A Life In Questions by Jeremy Paxman

(William Collins, £20)

Reviewed by Julie McDowall

THERE are clues that Jeremy Paxman isn’t taking this book seriously or, despite the brief of delivering a memoir, that he’s intent on guarding his privacy behind a high wall of humour.

The photographs have captions like “Waiting to be told to do some damn stupid thing by a director”, while the back flap has supportive quotes such as: “Stay well away from me” (Piers Morgan). There are also cartoons.

“It’s just some stuff that happened,” says the former Newsnight anchor, keen to lower our expectations, and keener still to mock those hoping for grubby personal details. To them, he tosses a few morsels: “I don’t sleep very well and I don’t much like kale … occasionally I sit on the loo and shoot squirrels out of the bathroom window.” He drops a causal reference to his depression – but by placing it amongst the kale and squirrels it’s clear that those looking for tears and intimacy won’t find them. It’s just some stuff that happened.

There is a sense that this memoir has been prised out of Paxman by a publisher. His other books don’t bristle with such lofty reluctance, so it’s probably with relief that Paxman found he could frame his childhood as an eccentric English fairy tale. Instead of realism, and the revelations it drags with it, we have a young boy in Rose Cottage, raised beside fruit trees and the cricket green. But, as with all fairy tales, the monster arrives. Paxman’s stern father returns from sea and the child “runs away screaming”. Relations do not improve, and Jeremy is “thrashed with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps, cricket bats or the flat of his hand”.

Our young hero escapes to school and the weird tale gets weirder still, going from Rose Cottage to Lickey Hills where frogs leap at him in the coal bunker and his teachers are missing various eyes and fingers.

Paxman’s tales of boarding school will be familiar to readers of Roald Dahl’s Boy, where young pupils acted as “fags” and were sent to freezing lavatory blocks to warm toilet seats for the older boys. When young Jeremy is caned for showing disrespect he is told: “The purpose of a public school education, Paxman, is to teach you to respect people you don’t respect.”

This is an excellent section, rich with vivid and eccentric characters: lunatic headmasters, Teddy Boys and Aunty Kathleen, who “spoke like a duchess slightly perplexed at the way the butler had laid the table”. But sadly this doesn’t continue.

When Paxman joins the BBC, quaint old England is left behind and we become concerned with war zones and politics. People are replaced by events. Arthur Scargill, Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher zip by without being given the same warm literary gloss as Aunty Kathleen. The keen portraiture of idiosyncratic teachers and maiden aunts is replaced with a journalist’s brisk, factual reporting. Perhaps there is too much of the journalist in Paxman to allow him to embellish a person in the public eye, but it does make the book frustratingly inconsistent. It’s like sitting in a room full of unopened presents.

But if the reader can acclimatise to the abrupt change, there are rewards. The book's middle section offers potted histories of 20th-century horror, taking in the death squads of El Salvador and the country’s notorious Treasury Police, who marched in goosestep, each one behind mirrored sunglasses so the mass resembled “a sinister giant insect”. He recalls the ethnic cleansing and despair of Yugoslavia, and there is a particularly strong section on Northern Ireland, “the roads often blocked by hijacked burning buses, streetlights disabled and the areas generally dark, dank and eerily quiet but for the sound of howling dogs”.

Although this section is more concerned with place than people, the strangeness of humanity occasionally peeps through. As a young journalist in Belfast, Paxman was warned he was “on a list”. Returning after a safe period abroad, and unsure of his reception, he found himself being offered a puppy by Gerry Adams.

Unfortunately, the closing section lapses into a rather pedestrian instruction manual for journalists, and one chapter resembles a Q&A for aspiring TV presenters, with penetrating questions like: “Do you wear your own clothes on screen?”

Reading this book, you’ll acquire knowledge of subjects from Belfast to Bosnia, from nuclear war to the charms of Blackpool, but Paxman remains as elusive as ever, and he mocks the reader for wanting more: “To attach particular importance to those who report the news is like being more interested in the handles of the coffin than in the life of the person inside.”

He’s being disingenuous. Paxman is such a formidable figure, a gruff national treasure, that he can’t blame us for wanting to know him, and so the frustrated reader might close this book sounding just like Jeremy: “Oh, come on!”