the younger viewer, but there is no evidence that younger people don't want to watch older presenters."

"I think presenters, like actors, live in a world where the same rules don't apply. It doesn't matter how old they are, as long as they're still that person. I get kids at the Roadshow wanting my autograph."

"Earlier this year, I was in The Rocky Horror Show, wobbling on stage to take my bow in high heels. I stumbled around among this terrific young, well-trained cast and I never felt they were taking the mick out of me."

"They asked questions about my career because they were brought up on one or other of my shows."

Michael had planned to slide discreetly away from Antiques Roadshow when this series ends next spring but the hunt for his successor, confirmed as Fiona Bruce, scuppered this.

Fiona's uncertain future at Crimewatch, which is to have a radically youthful makeover - the apparent trigger for Nick Ross's departure - saw all the participants making headlines.

"Fiona wrote me a nice letter saying I was a hard act to follow. I wrote back saying the BBC was lucky to have her. I told her what my predecessor Hugh Scully said to me when I joined, which is that the travelling is demanding."

How does he think Fiona, chief newscaster on the BBC's Ten O'Clock News, will handle the Roadshow?

"I think she'll be very good. She has a natural charm and is much more comfortable outside the studio. I think she is suited to outside broadcasting and to chatting to people."

Michael, who began his TV career as a continuity announcer at Lime Grove but swiftly went on to newsreading, becomes fractious when watching news bulletins these days. He is annoyed by the jazzy presentation, the mispronunciations, the idiosyncratic delivery by newsreaders.

Although a housewife's favourite, he dislikes the pumped-up sexuality of some presenters.

"There's a danger about having a deliberately sexy image. Some presenters act as if they're going to a cocktail party with someone special after the bulletin."

"Fiona Bruce has a wonderfully strong face, perfect for TV and there's a long shelf-life there. But she's overdramatic when she reads the news."

"There's a lot of acting going on and she'll suddenly drop her voice a bit."

"She reminds me of the comic Norman Evans, who did an act as a housewife gossiping over the garden fence." Evans was known for his facial contortions and the way he glanced around quickly as if worried about eavesdroppers.

"I keep thinking Fiona is suddenly going to look over her shoulder and say: 'Ooh, there were 30,000 of them.'"

"These newsreaders seem to have been told: 'Hit the verb, no matter what the sense is.'"

"So instead of: 'He came out of the room,' it becomes: 'He came out of the room.' You get the strangest stresses."

"They will emphasise someone's age: 'Today a 27-year-old man was killed', as if yesterday only 26-year-old men were killed."

Michael admits he's had several accents on the way to perfect received pronunciation. He started life with a working-class London dialect, being raised along with three siblings by his parents Vi and Edward in a cramped flat in Wandsworth, south London.

Edward took whatever work he could get. Michael has a photo of his father standing outside Ted's refreshment stall where he sold tea and snacks near the family home.

Sent to Somerset as a wartime evacuee, Michael returned to London with a West Country burr. The edges of his accent were smoothed out at grammar school where he excelled in drama productions.

In 1955 he developed a Welsh lilt when he spent two years contracted to BBC Radio in Cardiff as an actor in serial plays and children's dramas.

When he became a BBC TV announcer in London, Michael acquired an Establishment accent which now makes him cringe.

"I sounded embarrassingly posh, but I didn't do it to ingratiate myself. I just used to fit in with my surroundings."

What he abhors on television now are unintelligible accents; he cites Newsnight's Kirsty Wark as the worst offender.

"She doesn't use any consonants," he complains. "There's nothing wrong with the Scottish accent, but she'll say a sentence and I won't have understood a word of it. Moira Stuart, though, is cool, lovely, ageless and without irritations."

"I feel uncomfortable seeing presenters standing at the beginning of the bulletin, and the perspective of the camera makes their trousers look strange and their feet tiny."

"I know everything is showbiz but it's gimmicky. And those exchanges between the newscaster and the correspondent, using each other's first names, makes me feel I'm intruding into something intimate."

"They should check their pronunciations, check their stresses and stop having private conversations with each other."

Michael says he could have stayed in newscasting but liked variety, fronting many of TV's biggest programmes from Crackerjack and Miss World to This Is Your Life and his chat show Aspel & Company.

"I've had the career of a dilettante but it's been great fun. My only regret in terms of my career is not following up my yearning to act."

"I look at Michael Caine, who I run into quite often. He's about the same age and from the same background, and I think: 'I could have been an Alfie.'"

"My dream was to be in cowboy films. TV got in the way of acting and it was impossible for me to say no to the money for personal reasons."

Michael is referring to his family life: three marriages, six children who survived to adulthood, and the scandals that followed his marital problems.

He married Dian, a "stunning domestic science student" in 1957. "She was particularly fecund," he says, "and we had two children in barely the time it takes to have two."

They divorced in 1961 and, on a whim ("I suggested a holiday become a honeymoon"), he married Anne Reed, a TV scriptwriter, in 1962. They had twins but divorced in 1967.

In 1977 Michael married actress Lizzie Power, leaving her after 17 years, shocking the entertainment world.

Any other regrets are focused on his turbulent personal life. In 1994, his affair with Irene Clark, a production assistant on This Is Your Life, hit the headlines.

It destroyed his marriage to Lizzie, the union that he says had felt absolutely right when they met, playing opposite each other in Private Lives in Eastbourne in 1974.

"I started out as a bright young bloke getting on with everyone and having a laugh. Suddenly, I'm older and it's gone wrong and I'm thinking: 'How did that happen?' There was a lot of pain, but Lizzie and I began talking again."

"The children were the catalyst and now we're great friends. Time can assuage if not heal, and I have a better family life now than I have any right to expect."

"It is ironic that my father, who never strayed as far as I know, lost the affection of his children, which I haven't."

"I now know that he was a working-class man who had a temper and was under the heel of authority all his life and that made him frightened and uncertain."

The elder of Michael's two children by Lizzie, Patrick, 27, has cerebral palsy.

"He'd like to go into the music business. He hasn't yet suffered the cruelty of the world and I hope he never will."

Michael, an expressive and emotional man, has discussed his marriage breakdown with the children, but residual guilt has given rise to doubts.

"I said to Patrick recently: 'You do love me, don't you?' He looked surprised and said: 'Of course, you're my dad.'"

Michael has also lost one of his sons from his first marriage, Gregory, to cancer of the sinuses, at 30.

"There isn't much about the human condition that I haven't experienced," he observes.

He feels he was pushed into his first two marriages. "The pressure was on to pack it all in, get married and become replicas of our elders."

When Michael's affair with Irene was revealed, Dian sold her story, recounting his "insatiable sexual appetite".

Thinking of the recent mud-slinging by Ingrid and Chris Tarrant, he says wryly: "It could have been worse. One of our sons had a go at her and she said she wanted the money to buy a piano."

"I maintained a silence. I don't know how dignified I was. I didn't have scores of affairs. I wasn't led astray by loose women."

"In my first and second marriages, I suffered from claustrophobia, as if I was trapped in a lift, although I loved being a father."

It was the 1970s, when he was in his 40s and enjoying bachelorhood, that he recalls nostalgically.

"I was at Capital Radio, taken on to woo housewives. That was the happiest time of my career as we were left to our devices."

"Kenny Everett used to invite listeners to hear me switch the buttons and cut myself off. At the BBC, technicians did all that."

"I led a frenzied lifestyle: out every night, different girlfriends, eager to accept any programme that came my way. I look back and think: 'Whoever that bloke was, he had stamina.'"

Michael and Irene now live in a flat in Surrey with spectacular gardens. Lizzie, who is a Catholic and has said she will never divorce Michael, lives nearby in the former family home, which has a swimming pool.

Irene, now 60, is trim and graceful. She never accompanies Michael to his frequent family get-togethers.

"She is perfectly understanding," he says. "There are ripples in every relationship. I lose my temper and get irritable."

"I've always valued fidelity, it's just that I've not always been able to achieve it. Emotional stability has escaped me most of my life and it's nice to be able to relax into it."

He says he might take up golf and has to guard against a tendency to idleness. This is the first time he has left a flagship show with nothing lined up.

"I left This Is Your Life because they were messing around with it and I wanted to go before the 'Aspel axed' headlines."

"If the phone hasn't rung by next spring, I shall take the hint, get a few ideas together and do something about it."

"The trouble is that everything is copycat TV these days. They see a good idea and rip the heart out of it. You've only got to think up something like The 50 Best... and you've got TV for the rest of time."

"When colour TV was new, I had the idea of exploring Britain's villages like all those Sunday evening programmes like Coast and Mountain, in which we worship at the altar of beauty."

"I heard no more about my plan, which was to go to corners of the country and discover idiosyncratic tradesmen and age-old customs."

"Then nine months later I switched on the television to see my idea going out. I can't remember who was fronting it, but it looked very similar to the series I'd devised."

"Ten years ago, after making Lights, Camera, Action, about the history of cinema with the producer John Gau, Gau came up with an idea for a series on detection."

"I added a handwritten note to his presentation and we sent it to Alan Yentob. I rang his office several times but got no reply. Such rudeness astounded me."

Yentob, a former BBC executive, has become a presenter, but Michael says that at least he has a marketable quirkiness.

He is less happy about reality TV competitors and actors hosting TV shows, and is angry that chat shows are given out like sweets. "Why do they think anyone can do it?"

His chat show, Aspel & Company, ran for nine years. It was ITV's answer to Parkinson.

"I am frivolous, an entertainer. He is a journalist and is now unassailable. I once had Harrison Ford on with Mel Smith who was doing beer ads, Indiana Jones-style."

"We played it and Ford gave a large, unnatural laugh. He clearly didn't find it funny. His PR said it was the first time she'd seen his teeth all week."

"The series ended in shame when Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone came on and it turned into a long plug for their new Planet Hollywood restaurant."

Michael likens his style to a less outrageous Jonathan Ross. "You can tell he's not joking when he says, with a wink, that he wants a part in a film."

"I was the same. I never wanted to sit at people's feet. I was always dropping hints about acting. I once asked Michael Winner at a party to put me in one of his films. He just smiled patronisingly."

In the late Sixties, Aspel appeared as himself in The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers and Wilfrid Hyde-White.

"After he'd watched the 3.40 from Lingfield, Hyde-White deigned to come out and do the scene. He couldn't get his line right and blamed me. I knew my place and said nothing."

"I was in panto with Dick Emery once when he dried on stage. I said something to fill in the gap, but afterwards, instead of thanking me, he said sarcastically: 'Oh, ad-libbing are we?' and stalked off."

"I thought: 'You don't do that to the stars.'" Michael would love to do something unexpected, but he is resigned to being typecast as the urbane, suave, handsome elder statesman of TV.

"My blood runs cold when someone says they've written something in my style. I went through one documentary script removing all the puns, then one of the critics said it had too many puns 'but that was Aspel's style.'"

In The Rocky Horror Show he ad-libbed nightly, playing the Narrator.

"I might say, 'What's over?' and the audience would shout: 'Your career is.' In Cardiff, I came on in this scene full of sexual activity and said 'Disgusting' in Welsh, which they loved."

One clue to Michael's ability to laugh at himself was the 2003 BBC Three spoof documentary Sex, Lies And Michael Aspel.

"The idea was that I'd had about 30 children by famous women like Jan Leeming, Valerie Singleton, Pamela Anderson and Angie Best. We didn't script it and there were clues that it was a spoof, but I got tons of hate mail."

"One man approached me in the street and said: 'I wept for you last night.' I couldn't correct him so I thanked him and went on my way."

"Then a girl joined the production team of Antiques Roadshow and told me that her father had said: 'Are you sure you should be joining that show with a man like that?'"

"There was an overlap, I suppose, between the show and my personal life, but I am what I am and people should understand that."

"I'll be 75 in January and I've mellowed. It's wonderful to feel like you did as a young man, that there's no one that you don't get on with."

"I have no trepidation about my future, my health or my career. The world's my oyster. The night is young."

• The new series of Antiques Roadshow begins on BBC One on Sunday, September 2 at 8pm.