10:19am Monday 18th February 2008
By Jim Greenhalf
The late, great script-writer and broadcaster Frank Muir once memorably described BBC2 cultural commentator Joan Bakewell as the thinking man's crumpet.
During the peak of Barry Norman's popularity as BBC1's weekly film critic he was undoubtedly the thinking woman's crumpet.
But there is more to Barry Norman than a charming baggy-eyed pin-up. He is also a writer of novels (ten to date), was a Today presenter, the first News Quiz chairman, a Radio 5 interviewer, and a Seoul Olympics presenter for Channel 4 in 1988. A family man with two daughters (his wife Diana writes historical novels), he is also known to sell pickled onions at his one-man shows.
Will he be bringing any jars of this secret Norman family recipe to Bradford's International Film Festival on March 5?
"I think it's unlikely. The jars are too heavy to carry around and my agents haven't made arrangements with the manufacturer," he said.
But how did it start?
"I got the recipe from my mum who got it from her mum, so that takes it back to the 19th century; where she got it from I don't know.
"The pickle market isn't huge, just at Christmas time, which is puzzling because you would have thought they would be popular in summer with cold meats. But our pickles did well at Christmas in Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsbury's. Tesco reordered," he added.
There is a website dedicated to Barry Norman's pickles - hot, spicy and crunchy'. And yes, it is called Pickleodeon'.
So is Mr Norman a pickle millionaire?
"No, I make pennies, pennies I tell you. It's just a fun thing really, an amusement."
At 74 he is still talking about films on television, for Sky. But it was with the BBC that he established his reputation. From 1972 until 1998 he was to film criticism what Judith Chalmers was to The Holiday Programme, what the late Eddie Waring was to rrrrr-rugby league and Sir Michael Parkinson was to chat shows. He brought to the job intelligence, wry humour and knowledge.
Knowledge of the film industry came via his father Leslie who directed Dunkirk, one of the best British movies about the Second World War. Probably for the first time, three of Leslie Norman's movies - The Night My Number Came Up (1955), Dunkirk (1958) and The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961) - are being screened at a film festival at which his son is one of the main guests.
"It's lovely. Dunkirk is a damn good film. The scenes on the beach were shot at Camber Sands in Sussex. I remember going down and watching the film being shot. He also produced The Cruel Sea. My father told me a story about that when they were shooting in Malta Harbour with the corvette, Compass Rose. There was a British battleship and the Corvette bumped against the side of it. A little matelot leaned over the side of the battleship and said: Who's driving that f...... wagon?'"
A few years ago he calculated that as a film critic he had watched around 12,000 movies. Unlike the late theatre critic Harold Hobson, whose practice it was to see a play at least twice before writing his review, Barry Norman weighs up a film after the first screening.
"I always do it as a member of the audience. Most people only see a film once. I go hoping to be exhilarated, thrilled, intellectually involved. I was always happy when I came across a real piece of cr*p because I could make some funny remarks about it; but I would never work jokes in against a good film."
What film has he seen recently that he considers wildly over-rated?
"I cannot understand all the fuss over There Will be Blood which has had rave notices. Daniel Day-Lewis does turn in a good performance, but the film is too depressingly downbeat. You've got to have light and shade," he said.
Perhaps the film is trying to reflect modern times.
"I don't honestly think that hits you. But if it is, I don't think it does it all that well."
Talking about the depressingly downbeat, I mentioned Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old men, the movie of which (starring Tommy Lee Jones) is currently running at Pictureville.
"I think that's the best film of the year. I hope it wins the Oscar," he said.
In the book multiple murders crop up in virtually every chapter, sometimes as an aside outside the main narrative. The killer talks in philosophical mode to those he's about to murder. "He does that in the film, tosses a coin. It's never predictable. You think know what's going to happen but it goes off in another direction. It keeps you on your toes."
Movie-making has changed. Does he think that cinema-going still retains some of the magic it used to have in the days when for a couple of bob you could have half-a-day's entertainment at the local Empire, Plaza, Ritz or Gaumont.
"It's got a bit like football. It used to be working men's entertainment as opposed to the theatre. Now there's so much money in sport and going to the cinema can be very costly.
"For a family to see a film in London's West End it can cost £60 apart from the cost of travelling there and the food they might eat. It was never intended to be like that. In America you got in for a nickel, five cents.
"Films have changed. They are more explicit and violent than they were since the days of Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart," he said.
I think Spencer Tracy, a double Oscar winner, was the greatest movie actor I have ever seen. I mention Inherit the Wind.
"And Bad Day at Black Rock," Barry Norman chipped in. "An awful lot of people believe that Tracy was bloody marvellous. De Niro can be bloody marvellous when he raises his game. So can Jack Nicholson, when he's not acting by e-mail."
At film festivals and during his one-man show (with or without pickles), inevitably people ask him about his favourite movies and want to know what the stars are like. I supposed he must get fed up with this, but no, he accepted people's curiosity in good faith, in good humour, it was part of the job.
"Mostly I enjoy talking to directors and writers: Martin Scorsese, William Goldman - he's extraordinary - Billy Wilder, Steven Spielberg, Joe Mankiewicz - one of the most intelligent men in movies. I always liked going to New York to see Joe.
"Actors are working stiffs, they are just prettier than everybody else. But generally speaking they don't have such a wide range of interests as the people who write and direct films."
So which of these stiffs did he least enjoy talking to?
"For all kinds of reasons I didn't hit it off with Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I just didn't hit it off with De Niro. He was a reluctant interviewee but had to do it because it was in his contract. He was monosyllabic. I had a bit of a row with him and we almost ended up coming to blows.
"Willis was at Cannes. The critics didn't like his film Armageddon (1998) and he was so petulant the next day and silly. Schwarzenegger I always thought terribly self-satisfied and pompous."
I read somewhere that Barry Norman, man of many parts and pickles, had one unfulfilled ambition: to write a best-selling novel. Some of the ten he has to his name have titles like pulp thrillers - Death on Sunset, To Nick a Good Body, The Birddog Tapes.
"Three are comedies set in Fleet Street, television and Hollywood. One of them is a futuristic novel. The others are, yes, I suppose they are thrillers," he said.
Anything new in that line?
"I am in discussions with a publisher, to write a non-fiction book. I don't want to say more in case it doesn't happen," he added.
People may want to know Barry Norman's top ten films. The magazine Sight and Sound badgered him about that. To keep them quiet he rattled off the names of ten movies - Citizen Kane, The Searchers, Singin' in the Rain among them - and the list was published.
"I told them that I would be liable to change my mind the next day, but they left that bit off the article. It's impossible. The kind of film you want to see depends on the mood you're in."
What are his criteria, then, for a good movie?
"You need a bloody good story and screenplay; good dialogue and character development; a good director, cinematography. Put all these things together and the chances are you are going to end up with a good movie.
"Whether it will be a great movie depends on something indefinable. Casablanca is an example. It's that indefinable something extra that creeps into great films," he added.
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