Coming back from obscurity

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33775, 22 February 1975, Page 10

Coming back from obscurity

Out of Step. By Daniel Farson. Michael Joseph. 252 pp. N.Z. price $7.90. What is fame? When Negley Farson, the last of the great roving newspaper correspondents died in the sixties, the headline in the London "Daily Mail” read: “Dan Farson’s father dies.” If Dan Farson should die tomorrow, the headline (a small' one) might well be: “Negley Farson’s son dies.” For Daniel Farson, the David Frost of British television a decade or two back, sank to’obscurity after a financially disastrous attempt to run a - pub on the lines of the old British music halls and he retired to his house in Devon to readjust his life and begin a new career as a writer. “Out of Step”, the second book in this new career,? indicates that he'may ? be as successful as in the past. It is a ‘ candid self-portrait by a man who has touched the heights and dredged the depths and it abounds in equally candid portraits — some with his own camera as well as his pen — of the people his path has crossed: Somerset Maugham, Brendan Behan, Joan Littlewood, Noel Coward, " Barbara Hutton, Colin Wilson, Beaverbrook, John Osborne, Caitlin Thomas and his eccentric Soho cronies, John Deakin and Francis Bacon, whose behaviour makes it plain that riotous living did not die in the twenties. Dominating his life, it seemed, was his father, a renowned writer who, drunk or sober, was an overwhelming figure.

Daniel Farson packed more into his youth thin most men in ? their three score years and ten. He was evacuated to the United States in the Second World War, was a Parliamentary ? correspondent at the age of 17, went to Cambridge, became a photographer for the lamented "Picture Post”, explored Soho and joined the Merchant Navy to see the world. It was the powerful combination of gin and purple hearts that propelled Farson into television. Asked at short notice to take part in a TV programme, he “froze” at the rehearsal, less than an hour before the show. He cannot recall who provided the lubricants, but his tongue was freed and the other speakers and chairman were drowned in the flood of his eldquehCef /An interview with Caitlift Thomas sbon after the death of her husband, Dylan, turned him into a celebrity overnight. He rapidly became, as his friend Deakin observed, the idol of millions, but without a friend in the world. But at the height of his fame, especially in the programme, “This Weekly -came a run of bad luck. After eight years with AssociatedRediffusion he broke his contract and resigned. He had put all his money Jnto* a Lpridon dockland pub, the Waterqian’s Arms, and despite its immense social success, he lost nearly everything he owned jn the venture; His musical, “The Marie Lloyd Story” failed to reach the West End and his rather swashbuckling career came to an end. But Farson’s “Jack the Ripper” was well received and he is now working on a biography of his great-uncle, Bram Stoker, of Dracula fame. As a writer he may yet eclipse his father; and one cannot but help wonder if that, at least in part, is not his motivatiop.