EP.239 - ROB BURLEY

Adam talks with writer, TV producer, and editor of political interview programmes, Rob Burley, about the way we absorb politics from our parents, the story of Thatcher's undoing at the hands of political interviewer Brian Walden, Rob's fascination with scandals and why we loved Britpop. Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on October 3rd, 2024. Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and conversation editing. Podcast illustration by Helen Green https://helengreenillustration.com/ EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal https://nordvpn.com/buxton Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! PRE-ORDER'I LOVE YOU, BYEEE' https://lnk.to/ILoveYouByeeeby Adam Buxton - 2025 RELATED LINKS WHY IS THIS LYING BASTARD LYING TO ME? https://www.waterstones.com/book/why-is-this-lying-bastard-lying-to-me/rob-burley/9780008542481 by Rob Burley - 2023 THE HIGH KIND https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcSaICcPwE (ROB'S BAND) CHANGE - 1995 (YOUTUBE) BRIAN AND MAGGIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW-KCX3spks (TRAILER) - 2025 (YOUTUBE) EMILY MAITLIS INTERVIEW WITH STEVE COOGAN https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/steve-coogan-brian-maggie-thatcher/ - 2025 (RADIO TIMES) BRIAN WALDEN INTERVIEWS MARGARET THATCHER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu7kZdbI2sg- 1989 (YOUTUBE) EDDIE MAIR VS BORIS JOHNSON https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxA-9D4X3o (FULL INTERVIEW) - 2013 (YOUTUBE) "You're a nasty piece of work, aren't you, Boris?" A spicy interview that nevertheless did not keep Boris from becoming PM. ROBERT A CAROT - THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON SERIES https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/YLJ/the-years-of-lyndon-johnson/(PENGUIN) DAVID LYNCH BEING A MADMAN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqZpi8zAqe0 - 2020 (YOUTUBE) DAVID LYNCH - MEDITATION, CREATIVITY, PEACE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH4qD5Fzyjk - 2017 (YOUTUBE) HERE'S WHY SOME PEOPLE SEE A WORLD OTHERS DON'T https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-RnlwICTQg - 2021 (YOUTUBE) A shorter encapsulation (with cheesy 'wellness' music) of Lynch's relationship with transcendental meditation. ISABELLA ROSSELLINI TALKING ABOUT BLUE VELVET https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ykm8JEFqr8- 1986 (YOUTUBE) DAVID LYNCH IN CONVERSATION https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGd6lnYTTY8 - 2015 (YOUTUBE) DON'T LOOK AT ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OveMpEI2Mys (David Lynch doc) Directed by Guy Girard - 1989 (YOUTUBE) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Adam Buxton?

  I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buckston, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

• 0:31Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how are you doing, podcats? It's Adam Buckston here, joining you from a really very windy farm track. Wow, it's crazy out in East Anglia. Towards the end of January 2025. Okay, it's plus three down here in East Anglia. It's a lot worse in Ireland and Scotland at the moment, thanks to Storm Aoin. So I'm counting my blessings. Apart from the wind, it's actually a rather beautiful day out here in Norfolk.

• 1:14Adam Buxton?

  The sun is out and most of the clouds have been blown away, which makes a change. It's been solid grey for the last few weeks here. Braving the wind with me today is my best dog friend, Rose, who is looking quite confused by the fact that we're out here. Fair enough, but we've got to get out, get some exercise, get out the compound. All right, this is actually ridiculous. I'm gonna wait till we get to some tree coverage.

• 1:52Adam Buxton?

  Hang on, dog. I'm gonna sit on this log. Okay, we're in the sunny woods now, slightly sheltered from the wind. So how are you doing anyway, podcast? I hope you're well and that things are off to a relatively decent start for you this year, you know, the news accepted. This episode of the podcast is gonna be a bit of a break from all that, a bit of a retro fest. So let me tell you about my guest for podcast number 239. He's a writer, TV producer, and editor of political interview programmes, Rob Burley. Here's some Burley facts for you. Rob was born in 1969 and grew up in Sussex,

• 2:35Adam Buxton?

  later attending Nottingham University, where he earned a degree in American Studies. He was a researcher for a Labour MP. Before getting into TV, he joined ITV in 1996, where he worked on shows mainly as a political editor with Jonathan Dimbleby and Trevor McDonald. After moving to the big British castle in 2008, that's the BBC, just in case, he became executive editor of Question Time. He was deputy editor of Newsnight and assistant editor of BBC Breakfast. Rob then became the BBC's editor of live political programmes in 2018, later becoming editor of Politics Live and The Andrew Neil Show.

• 3:18Adam Buxton?

  More recently, he's worked as executive editor on LBC's Tonight with Andrew Marr and with Kay Burley over on Sky. Last year, I mentioned how much I'd enjoyed Rob's 2023 book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me?, which, full disclosure, I came across because we share a publisher, Harper Collins, and someone there recommended it. That's not the reason I mentioned it. I mentioned it because I enjoyed it very much. It tells the stories of various politically significant moments via a series of memorable TV interviews, which, on the whole, serve as a reminder of how difficult it's become to get a good interview out of a politician in the hyperpolar Social media age.

• 4:03Adam Buxton?

  A good chunk of the early part of the book is devoted to a legendary TV confrontation that exemplifies how much things have changed in the world of political interviews, which took place in nineteen eighty nine between then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and master political interviewer Brian Walden. That part of Rob's book now forms the basis of a two-part drama on Channel Four called Brian and Maggie, which is going out in a few days as I speak. Hello, Studio Buckles here. The show goes out on Wednesday, the twenty ninth at nine P M on Channel Four with the next episode the following night, Thursday, also at nine P M. Back to Windy Wood. It's written by James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears, director of Philomena,

• 4:48Adam Buxton?

  starring Steve Coogan, and Steve plays Brian Walden in Brian and Maggie. Harriet Walter plays Thatch, and it is, I think, a superlative Thatch. She absolutely nails her in a very three-dimensional way. Maybe it was too three-dimensional. In a Radio Times interview with Emily Maitlis, Steve Coogan said he asked for one scene in the drama to be cut because he thought it was too kind to a figure who was so controversial, Thatch, that is, and who remains bitterly despised for, to take just three examples, her role in shutting down Britain's mining industry, the section twenty-eight law that prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality in schools and the community,

• 5:33Adam Buxton?

  and her introduction of the nineteen ninety poll tax, or community charge, that required all adults to pay the same amount regardless of income or property value. My conversation with Rob was recorded face to face in London back in October of last year, twenty twenty four, and we talked about our respective political journeys. Rob's journey was a little more eventful than mine, you won't be surprised to hear, and Rob tells the story of Brian Walden's momentous encounter with Margaret Thatcher. We also talked about the new book that Rob is working on, in which he writes about scandals. And because I know that Rob used to be in a band, we also reminisce briefly about the glories of Britpop.

• 6:17Adam Buxton?

  In Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me? Rob mourns the death of the long-form political interview and the social media-driven gotcha journalism that's taken its place. A typical trick in modern political interviewing, says Rob, is to do something like ask a politician how much a pint of milk costs, and then, if they don't know, to dismiss them as out of touch with the people they claim to represent. "Sounds like a good idea for my interview, I thought." Oh, and by the way, early on in the podcast, we talk about the fact that we were born very close together, me and Rob, and I mentioned someone else who was born just a few days before me, and that was former podcast guest Tommy Tiernan, just so you know.

• 7:00Adam Buxton?

  Back at the end with a tiny bit more waffle and a small goodbye to David Lynch. But right now, with Rob Burley, here we go.

• 7:49Adam Buxton?

  In contrast to your normal routine, like I've heard you in the past talking about plotting an elaborate map for an interview when you were doing shows back in the day, and you know, like the big interviews, you'd spend a week figuring out every permutation of how the conversation could go. I don't do that. No, I've noticed that. This is rambling. I mean, sometimes I do have, you know, notes and things I want to hit, and I've got a couple of notes. But you're not trying to prosecute me, are you? I'm not trying to get one over on you, I don't think. And this would be quite a clever tactic to actually do that, because you'd loom

• 8:34Adam Buxton?

  into this idea that it's going to be ramble, and then you just hit me with it. It's not a gotcha. How much is a pint of milk, by the way?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Fucking hell. I buy the litres, is it about, do you know?

• 8:46Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I looked it up.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Is it about one fifty for a litre?

• 8:51Adam Buxton?

  For a litre, it's probably about that, couple of quid maybe, I don't know. A pint is eighty five p at Sainsbury's and Tesco.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  I never buy the pints, the small tiny ones are over before you know it. I've got children. Eighty p, okay.

• 9:05Adam Buxton?

  Eighty five p, ninety five at Waitrose.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  It's an annoying question, isn't it? Do you think it's a legitimate question?

• 9:12Adam Buxton?

  Well, what it is, is an indication of how you manage your finances, isn't it? And when I was really hard up for money, even then, I didn't know how much a pint of milk was. Because that's just not how I really thought about money. I mean, that's probably something I inherited from my dad and part of the reason that my dad went bankrupt.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I'm quite bad with money too, but I think the purpose of it in political terms is just to sort of demonstrate whether you are a person of the people or not.

• 9:41Adam Buxton?

  It's, yeah, to demonstrate how much you are in touch with the kind of things that most ordinary people have to worry about.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fine. I think it's fine for to, well, I think it's important to ascertain whether the person cares about those things, has some grasp of what people go through. But whether you know the price of a litre or whatever it is with milk, you might not, because you might not ever buy them, because you might always be in the office and they're always just there. And it's like, does that really make you an asshole? I don't think it does.

• 10:07Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, you might not like milk. I prefer Alpro vanilla soy milk.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  That figures.

• 10:13Adam Buxton?

  That's more expensive, but it's delicious stuff. So, like, you and I are very similar age, right?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I think I looked you up. I think I've had one month more on earth than you.

• 10:24Adam Buxton?

  Oh, mate, and that month made all the difference.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  What a month it was.

• 10:31Adam Buxton?

  I think that is the case as well. Who else did I interview, uh, who had been around just a few days more than I had? And had achieved so much more because of it. Uh, I can't remember. Anyway, but, um, yeah, so you're May sixty nine?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  May sixty nine, yeah.

• 10:47Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I'm June sixty nine.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Which means we were conceived in the, um, in the, in the sort of rebellious summer of sixty eight.

• 10:54Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. What do you think your parents were doing? Were they high on drugs?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  No, definitely, definitely not that. They would definitely not have been high on drugs. They never took any drugs, I'm pretty sure of that. I like this thing about how the sixties is fascinating, but, um, we all love it. And I remember sort of idolising the concept as a kid. But they didn't go through the sixties in the way that it wasn't like they were all having a wild time in Carnaby Street, you know, it's like that, have you ever seen that bit of um the Beatles film uh of Get Back? They're on the roof and then they go down to the street.

• 11:21Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of just regular people are just like, what the fuck are they doing?

• 11:24Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  You know, it's like they're not touched by the sixties in the way that we imagined it was. And my parents, I think, were pretty untouched by the sixties in that way, really.

• 11:31Adam Buxton?

  What were your parents like politically? Were they sort of on the left?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were on the left. So, well, yeah, my mum was, she, she, she went along with that. She was, she would say she's on the left. And my dad was, was properly on the left, yeah. He was like, he, he was, he was that generation. So he's born in like twenty eight. Interesting that the, the Chinese Revolution was like quite a big thing for people like him. They thought this was great. And then they had to kind of explain, oh, the Cultural Revolution's a bit difficult. They had to sort of somehow be an apologist for that. He was, but I remember him being, still being keen on it in the eighties, you know, well, it wasn't all bad. I, I was like Mao's like a really terrible man. He killed a lot of people. And he's like, well, you know, there's a lot of change and there was resistance and things. But he couldn't quite let go of it. But he wasn't like a Maoist in some big way, but it just shows that he was quite on the left when he was younger. And I think that residual thing was there.

• 12:16Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  In the eighties still. So he was quite into it. But mainly he was a historian. So he was just brilliant. He just knew loads of stuff about history and about politics. But he was always up the garden. So I'd just spend a lot of time up the garden with him, talking about politics. And that was that and telly were the things that got me into politics.

• 12:32Adam Buxton?

  I think most people, though, they inherit their political views from their parents, don't they?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of that, I think.

• 12:38Adam Buxton?

  And so it's very difficult for them to think of other people with different political views as sympathetic because they, they've just never been around those kinds of people. Whereas, you know, I grew up in a pretty right-leaning house.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:54Adam Buxton?

  Uh, my dad worked for the Sunday Telegraph. My mum was definitely a Tory. My dad was more conflicted. He didn't have a lot of time for a lot of the Tory politicians, especially in the Johnson era and the Cameron era.

• 13:07Adam Buxton?

  So, you know, I knew a lot of people with those kinds of views. The people I met through my parents were probably gonna have similar political views to them a lot of the time, I would think. But I wasn't really politically aware when I was getting to know them. So that wasn't the first thing I got to know about them, you know what I mean?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you did you start to think about it in the eighties?

• 13:28Adam Buxton?

  Not so much. I mean, I started to think about it much more in the nineties.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 13:33Adam Buxton?

  I made it through the eighties without really being affected by politics. The only person who ever talked about politics that I knew was Ben Walden.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 13:42Adam Buxton?

  Son of Brian Walden.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Right, okay, yeah.

• 13:44Adam Buxton?

  And he was very left.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:46Adam Buxton?

  And he listened to Billy Bragg and he was, you know, but we were public school boys.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:52Adam Buxton?

  So he had a certain amount of kind of self-loathing about that.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:57Adam Buxton?

  That he had this privileged life that his dad never had. Cause Brian Walden grew up pretty poor.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Very poor, yeah.

• 14:04Adam Buxton?

  But then Ben found himself in this strange position of being the son of someone who grew up poor, who was definitely working class. Who had used their, the money that they earned to send their kids to a fee-paying school. And then if you're someone who has the same views that your dad grew up with, for Ben, left-wing views, Labour right views, his dad was a Labour politician before he eventually went over towards the right. You look like a bit of a poser. If you're a public school lefty.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:36Adam Buxton?

  Who listens to Billy Bragg.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:38Adam Buxton?

  It's a weird position to be in.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suppose it is. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know any public school boys, so.

• 14:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, you weren't privately educated.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't, I was.

• 14:46Adam Buxton?

  I wish you'd told me before.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  I know, it wouldn't have happened, would it then? But I went, yeah, I went to a comprehensive school. It's funny. It was in Selsey in West Sussex, so it's not, not really the badlands, but there was a vibe in seventies and eighties comprehensive schools. It was always a bit edgy. I remember getting there and on the first day being kind of like some physical manhandling by the older kids, you know, it was like this is the way it is and it was horrible. But I was quite annoyingly a left-winger when I was a teenager. Yeah, the Billy Bragg records and all that. I think I changed because I ended up, I ended up appreciating because of the work, I ended up appreciating the different arguments. So it's like Brian Walden is essentially a meritocrat, right? He thinks the best way of doing things is to give people the best chances they can get, they'll compete. And the best people will emerge and win.

• 15:30Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, that's why he was on the same page as Thatcher.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And he thought actually to have a quality of outcome where you could sort of fix a world in which everyone would have the same thing irrespective of their talents. Didn't speak to him as a human being about his experience of what people are really like, which is they are, they are different. And some of them are driven and some of them have great ideas and others aren't driven or don't have good ideas. And you should sort of reward that in some way. And so I can understand where that, I can understand where he's coming from, then maybe the best way is some middle ground between those two positions, but. Because I started to appreciate people's arguments, which I'm quite into arguments, then I stopped thinking they're bad people. I used to think they were bad, bad people. I remember going to university and still having this idea and the, you know, like.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  The whole never kissed a Tory thing, you know, that, that, that was sort of the idea. He wouldn't interest anybody who was, who was a Tory. If they were a Tory, they were just a fucking Tory.

• 16:20Adam Buxton?

  The idea, I suppose, seems to be that if you do have that meritocratic outlook. Then it's all very well if you're born with all the things you need to get ahead. But what if you haven't been born with those things? What if the odds are stacked against you because of where you come from or what you look like or whatever?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:41Adam Buxton?

  What happens to you then? And does society have a responsibility to look after you? And that's obviously the bit that most people felt someone like Thatcher or Brian Walden or whatever, whoever had that kind of outlook. They couldn't really care about those people.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Well, they would obviously argue they did care about those people and, you know, the welfare state was there and state education, all those things were still there under Thatcher. They, she'd argue, but clearly, you know, she had a different outlook on it. But the thing about Brian Walden, of course, is that was exactly what happened to him. His mother was a bookbinder, I think. So there were a lot of books in the house, only because that was her work that she did at home. So he would get to read them. She died very young, so he didn't have long with her. And his father was almost all the time unemployed. So he came from exactly the environment you're talking about there. Yeah, what he does, then he succeeds and he's what they do, people like that is they extrapolate from that experience that this should be the way for everybody that surely if you just have that, if you give, you know, people will come through. But yeah, I mean, the other bit of it is

• 17:38Speaker 01

  like you say, what so what happens to those who don't come through? A, is it fair? But even if it was fair and then you've lost out, what should happen to you? So you want a society which reflects that. So yeah, anyway, I'm just saying that I think Walden would, he would use his experience that when you outlined there was evidence for why he was right, not why he was wrong.

• 17:56Adam Buxton?

  One of the other differences between you and I is that you grew up thinking that Weekend World, presented by Brian Walden, political discussion programmes, which you would see around about midday on a Sunday.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, correct.

• 18:08Adam Buxton?

  In the eighties, you thought that was interesting. I did not think that was interesting. I thought the only good thing about that was the theme tune.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  I'm glad you mentioned that. That was, that was incredible, wasn't it?

• 18:19Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  It was, who was it? It was, it was Mountain.

• 18:21Adam Buxton?

  Nantucket Sleigh Ride by Mountain.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:46Adam Buxton?

  Oh, it's a classic. I absolutely loved that thing. I just thought, what is this? And this is pre-internet, before you could look it up and just know instantly. So it was this mysterious.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:56Adam Buxton?

  Bit of magical rock.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  You say, I thought it was interesting. It was more that. I mean, so what would you do on a Sunday typically if you were at home?

• 19:04Adam Buxton?

  Sunday, back in the eighties.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Late seventies, early eighties. So you're about nine, 10, right? What are you going to do?

• 19:11Adam Buxton?

  Watch TV.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Right, that's what I'm doing. Okay. I love telly so much.

• 19:16Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  And, and the house, and one of the things about the house that we lived in, the environment we lived in was, do you remember The Good Life?

• 19:20Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm. Tom and Barbara.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Oh my God, such a brilliant series. It's amazing. And the thing about Margot and Mrs Thatcher.

• 19:28Adam Buxton?

  We should say who Margot is. If if listeners haven't seen The Good Life, The Good Life was about a middle-class couple, Tom and Barbara, who downsize and go and live somewhere where they can grow their own food and live an honest life. He's an ex-advertising executive or something?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Correct. I remember it's in Surbiton, so it's not like they've gone to a farm.

• 19:46Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  They're going to grow it in the garden in suburbia.

• 19:49Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. And their neighbour is this very posh woman called Margot, who was a lot like my mum.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  She was a car-carrying Tory.

• 19:59Adam Buxton?

  It was as if my mum had seen The Good Life and thought, I think I'm going to be like her.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. She was wonderful. She was brilliantly acted by Paddy Keith. Her husband was played by Paul Eddington. He was terrific. And so there was, it was this fantastic juxtaposition of these sort of trendy middle-class lefties and their sort of right-wing neighbours. And in a way, it started off as being about the goods, which is the The Good Life, which is the one, the people that went self-sufficient. But quite quickly, Margot emerges as the real star of the show. And I thought, I remember, because that series came on about seventy-five, about the precise same year as Mrs Thatcher became leader of the Tory party. And so because I consume TV so much, I sort of associated the two women in my head in some way as being similar or the same, because they were quite the same.

• 20:44Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  And she, there's one moment when she says in the series, I'm not a citizen, I'm a resident. This is in the face of bureaucracy, you know, and you kind of rooted for it because she was dealing with like intransigent bureaucracy, but it precursors to there's no such thing as society. The idea that I'm not partaking in this thing, you want me to partake in it, I'm different from it, right?

• 21:08Adam Buxton?

  And just kind of fundamentalist individualism.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yes, right, exactly. And then so. I thought, God, it's so interesting to me that these two things came together. And then I thought, I just wondered whether anyone else had ever thought this before. And so I ended up finding some clue that there's a guy who was teaching at a school up in Yorkshire, who'd been a Tory activist, and I've got a hold of him, and it's true. They used to say on the doorstep in the seventy nine election, I know she's a woman, and because people found it difficult to think that she should be a prime minister. She's a woman, admittedly, but maybe what we need right now is a woman like Margot, who can basically knock some heads together and subtext be better than those useless men, the wet husband. Then he told me that he discovered elsewhere this was being said as well. So it wasn't actually a thing that people said. And so I love that way in which culture and politics kind of interact with each other.

• 21:53Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  And it was just great to know that what was in my head in this little house was the same. And also, my parents went self-sufficient.

• 22:00Adam Buxton?

  Did they?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. They moved from a normal environment to a house in the middle of nowhere, it seemed like, where they grew vegetables and had animals.

• 22:09Adam Buxton?

  Out in Sussex?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Sussex. And they weren't doing this in a malevolent way, but they just weren't interested in the outside world very much. So it was all very hermetically sealed, really. And the only way I could see out was through books, music and TV, most of all. And so it wasn't, it wasn't that I thought that it was interesting, Weekend World, which was a very, very heavy political programme, just for people if they don't know. It was like forty minute interviews, maybe with a film of fifteen minutes before that, with interviews with, you know, whoever, trade unionists or whoever it might be, people of the day. It was heavy and stodgy stuff with a great theme tune. It looked great, had a brilliant sort of seventies TV studio feel to it. And I had nothing else to do, you know, so I just watched it and thought, well, it seems to be important. And dad can tell me some stuff about this if I go and talk to him about it, and he might.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  And it seems important, so maybe I should try and learn about it. And then, because of watching it over and over again, and then I started to understand what was going on in the news, then it sort of made, started to make sense. It was one of the choices I had was listen to music, the limited amount of records that were not classical music in the house, and read or watch Brian Walden saying something incomprehensible to somebody. So I went for that quite a lot.

• 23:18Adam Buxton?

  And when did it start becoming comprehensible?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  I think it must have been about, I think in the early eighties, it was going, its heyday was between seventy, but he starts in seventy seven and it runs through till about eighty six or something. So the heyday would have been late seventies, well Thatcher's, this is the thing, Thatcher, she looms large, I'm afraid, like or loathe her. Well, I like, I mean, I didn't like her, but I do admire her more now, more and more, having sort of worked on the book and just thought about what she was like. I think whatever her politics were, she was very much up for the argument, which is commendable. But it was what she was doing was the thing that made people politicised in the early eighties, because it felt like this was a wrecking ball, you know, to sort of the settlement. And, you know, unemployment was through the roof. And I was watching like the specials and Ghost Town or whatever on Top of the Pops, but

• 24:03Speaker 01

  it was all in the culture, you know, and it was like, do you remember those programmes that have like Something Else? Do you ever remember that show? They had those, those kids, those kids shows that were sort of, I mean, so much of, you know, BBC impartiality, they were just like pumping out left wing propaganda against Thatcherism. And then she won again, you know, the Falklands was obviously quite exciting. And in fact, that was a bit of a turning point for me, the Falklands, because I realised that maybe she was right about something. Which was a bit of a shocker.

• 24:27Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, well, again, my mum had an opinion because she didn't like those Argentinians.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:33Adam Buxton?

  And so she thought Thatcher was doing a terrific job there.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and my dad used to, my dad also thought it was the right thing to do. That was an interesting moment for me because it was like, here's the thing, well, I'm supposed to feel one way, which is Thatcher is bad.

• 24:45Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  And actually, I didn't think she was wrong, and neither did my dad, crucially.

• 24:49Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  And so it was like, oh, so things might be more complicated than that. And then you've got all the debates going on on Weekend World and other programmes. And in the end, this is becomes quite comes quite exciting, you know, it's, it's really good and I'm really into it. And so I became a true believer and fan of that genre. And actually, that's made my career.

• 25:06Adam Buxton?

  Of it.

• 25:33Adam Buxton?

  The big event in the Walden universe, as far as you're concerned, and for a lot of people, I suppose, was 1989 after Weekend World, when he's doing the Walden interviews. And he had that big showdown with Thatcher. And you write about that. That's the sort of centrepiece of your book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:53Adam Buxton?

  The quote, incidentally, is Robin Day, right?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  No, it's, um, famous, made famous by Jeremy Paxman.

• 25:58Adam Buxton?

  Made famous by Paxman.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  But not originated by Paxman, originated by somebody, a guy who worked for the Times, who was a foreign correspondent, who said at one point, when I speak to politicians, I think to myself, why is this lying bastard lying to me? In other words, he was looking for another motive. But anyway, in terms of the Walden moment in 1989, it's, yeah, amazing moment in sort of political TV interview history, probably it's our Frost Nixon, I suppose.

• 26:22Adam Buxton?

  And you write about it really well. I thought it was thrilling, that whole section right at the top. It's an amazing story. They're doing a TV version of it, right?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  They're dramatising my, those two chapters, form the basis of a TV show that's going to be coming in 2025. Yeah, with Steve Coogan playing Brian Walden and Harriet Walter playing Margaret Thatcher.

• 26:42Adam Buxton?

  Wow.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Which is obviously, yeah, I mean, unbelievable. And it came, and for me, that all starts because I'm, I'm in my student hovel, watching that day. It was 1989. So, you know, I was at university, I was not really that obsessed by Weekend World at this point, or the Walden interviews. But Thatcher was in trouble because in the previous week, Nigel Lawson, remember Nigel Lawson?

• 27:04Adam Buxton?

  Sure. Nigel's dad.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Nigel's dad, yeah. Who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer for six years. So right beside her throughout the half of the Tory years, of the Thatcher years. And he resigns in 1989.

• 27:17Adam Buxton?

  And he resigned because he got fed up of being criticised by some guy?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, some guy called Alan Walters. Now, Mrs Thatcher thought this was all a pretext. So basically, there's a guy called Alan Walters, who was her economic adviser. And he was always shouting his mouth off about fiscal policy, or, you know, the economy and about tax and whatever. And he was always saying stuff. And Nigel Lawson found this increasingly irritating, because he seemed to have a free rein to just say whatever he liked and take people to lunch and blurt things out. And so that was the pretext. I think actually there were deeper reasons for this that had been going on for ages. But by the time you get to nineteen eighty nine, he's looking for, I think he's probably looking for a way out. And Alan Walters provides it because he goes to see her one day and he says, it's either me or Alan Walters. You either get rid of this advisor or I will quit.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  And she's not willing to do that. She's the prime minister. She's not willing to call up Alan Walters and sack him. So she doesn't. And in the end, he quits that day, which is a massive blow to her authority because he is a, he's a big figure, as I say. And also the other thing to remember is that, do you remember her saying, we have become a grandmother?

• 28:20Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  This was a really weird moment that was hard to understand that she, how could she be so strange? But when her son Mark had a child, she appeared out through the door of number ten and said, and sort of clattered into the middle of, into the middle of the street and said, we've become a grandmother. Which was really odd. It sounded like she thought she was the queen or something, or in a way that we've all had a grand. So I don't know what it was, but it was very odd. And it was alongside that, there were other things that seemed to be a bit erratic about her. She was, you know, she was pushing through the poll tax, remember the, all that stuff, there's riots and, you know, there was a lot of stuff happening that was quite controversial and she seemed to be slightly different. She wasn't quite the person she'd been before. And so people thought she was a bit strange. That's going on. And then Lawson resigns.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  So it's a big crisis moment and she'd already agreed at that point to do an interview with Brian Walden, who'd just got his show back, a new show on ITV, having had that Weekend World show, there was a gap and then he comes back with his own show. And she agreed to appear on it months before. So it's very, very lucky for Brian Walden and for ITV that suddenly we've got the hottest interview you could possibly have. There's a massive crisis. She's going to do forty six minutes, which you'd never do now.

• 29:30Adam Buxton?

  And they were pals straightforwardly by that point, right?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  By this point, yeah. So, I mean, yeah, that's a good point. So he was a Labour MP and a very well regarded one. Everyone thought he was going to be something big, but he didn't really like Parliament very much in the end. He didn't enjoy it very much. In the meantime, she's rising up through the ranks. And eventually he leaves and goes to work on Weekend World. Before he left, he was moving further and further right and he was, he was kind of Thatcher curious by the point we get to nineteen seventy five, like, she's speaking my language and I quite like her. He was recruited to come and take over on this show and become the interviewer. And even though no experience of it whatsoever, but he, for some reason, they alighted on Brian Walden as being a good idea to do this news, to do this show. So he, his very first interview was with Margaret Thatcher and you watch them and they, this is in the TV drama, which James Graham, the playwright has written from, from

• 30:17Speaker 01

  my book, but you see this really interesting relationship develop between the two is he's sympathetic to her, but he draws her out. They're worthwhile conversations. There's not much conflict there. It's more like he says, that's very interesting what you say there. She likes that. And then they start to, and then intellectually there's kind of, there's a kind of romance going on. And that keeps on going all the way through the, all the way through the eighties. And then you reach the point in 1983, which is in the book. Do you remember when Kenny Everett's?

• 30:44Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, let's bomb the bastards.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Let's bomb Russia.

• 30:47Adam Buxton?

  Oh, he didn't say to bomb the bastards.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  He says, let's bomb Russia.

• 30:51Adam Buxton?

  And he wanted to kick away.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Let's, let's kick Michael Foot, who was the Labour, Labour leader, elderly Labour leader. Let's kick Michael Foot's stick away.

• 30:59Adam Buxton?

  Classic Kenny.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Classic Kenny in front of this audience of Tories.

• 31:02Adam Buxton?

  With big foam hands on.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Did you remember how big a deal that, that show was that he had?

• 31:07Adam Buxton?

  Kenny Everett's, um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  That was a really big thing, wasn't it? Did you love it?

• 31:11Adam Buxton?

  I did love it, yeah. I had no clue that he was, like, it was quite weird when he came out suddenly as this Tory guy and was at the Tory conference. Was it a conference?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  No, it was a special rally in the middle of the election campaign in 83. They're all going Maggie, Maggie, they've got T-shirts and it's all the squares. It's like Tarbuck, Steve Davis. Hasn't he turned out to be like a massive techno music fan or something?

• 31:33Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. He's a DJ. Also, he very much regrets that part of his.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Oh, does he really?

• 31:37Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, he does. He's, he's very much a lefty now.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Oh, he was there and with Tarbuck and with, um, oh, Michael Winner, obviously. Um, and they were all there saying, we love you, Maggie. And then Everett appears, which is completely surprising. And then he, he then says these things which are regarded at the time and it was really outrageous, things to say. They were a bit, they were quite naughty. Um, but it was funny. And, and anyway, she gets very pumped up.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  So can you imagine her, like, what a scene when David

• 32:03Adam Buxton?

  Oh Kenny, that was very funny.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  I know, because she's not used to the young people liking her.

• 32:08Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Kenny's there, fires her up. So she leaves Wembley, having done this massive gig at Wembley. Early that morning, she'd been interviewed on ITV by Brian Walden. Then she goes to the rally and later that evening, she needs to record the final election broadcast, which is her final appeal to the country to give her a second term in power. And she's got a guy there who's waiting for her, who's a speechwriter. And he is not as pumped up as she is. And he's not in the same mode that she is in, which is kind of, you know, very excited. And she wants a different script. She sends him away. And they think, well, who can come and write the script for us? They think and they think and they think. And they decide to try Brian Walden, who's literally that day just interviewed her as an impartial journalist, who will continue to interview her after the election.

• 32:54Adam Buxton?

  And who has not come out and expressed specifically pro Thatcher statements beyond being sympathetic in interviews.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you'd only know really if you'd paid really close attention.

• 33:05Adam Buxton?

  Right, okay.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  To sort of the press, you know, reading the diary stories about that he was regarded as a bit of a Thatcherite. But he wouldn't know otherwise. And he, he shouldn't have done it. He said, yes. You know, they ring him up and he says, yes. And he shouldn't have done it. It was, it was breaking all the rules. And apparently he'd been out for drinking that night because it was the end of the series. And then he's slightly sort of worse aware, arrives and writes the script with her. Because, you know, he used to be a politician. He's turned on by all this. He thinks she's great. He sort of, I don't know what he was thinking.

• 33:33Adam Buxton?

  And he was flattered, I suppose.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Of course, you would be, wouldn't you? The prime minister's calling for you. But he should never have done it. And he did it. And that's how close they were, right? So they were very close. Anyway, a few years passed, Weekend World ends, but he still does, he still, he writes a column. He becomes more openly Thatcherite actually after that, because he's no longer got a TV show for a bit. And he's writing columns in the Sunday Times, interviewing her for the, like a newspaper interview, very, very sort of flattering. And then he gets this show called The Walden Interviews. And this pretty much coincides with this event in 1989 when Nigel Lawson has resigned. So the two are going to come together again because this interview has been pre-planned. And they're coming together at the moment of real crisis for her. And he has to decide how to tackle that interview.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  And the atmosphere in the press around this, particularly, you know, people on the left was that, oh, God, so when she's really on the ropes, who does it fall to to have the chance to interview her? But Brian Walden, who's that guy who likes her, and they get on, have you seen what he writes in the Sunday Times a few weeks ago? He may, he may have a TV show again, but he's a Thatcherite. And there was a piece, the morning of the interview, there was a piece in the independent newspaper, which was an attack piece on him and really said, you know, this is a moment of truth for you. Can you rise to this? We don't think you can. You're not actually a proper journalist, effectively. And it fell to him to make a choice. And he chose to go down the road of the toughest interview that he could possibly deliver. So included a lot on the mechanics of what happened.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  And she was blindsided, did not expect that. And I'm standing here watching this right as a twenty year old, watching it on telly as a student. And I'm thinking, she'll be fine, she's always fine. But there it was, a chink in the armour finally, when she appeared sort of ridiculous. She kept saying, he is unassailable, Nigel Lawson. Well, he wasn't, was he? Because you did, you kept your adviser and you didn't get rid of him. And, you know, she was, I don't know why he resigned. And he was like, you don't know why? Anyway, he was really tough on her. But then the absolute cherry on the cake with that really was that he then also decided to reflect back to her what people were saying about her, which was people in Westminster saying, and his quote was that you are off your trolley. When you think about that, it's quite a thing to say to the Prime Minister.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Especially when you are her friend. So it was a moment of real time, human interaction. He wouldn't have known all those, we now know the nuance, right? So we can watch it now, or you can watch it on YouTube, or you can watch the dramatization that's coming and really appreciate the human forces underneath that that were going on. At the time, it was, it was a bit just more that she seemed thrown and wasn't able to defend herself. But that was probably the reason she regarded it as a kind of betrayal. And they never spoke again after the interview. That was the last time that they ever communicated.

• 36:17Adam Buxton?

  When I watched the interview, I thought, when he mentioned the off your trolley thing.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:22Adam Buxton?

  I thought that he was trying to get her to come back. He wanted her to defend herself more robustly, to show that she wasn't as out of touch as some people thought she was.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  I think you're right. And that's not the only moment. There were moments where he says, almost like, you let people think you're this awful person.

• 36:42Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  I know you're not. You never, ever show it, he says at one point, you know. Can't you just, come on, come on, Margaret, rise to the occasion, but she just doesn't, it just doesn't compute for her. She just, that isn't the mode she's in when she's in that chair. So she wasn't, she wasn't able to be nimble enough to see that he was giving her an opportunity to say something back. Because she must have been stunned by off the trolley, off your trolley.

• 37:05Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, but it's almost like a son confronting his mother at, at a certain point and saying, look, mum, you've got too cranky. This is, this is what people are saying about you. And now I'm grown up enough that I can talk to you about this stuff. And here's your chance to change it. And if you've ever had a conversation like that with your parents, especially if they're the kind of parents that I had, you know that that conversation generally doesn't go well. They generally don't go, oh, you know what? You're right.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:41Adam Buxton?

  I'll think about it.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Hmm, all these years I've been doing it wrong.

• 37:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Let me put this to you, Prime Minister. It's a point that's always interested me, and I think it's now politically relevant. It may be the case that even private, you will have a lusty argument and you will listen to other people's opinions and that you're only too happy to accept a suggestion if it's correct. But you never come over in public like that, ever. You come over as being someone who one of your backbenchers said is slightly off her trolley. Authoritarian, domineering, refusing to listen to anybody else. Why? Why cannot you publicly project what you have just told me is your private character?

• 38:25Speaker 03

  Brian, if anyone's coming over as domineering in this interview, it's you. It's you.

• 38:31Adam Buxton?

  You think so.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Hammering things out instead of just talking them in a conversational way. Yes, you're very domineering at the moment.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  He's reached the point where he has to stop being like he was being with her. He stops being her friend or she's the prime minister, right? I mean, whatever he, even though he was a significant person. Number one is Mrs Thatcher.

• 38:48Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  And she was getting all the time from him, reinforcement of that effectively. Intellectually, personally. And this is the moment where he says, you know, I have to name you for what you are, which is a bit off your trolley, which is a difficult thing to say to her. And the power dynamic shifts almost on air as you watch it. You can feel it kind of, well, maybe I really, it feels like to me as I watch it now, that that power that was, if you can remember her, she was everywhere. She was always there. She was, you know, untouchable and suddenly she was a human. And she was a bit discombobulated. And, you know, a year later she was gone. So, you know, in many ways, I think you could say that this was the beginning of the end. And I was watching it on telly again, it just, it delivers. TV just delivered for me in my life, you know.

• 39:33Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  These moments, it was just extraordinary. And it was always in my head ever since that was in my head. And then when I got the chance to write the book, which is not about that, but I couldn't not tell that story. And then, you know, now it's a TV drama.

• 39:47Adam Buxton?

  It is very dramatic. Yesterday I was watching the second dramatization of the Emily Maitlis Prince Andrew.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Oh, did you watch it? Okay, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't seen them both.

• 39:57Adam Buxton?

  I watched Scoop, which was the first one, told from the point of view of one of the producers, played by Billy Piper, that central character.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Sam McAllister. She's a friend of mine, yeah.

• 40:07Adam Buxton?

  Right. And that was fine. But then last night I watched the new one, which is called A Very Royal Scandal.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Is Emily, Emily Maitlis, a version of events?

• 40:17Adam Buxton?

  Yes, I think so, yeah. So she's a producer on this version, although I don't think she wrote it.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, right.

• 40:25Adam Buxton?

  And she is played by Ruth Wilson. Uh Gillian Anderson played her in the

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:31Adam Buxton?

  Other one. And Ruth Wilson does quite a good vocal impression of Emily Maitlis, although it's it's very low. She does. Emily is is really quite gruffly spoken um with a low voice, but it's quite a good impression. Anyway, I thought it was good. And I thought it also delved a bit more than the previous one into the whole thing about what do long form political interviews mean nowadays?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:01Adam Buxton?

  And especially in the internet and social media age.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:06Adam Buxton?

  Because surely that is the thing, you know, your book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me? Is all about your love of the long form political interview and you're considering in there why it's not something that people do generally and thinking about all the reasons for that. And you do go into the fact that obviously a big part of that is the internet and social media. How how has that changed things?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so it's a it's a big, it's a well, it's not a big topic, but it's it needs to be contextualized, I think. I mean,

• 41:39Speaker 01

  the the point about the it's not that I just love them because I just like.

• 41:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  It's they're important. What what what what happens in democracies is that we need we we we're supposed to have elections every few years and we're supposed to make an assessment of people. The governments and, you know, decide to vote or when and when they're in power, we judge how they're doing and we do that. How are we going to do that? Personally, I don't find Parliament as a very effective way of that happening. Assessing it, holding it to account, talking about what they're doing. I don't really think Prime Minister's Questions does that in any way that's particularly useful for anybody. And I don't think most of the broadcast opportunities people have does that. Question Time is, you know, often I don't really watch it anymore because I find it unwatchable. Other programmes have interviews that last about six minutes at most. No one gets anywhere. Everyone's just being performative.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Politicians generally go into those interviews trying to avoid saying something rather than wanting to say something. Often broadcasters go into them trying to make a splash with a sort of big moment that that can be on social media. So what, why am I banging on about long performing political interviews? It's because that's the only, that's the best way that we can do that. A very important function, which is hold our leaders to account. Because we can only do it effectively if we actually sit with them for a long enough period to develop a conversation and an argument, know well the background. The journalist knows as well as the subject, the background and can put them under, under pressure. And when we don't have that, we lose a lot. You know, Mrs Thatcher in that moment, it wasn't good for her, obviously, but it was, it was incredibly important moment in, in British political modern history.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  And it wouldn't have happened at all if we hadn't had a culture at that time of valuing commitment to that sort of length of time for interviews.

• 43:21Adam Buxton?

  Yes. Last night you sent me, is it the introduction for your new book?

• 43:24Speaker 01

  It's, so it's not finished. So you, you're getting a very early sneak preview, only because I know that we, you, you're interested in the subject matter, which is about scandals.

• 43:32Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  And so I thought it'd be interesting to sort of show you what, what I was, how I was coming at it. Because I don't really want to come in it in a, in a traditional way. So I came at it slightly differently really, which is to tie it in with, as we, as some of our conversation, I think tying those events that you are in the news, within with your own life or with other cultural sort of factors that were going on.

• 43:51Adam Buxton?

  Hmm.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  That's kind of how I'm coming at the scandal thing.

• 43:54Adam Buxton?

  I'm reading at the moment, or I'm audio booking. Does that count as reading?

• 43:58Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah.

• 43:59Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, let's say yes. I am reading Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. And I'm reading it because I heard Rory Stewart mention it. And he was interviewing Mary Beard, who I had on the podcast and I saw this interview they did. And Rory Stewart said to Mary Beard, if you haven't read Robert Caro's extraordinary four volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, do. And so I thought, okay, sounds interesting. I'll look it up. And he was mentioning it because they'd been talking about kind of political monsters.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:30Adam Buxton?

  And.

• 44:32Adam Buxton?

  So I looked it up and just the audiobook version, the audiobook of all four volumes comes to a little over one hundred and thirty hours. So I worked out if you read every day for an hour, like if you read the actual physical version, it'd take you four and a half months just to read the first four volumes. I think there's a fifth.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  There's no one coming, isn't there? He's still alive, isn't he? He's still writing away.

• 44:56Adam Buxton?

  He's still writing away. The first one came out in nineteen eighty-two, The Path to Power.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Wow, how much have you listened to?

• 45:02Adam Buxton?

  Uh, I'm about thirteen hours in and it is absolutely brilliant.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 45:08Adam Buxton?

  Robert Carrer went and lived in Texas, in the part of Texas in the hill country where LBJ grew up and he lived there for three years, interviewing people and researching the land. You know, there's all these passages in the beginning of the book about what it was actually like to farm land up in the hill country of Texas back then.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:30Adam Buxton?

  And, you know, he talks about the ecology of the place and it's all so beautifully described and he talks about it being this trap because as soon, you know, it had been untouched for hundreds of years and it was this beautiful, pristine landscape, fertile landscape, but then only a few years after it started being cultivated, it was totally destroyed and it stopped being somewhere where you could make a good living as a farmer and it just became this punishing country to farm.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  But that's interesting. So that's, and that's kind of sufficiently general to appeal to people, right?

• 46:02Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  But then, like, the thing I thought is, like, am I really going to care about this nineteen twenty-three, like, whatever his act into, they were debating and how he got the vote through? Is that stuff fascinating as well, though?

• 46:13Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it is because it's in the context. He, he, he creates this picture of LBJ as a person that is really compelling. I mean, it's very cinematic.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 46:24Adam Buxton?

  And it's like, it feels like watching a mini-series. All these characters are beautifully drawn. He kind of hammers away at things as well so that they stick in your mind quite well. You get to know the characters and his mum and dad and brothers and sisters and the people around them and then people he went to college with and it's really, really well done.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I might, I might do it.

• 46:48Adam Buxton?

  I would recommend it, even if you've got no interest in the actual politics. Anyway, so your approach with your scandal book, though, you have a personal angle on it.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  So I mean, I remember the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. Do you remember that?

• 47:01Adam Buxton?

  I know what you're talking about, but I don't remember it at the time.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  So is it seventy nine?

• 47:05Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  So I was ten and you were ten and.

• 47:08Adam Buxton?

  That's another one that I only know through a dramatization.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yes, it did. Well, actually, and I think, I think actually one of the things I want to write about is dramatizations because there's, there's quite interesting stuff.

• 47:16Adam Buxton?

  That's the Hugh Grant one.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really, that's brilliant. It's actually Stephen Frears directed that. He's directed the one about Walden and Thatcher that I've done. But I remember the Thorpe one was, it's an extraordinary story about, you know, the leader of the Liberal Party, but being, well, he, he was acquitted, but went, went to court, you know, accused of the attempted murder of his gay lover. There's all sorts of things that were there in that that were kind of what on the news were just, what is this all about? He's a male model and he's, it was all this kind of slight innuendo and. And then there was this summing up by the judge, very supportive of Thorpe and very dismissive of the guy who actually had been, his dog was shot in the, in the attempt, the attempt of on his life allegedly, you know, he didn't, he was acquitted for this, but.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, he went through a trauma and he was the one that the judge was kind of castigating in this, in a very homophobic way and is summing up of the case. And so that was all going on telly. So that summer in seventy nine, Thatcher becomes Prime Minister, Jeremy Thorpe trial happens and, and he's acquitted and. And so again, it's just that thing of it being in the culture, you know, scandals in the culture.

• 48:17Adam Buxton?

  This is a sidebar, but my dad had a relationship when he was young with a woman called Bronwyn Pugh. And she was a model.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:29Adam Buxton?

  And then became Lady Asta.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Oh, Christ, Bronwyn Pugh, I do know the name. That's why, yeah, I know. Yeah, I know she is. Yeah.

• 48:35Adam Buxton?

  And.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  He had a relationship with her?

• 48:37Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 48:39Adam Buxton?

  My mom always resented the fact that my dad was so, you know, there's always, sometimes there's that person. And you sort of think, well, what would life have been like if I'd ended up with them?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Well, history might have been different because Lord, because Lord Asta was, you know, I was ever going to, of course, that was Clifton, wasn't it? It was, it was where it all happened.

• 48:55Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, right. So, yeah, what was the deal? So, so she?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  So Stephen Ward, who was the guy, this strange, at the heart of the Perdido scandal is, is this strange man, Stephen Ward, and no one quite knows what his motivation was, but he was, he befriended. Young girls or young women and sort of facilitated them meeting men who were, sometimes powerful or aristocratic or whatever. And he had a, he had a sort of permanent cottage in Clivedon, which is the stately home of Astor. So Bronwyn Pugh would have been Lady Astor. So at the period of time when Stephen Ward had this, there's this little cottage and when in 1961, was it, I think it was, he came to the swimming pool there with Christine Keeler. And that was where Jack Perfumo first saw Christine Keeler and I think made a mental note

• 49:42Speaker 01

  that he intended to get to know her better on the basis of that, that occasion at the swimming pool. And that happened, that subsequently happened and the whole scandal goes from there. Although I'm actually quite interested in Christine Keeler. Stephen Ward is the kind of, he's at the centre of it, but I think Christine Keeler is quite a fascinating subject, actually. Because she was hated for years.

• 50:00Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. That was, it seemed like that was a fairly straightforwardly kind of misogynistic angle that people had on her.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  What did she do wrong? I mean, Jack Perfumo was, I'll have to check, but I think he's in his 40s or 50s. He has a sexual relationship with a girl of the age of 17, who was very innocent of the world, you know, was very certainly, you know, wasn't mixed in his social circles and got involved with, with this. And years later, when, do you remember the film came out, Scandal?

• 50:28Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. Pet Shop Boys did the soundtrack.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  They did. And John Wally Kilmer's in it. And it was really good. And, well, I loved it. And Sue Lawley was standing in for Terry Wogan. Again, it's telly. And she was doing the Terry Wogan Show when Christine Keeler and John Hurt came on. John Hurt was playing Stephen Ward. So Christine Keeler's there and they're talking about the movie. And one thing that's interesting is that it seems amazing now is that there was a lot of opposition to this movie ever being made. Because it was felt it was reopening this awful scandal and we shouldn't be talking about this thing. But it was made and it was controversial that was made. And so Lawley was saying, you know, why have you made it? It's a terrible thing. So that's the implication. And then she said, hasn't John Perfumo and his family suffered enough? And she was saying, well, I'm the one that they're all calling a vice queen, you know,

• 51:12Speaker 01

  they, she was the one that's been sort of ostracized and hated. And then she comes back to me and she says, what possible good can this movie do for John Profimo? And I sort of thought, wow, it's amazing.

• 51:23Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  How we would view that from today's prism. But she was, you know, it was the cold hatred of her, even many, many years after the events, is, you know, it's amazing story really. And her son is really great. He's been leading a campaign to kind of rehabilitate her reputation.

• 51:37Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Uh, I had a good chat with him. So, you know, I said, that's, so that's how I'm trying to come at it. But it's, it's early days.

• 52:00Adam Buxton?

  You used to be in bands, right?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Bad bands.

• 52:03Adam Buxton?

  Did you have any success or were you just a total amateur?

• 52:06Speaker 01

  A total, a total amateur, yeah, yeah, total amateur. But it was, it was quite fun to go through the process of doing it.

• 52:11Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  But yeah, we, we, yeah, I had a band like when I was sixteen and we, we tried to, nothing happened. And then we had a band, a high Brit pop.

• 52:19Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah. What were you called?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Uh, we were called, I think we had a terrible, the latter band was called The High Kind.

• 52:25Adam Buxton?

  The High Kind?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 52:27Adam Buxton?

  I don't think it's right.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  I just.

• 52:28Adam Buxton?

  Where does that name come from?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Fuck knows, it was just terrible. It was awful. What?

• 52:31Adam Buxton?

  It's like a line from a poem or something?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not good, but it was, uh, it was, it was, yeah, it was all right to do it. It was, it was good to go through the process. Sometimes you just, I remember thinking, you've, you've hung out, you must hang out with bands and stuff.

• 52:43Adam Buxton?

  Sure.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Is that, do they have a good time?

• 52:46Adam Buxton?

  Do they have a good time?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Do you think they have a good time?

• 52:48Adam Buxton?

  They seem to have an amazing time before they get successful.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:53Adam Buxton?

  And then as soon as success comes along, it's fun for a year or so, and then it seems to be a real ball ache.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:01Adam Buxton?

  And. Um. And then they fall out and then they split up. And if they stay together, then it's just non-stop stress, as far as I can tell.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Because I'm not that it was ever close to anything happening, like success-wise, but just the sort of drudgery of like doing it and how getting guitars, all the practicalities. I thought, imagine if this actually happened, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be that great, really. It's quite fun writing songs and like being creative. That's the fun thing, but.

• 53:25Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. The cliche is always like when you're out playing shows, when you tour, then it's fun when you're on stage, but everything around it is not so fun.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like I say, I never got anywhere near it, but I just remember thinking this probably wouldn't be that much fun. So it's probably fine for a rock star.

• 53:39Adam Buxton?

  Do you still play music?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  No, not really.

• 53:41Adam Buxton?

  What was your instrument?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Guitar. Yeah, I was guitar and vocals, but no, I don't do, I don't do it anymore. In fact, I'm really, yeah, it's almost like I don't want to touch a guitar again.

• 53:48Adam Buxton?

  Really?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:50Adam Buxton?

  Oh, dear.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  A bit like that. Just became, just began, you put your heart and soul into it. It's just, it becomes, you just think, you know, I'll do other things that will be much better at, so it's fine.

• 53:59Adam Buxton?

  It broke your heart.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, many ways it did.

• 54:01Adam Buxton?

  Oh, mate.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:02Adam Buxton?

  That's no good, though, because music's the best thing in the world.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  It is fucking amazing. I love it so much, but it was great to not, to forget, you know, like it's, it's almost that thing of you, here's the thing I wanted to do.

• 54:12Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  I wasn't good enough at it, so let's just move on from that. And that feels good.

• 54:16Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, okay, fair enough. You may, you, you, you came to terms with your mediocrity.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:23Adam Buxton?

  And you went in and did something that you could properly be good at.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:27Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  That's all right, isn't it?

• 54:29Adam Buxton?

  I suppose so, but don't turn your back on the guitar.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Hey, man, I won't, not, not, not when it's played by other people. I know it's lovely, but I don't really want to play it myself.

• 54:36Adam Buxton?

  Did you ever find your voice, though, at least? Were you able to sing in a way that sounded sort of authentic? Or were you always doing an impression of someone?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it was a bit authentic. It was all, yeah, it's all really into, really influenced by Britpop.

• 54:49Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Britpop was exciting.

• 54:50Adam Buxton?

  It was.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  People forget about it. It was really great because like suddenly like records you liked were like number one.

• 54:56Adam Buxton?

  I liked it because I felt disenfranchised from that American scene of kind of industrial metal that was getting more and more popular. Nine Inch Nails and the Limp Bizkit and that, that harder edged rock.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:10Adam Buxton?

  I never got with. And then I was never a raver. Were you?

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Eventually.

• 55:16Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  But not in like nineteen eighty eight, more like two thousand.

• 55:20Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  The whole thing with like dance music was just everywhere. It was everything. And it was kind of my beef though was quite fun.

• 55:27Adam Buxton?

  I think my problem was that I wasn't into the drugs and I couldn't deal with the music without being intoxicated. I didn't get it. I think I missed out. But for me, Britpop was suddenly like, oh, this is much nicer.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:44Adam Buxton?

  Because at the end of the eighties, all the, the, the, the first wave of rave left me cold.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too. Actually, like I say, it wasn't until later I got, I understood it a bit more.

• 55:53Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, but when Supergress came along, that was the main thing. When Oasis came along, I just thought, I don't know. It sounded a bit too status quo.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 56:02Adam Buxton?

  And then Supergress, I thought, yes, please, it, cause it was more silly and

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:08Adam Buxton?

  uh quirky and

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then Pulp.

• 56:10Adam Buxton?

  Pulp loved it.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 56:12Adam Buxton?

  And, yeah, and I liked Blur as well.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought they were great.

• 56:17Adam Buxton?

  They were very good. And I saw them live and wow, they were a lot better live than anyone else, really.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Did you ever see Pulp live there?

• 56:24Adam Buxton?

  No, not back then. I've seen them since.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  I saw them the night of, the more, the night after he did the thing with Michael Jackson, the Brits.

• 56:30Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Which is so funny to watch that back, if you ever do, if you watch the coverage, it's like, there were like people on G, on GMTV, or it wasn't then. The next morning going, this just, just really serious about how terrible it was, what's, what happened and what he'd done. It was just so awful.

• 56:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  You know, like what a disgrace it was. He really disgraced the Brits.

• 56:47Adam Buxton?

  I know.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  I look back on it now, it's like, boy, it was just wonderful. He did that.

• 56:52Adam Buxton?

  It was great. I know he had a really terrible time.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:55Adam Buxton?

  He was vilified.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  It's incredible, isn't it?

• 56:58Adam Buxton?

  Just for jumping up there. I think the spin that they tried to give it was that he hurt some of the children.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  No, I think that was Michael.

• 57:11Adam Buxton?

  Wait. This is an ad for Squarespace. Okay, we'll return to the AI apocalypse in just a wee wee moment, but first I wanted to talk about Squarespace. Do you know about Squarespace, Steve? Uh, yes, Monty. I think I might even be a little bit more tuned into modern tech, websites, et cetera, than you. I don't know, just guessing. Oh, Steve, I love this dynamic. I'm old and conservative and you're young and progressive and that's what makes the Newswind podcast such great listening. But yes, you're right, I must admit, I didn't know much about Squarespace. But because my new grumble book, Hell in a Handcart, is out this month. And I look forward to getting enraged by that. So I should hope. Em, em, em. Anyway, the publishers, Bluestar and Dogwhistle, made a beautiful website for the book using Squarespace. I know, I got the newsletter that you sent out using Squarespace and the website

• 57:53Adam Buxton?

  does look great. Videos of you airing your views, members' areas for your mad fans. You've even got a merch store, I see. That's right, a Union Jack top hat is a big seller. But they constructed it all so fast with Squarespace. They did most of it over one lunchtime, Steve. Well, you wouldn't want to spend much longer on it, would you? Shut up, Steve. But here's the thing, anyone listening to this can start a free trial right now at squarespace.com/boxton and see how easy and versatile Squarespace is. And when they're ready to launch a new website or domain, they can save 10% off their first purchase by using the offer code BOXTON at checkout. Right, well, maybe I'll visit squarespace.com/boxton and start a new website just to refute all the nonsense in your new book. Oh, don't do that, Steve. I will. Oh, shut up, Steve. Uh. Shut up. Now, back to more depressing matters on Newswind.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Continue.

• 58:50Adam Buxton?

  Hey, welcome back to Windy Wood Podcasts. That was Rob Burley talking to me there. I'm very grateful to Rob for making the time to come and chat. And yeah, I didn't realise when I was talking to him that the Brian and Maggie drama was going to be coming out this January, so I just wanted to put this episode out before that dropped. I've seen it, really enjoyed it. As I said, Harriet Walter. Is spectacular. They're all very good. Coogan, always good, but Harriet Walter, wow. What a thatch. There's also links in the description to the original Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher interview. And there's a link to Rob's book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me?, which I recommend for a

• 59:36Adam Buxton?

  often humorous and insightful perspective on the world of political TV. So yeah, it's already been quite an eventful 2025. But one of the things that hit me on a personal level was David Lynch's death. That was one of those moments where I felt genuinely sad. That someone I never knew was gone. He was on my podcast guest wishlist from day one. But it never happened, obviously. I just thought he was great and in the last few years, he's one of those people that I just spend a lot of time watching in interview form on YouTube.

• 1:00:19Adam Buxton?

  I've probably spent longer watching interviews with him on YouTube than I've actually spent watching his films, much as I like them. Here's some Lynch notes. He was the perfect artist, I think. His life and work seemed to me like an extreme illustration of what it is to be human.

• 1:00:39Adam Buxton?

  He was capable of tapping into and portraying in dreamlike, disturbing ways the absolute worst that people are capable of and the hell on earth that we can create, which is there, of course, in so many of his films. There's the nightmarish isolation of Eraserhead. There's the cruelty of the mob in The Elephant Man. Everything about the character of Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, which is a film that I walked out of when I went to the cinema to see it with Joe and Louis when it came out in the eighties. And I was watching Mark Commode do a nice tribute to David Lynch the other day and he walked out of it too.

• 1:01:23Adam Buxton?

  But like me, he later came to think very differently of that film. Not too long ago, I was watching Isabella Rossellini speaking about it and that's worth looking up. But he was so interesting because that there was such a stark contrast to all that in his personal life. He was so sort of sweet and kind to people, as far as I can tell. He was, he's always very funny, like really funny. And he was a champion for peace and love and blissful appreciation of existence through transcendental meditation, which

• 1:02:03Adam Buxton?

  was a big part of his life. I've put a few links in the description to some profiles and documentaries that look interesting. Some of them I haven't seen, others I have. The problem with a lot of profiles of David Lynch is that they're made by people who love him so much that they feel they need to try and evoke his style somehow. And they, with the framing of the shots, with the music, with a kind of slightly obscure approach to the interview questions. But I think that he was at his best when people just came at him fairly straight. And I think you can see that in a very short but nicely put

• 1:02:43Adam Buxton?

  together tribute made in 2020 by a YouTuber called Cosmavoid. And it has a slightly clickbaity title, David Lynch being a madman for eight and a half minutes, solid or something. But it's a really good little compilation of moments and a, a, a moving encapsulation of, of what made him so great. But if you want to delve deeper and spend longer, which I do recommend, I don't think you'll regret it. I really love the documentary, The Art Life, which I've mentioned a few times on the podcast, I think. There's a documentary about the speaking tour David Lynch did a few years back, in which he talked about

• 1:03:24Adam Buxton?

  the importance of transcendental meditation in his life. Haven't seen that yet. I'm looking, well, I've, I've seen a bit of it. And it looks good. I want to find out more. I mean, the way he talks about it is, well, it makes me want to try it. Maybe this year. So farewell.

• 1:03:46Adam Buxton?

  Excellent, David Lynch.

• 1:03:49Adam Buxton?

  Okay, that's it for this week. The podcast will be back on a more regular basis in a few weeks. I'm not sure exactly when, probably towards the end of March, when I'll be with you putting out episodes regularly. Thank you so much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support on this episode. Thanks to everybody at Acast for their continued hard work keeping the show on the road, liaising with my sponsors, et cetera. Thank you to Helen Green for her beautiful artwork. She's still busy refining a new image of my face for the cover of my book, which is, I think, weeks away from finally being completed, maybe even less.

• 1:04:31Adam Buxton?

  There is a link in the description so that you can preorder it. I would greatly appreciate it if you did. It should be out in May, I hope, that's the current plan. Thank you most of all to you for coming back and joining me. Very nice to be with you again. Hope you're doing okay. Come over here, let's have a hug. I've got my ski jacket on, so I don't smell too bad.

• 1:04:56Adam Buxton?

  Good to see you. All right, Doglegs, let's get back to that warm kitchen. And until next time, we share the same outdoor space. Go carefully, and for what it's worth, I do love you. Bye.