I was brought up in Edgware, Middlesex. In those days, it was a smart little London suburb - probably less smart now. When I was 22, my parents moved to Canons Drive Estate, the posh part of Edgware. Their road was called Lake View - a street or so behind was a small lake, but you couldn't see it. Max Bygraves was a neigh-bour - indeed, my father, Leslie, directed a film with Max called Spare the Rod. He also directed Dunkirk, The Night My Number Came Up and The Shiralee, and produced The Cruel Sea and Mandy. Films were, in a sense, the family business, although, when I started on BBC1's Film programme in 1972, after writing television reviews as a free-lancer, they had no idea about my background. As a child, if I was sitting around, looking bored, my father would say, "Look, there's a damn good film on at the Ritz, go and see it" - and give me some money. So I did.
I had been in southern Africa for a couple of years when my parents moved to Lake View. I was working on The Star, an evening paper in Johannesburg, then on The Rhodesia Herald, a morning paper in what is now Harare and was then Salisbury.
In 1955, I decided the time had come to go home. It took a while to find a job, so it seemed right to move in with my family.
I wanted to: I liked them. My brother, Richard, is four years younger than me, and my sister, Valerie,is 13 years younger; war intervened between their births. Everyone was delighted to have me home, particularly my mother, Betty, who worried about me every day while I was away.
Ours was a detached, double-storey corner house. Probably built in the late 1920s, it was solid brick, with five bedrooms, a large sitting room, a dining room and a big kitchen. It cost £4,000, which was expensive then. My father had little to do with buying our houses. He was wrapped up in his work. Whenever we moved, my mother investigated, then told my father which one we were going to have. She had good taste, so it was a comfortable, warm, friendly place, with a pretty garden: she was keen on gardening. My mother had an au pair and a cleaner, but did all the cooking herself. There were always film people in and out. The camera-man Paul Beeson and his wife, Olga, often used to come for meals.
Advertisement
I'm not proud of this, but the only job I could get in London was as a gossip writer on the Daily Sketch. I was offered jobs in Edin-burgh and Derby, but wanted to work in London, as I fancied a girl who, like my father, worked at Ealing Studios. It didn't do any good - I'd barely started when she dumped me.
I was stuck there when I met my wife, Diana. She was working for the Daily Herald: a serious reporter, not a frivolous gossip writer like me. In late 1956, we met three times in one week. One Sunday night, the Moscow State Circus came to London. The arrival was a big news event: Diana was there for the Herald, I was there for the Sketch, and we got talking. I thought she was a very attractive girl, but did nothing about it. A couple of days later, there was a society wedding at St Margaret's, Westminster, that I was sent to cover; Diana was sent as well. Then, at the end of the week, I was sent to Shepperton Studios, where Charlie Chaplin was making an announcement about his new film, A King in New York, and there was Diana. I had a car - quite unusual in those days - and I offered her a lift back to London. We agreed we would meet again and have a meal, and so it went from there.
We married less than a year later, in October 1957. Diana's mum was divorced and not well off, so it was unreasonable to ask her to foot the bill, and my mother was keen to have the reception in the back garden, so we did. We married at an Anglican church half a mile down the road. A limo took the bride and groom back to the house, where the reception was held in a marquee. Fortunately, it was a beautiful day. There were 50 or 60 people, including friends of my father: Richard Attenborough and his wife, Sheila Sim; Donald Sinden and his wife, Diana: Bernard Lee, who was the original M in the Bond movies; and a Welsh actor called Meredith Edwards, who was in lots of my dad's movies.
After the reception, Diana and I were to fly to Mallorca from Blackbushe airport. There was a package-tour company that catered for civil servants and journalists, and we got a remarkable deal: £37 10 shillings for a fortnight in Mallorca, all-inclusive. My father drove us to Blackbushe and a whole crowd followed: men in morning suits and Diana's friend Trixie in her bridesmaid's outfit - all a bit sloshed. A young guy, who'd been an usher, kept putting money into a coffee machine, carefully getting out a cup of coffee, raising it to his lips, missing and pouring it down the front of his suit. He did it three times before somebody made him stop. In the end, fog descended, and Diana and I spent our wedding night sitting on a bench at Blackbushe, waiting to take off .