Time to ask Aspel

11/12/2008

 The timing of our interview is almost uncanny. 11am on Remembrance Day. We wait for the wreaths to be laid, the last post to be sounded and the two minutes silence to end – and by then both of us are in reflective mood.

 

“It’s still so emotional,” he says, “and of course while this year is the 90th anniversary of the First World War ending, we’ve got the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second coming up.”

 

And with that landmark on the horizon, Michael is launching a five- programme series on ITV 1 this December entitled ‘Evacuees Reunited’.  Michael, aged just seven, was one of a staggering 3.5 million youngsters packed off from their homes to be billeted (sometimes willingly, sometimes not) upon households in safer parts of the country.

 

We agree that now is an excellent time to start looking back at these experiences. “I know everyone goes on about how you can’t remember things that happened last Wednesday when you get older, but things from your distant past are very clear. But there is some truth in that – especially if the events were very emotional and even traumatic.”

 

 Traumatic? “In many ways, yes. I was taken away from my home in London and separated from my family. I know everyone says that they remember being the last child to be chosen, but I have vivid memories of being the only one left in the hall.”

 

In the event, life in Chard, Somerset, proved to be a boy’s heaven for the young Michael. For four and a half years he was in the care of ‘Auntie’ Rose and ‘Uncle’ Cyril Grabham. “They let me roam free. I turned into a bit of a rough, wild child and ended up being forbidden to see my brother and sister. It was certainly exciting and opened my mind.

 

“Probably the best time was when the US troops came along.” It was, he agreed, a relationship based mainly on chocolate. “We’d go along scavenging. The only disappointing thing from my perspective was that until that point there was a lovely girl who used to take me to see the pictures sometimes. I never saw her after the Americans arrived.”

 

Meeting his old friends from that time for the programme, fellow evacuees Ronnie Bronstein and Albie Mallows , was, he says, “Extraordinary. We were inseparable as kids. But what would it be like meeting them again? I did meet up with Ronnie in 1980 when Eamon Andrews came out with his big red book. With Albie, who I hadn’t seen since 1944, his grin was the same and the years fell away. But it’s odd, even though the faces may have changed somewhat, and they aren’t wearing a cap any more, there’s something not visible that you feel.”

 

So what impact did those years running wild have upon him? “I suppose 
it made me restless,” he says, hinting at the changes in his personal life along the way. “You don’t really know all the reasons why one does what one does, and whether it’s your character you were born with, or what happens to you, but I have always found it difficult to settle down – all my adult life.”

 

‘Evacuees Reunited’, of course, represents just the latest in a long lineage of programmes that Michael has memorably fronted over the years. He started life as a radio actor before advancing to TV announcer at the old Lime Grove studios.  “This was in the days when you were smartly dressed in the afternoon, doing the continuity with ‘Watch with Mother’ and so on, but in the evenings you had to wear a dinner jacket and I remember the paper collars. It didn’t matter what else you wore. The thing was, there was only one dinner jacket for all the announcers – and it was huge. I had to wear it with pegs in the back.”

 

Then the big break. “It was Christmas 1960 and Richard Baker was ill, 
so I was on reading the news.” That lasted until 1968 and, as many readers will recall, his work afterwards included fronting ‘This Is Your Life’, ‘Ask Aspel’ and the most famous Friday afternoon programme of them all: ‘Crackerjack’. “And yes, I do get people coming up to me and asking for a pencil,” he concedes. “Although I wasn’t on there as long as Eamon and Leslie Crowther, or the wonderful Peter Glaze.”

 

Perhaps most famously, he had a long stint as a chat show host on ‘Aspel and Company’ – with guests including a spectacularly inebriated Oliver Reed. “Some people might have worried about that, but I was thrilled. It was good television. If you invite someone like Oliver Reed on, you should know what you’re going to get. Mind you, he had a lot of mischief in his eyes. I think he knew what he was doing!”

 

In recent years he has been the avuncular host of Antiques Roadshow 
and as he readily confesses, leaving that programme has been the most 
painful of all. “When I watch it, it’s still a fresh wound,” he says. 

 

“It has a real magic – part detective programme, part game show. And 
it always looks so glorious too.”

 

And for the future? I’m not sure. I’ve only just finished this programme. I’m certainly not ‘retiring’ – in fact I refuse to use that word. At some point I might get some writing done.” A memoir? “I don’t know about that. I did write up my evacuee experiences a long time ago. To write a best selling book they want you to say things that will hurt people. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

 

One story that wouldn’t get a lot of coverage in any book he wrote is his ‘brush with cancer’ which he says is a lot of fuss over nothing. 

“I’ve got low grade Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma,” he says, “and the News of 
the World got hold of this. But there really is nothing to get very worried about – I haven’t even bothered to get treatment for it.”

 

Curiously, a programme that did appear to ‘dish the dirt’ on his life was screened several years ago: ‘Sex, Lies and Michael Aspel’, in which it was ‘revealed’ that Pamela Anderson, Angie Best and Valerie Singleton were amongst his many conquests and that he had fathered some famous offspring.

 

“What was particularly funny was that many people tuned in half way  through the programme and didn’t realise it was a spoof,” he says. 

 

“But it was brilliantly done – all ad libbed and very funny.”

 

So does he wish that some of the stories were true? “Absolutely!” he 
laughs.