Face to Face (TV series)

"Face To Face" was a 35 episode BBC television series broadcast between 1959 and 1962. The insightful and often probing style of the interviewer, former politician John Freeman, distinguished it from other programmes of its genre at the time. The camera angles and shots were also distinctive, with Freeman out of shot and the camera always on the subject, sometimes concentrating on a nervously smoked cigarette or a close-up of a face. The theme music was an excerpt from the overture to Berlioz' opera "Les Francs-juges". The titles for each episode featured caricatures of that week's subject drawn by Feliks Topolski. An exception to the usual format of an interview in a television studio was the edition with Carl Gustav Jung, conducted at his home in Switzerland.

The programme's best-remembered guests from the first run are Tony Hancock and Gilbert Harding, both of whom seemed disturbed by the questioning, but both of whom later endorsed Freeman's interview style. Harding wept as he recalled his relationship with his mother, and the programme with Hancock is considered to have been a contributing factor in his ultimate self-destruction because it is assumed to have enhanced his inclination to be self-critical. On one occasion an interviewee attempted rather underhand tactics to succeed in enduring his ordeal. The novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote to a mutual friend of Freeman and himself, the Labour politician Tom Driberg, asking for information to disarm his interlocutor during the proceedings.

Revived in 1989 with Jeremy Isaacs as its host, the questioner attempted to mimic the style of his predecessor with a similar interview technique. However, most of this later series' subjects were more familiar with the medium than the earlier guests, so it was quite difficult to catch them off guard. Some of these interviews were featured as part of the arts series "The Late Show". Running until 1998, the revival actually had a longer overall run than the original.

Episodes of the original "Face to Face" were shown frequently on BBC Knowledge and still turn up occasionally on BBC Four, especially during seasons such as "The Lost Decade" in October 2005. 29 of the original 35 episodes have been repeated, the exceptions being; Nubar Gulbenkian, Roy Welensky, Stirling Moss, General Von Senger, Victor Gollancz and Danny Blanchflower. The soundtrack of the interview with Stirling Moss was issued on the 'B' side of an LP which also featured the soundtrack of the interview with Hancock.

Of all the interviewees, only Adam Faith appeared in both series.

Incomplete list of Subjects

Original Series (1959-1962)

*Lord Birkett - 4 February, 1959
*Bertrand Russell - 4 March, 1959
*Dame Edith Sitwell - 6 May, 1959
*Lord Boothby - 27 May, 1959
*Nubar Gulbenkian - 15 July, 1959
*Adlai Stevenson - 22 July, 1959
*John Huston - 1 September, 1959
*Carl Gustav Jung - 22 October, 1959
*Lord Morrison of Lambeth - 18 December, 1959
*King Hussein of Jordan - 1 January, 1960
*Lord Shawcross - 10 January, 1960
*Tony Hancock - 7 February, 1960
*Henry Moore - 21 February, 1960
*Dr Hastings Banda - 22 April, 1960
*Augustus John - 15 May, 1960
*Sir Roy Welensky - 29 May, 1960
*Stirling Moss - 12 June, 1960
*Evelyn Waugh - 26 June, 1960
*Gilbert Harding - 18 September, 1960
*General Von Senger - 2 October, 1960
*Lord Reith - 30 October, 1960
*Simone Signoret - 13 November, 1960
*Victor Gollancz - 27 November, 1960
*Adam Faith - 11 December, 1960
*Otto Klemperer - 8 January, 1961
*Frank Cousins - 15 October, 1961
*Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr - 29 October, 1961
*Lord Hailsham - 12 November, 1961
*Jomo Kenyatta - 26 November, 1961
*Sir Compton Mackenzie - 7 January, 1962
*John Osborne - 21 January, 1962
*Roy Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet - 4 February, 1962
*Cecil Beaton - 18 February, 1962
*Albert Finney - 4 March, 1962
*Danny Blanchflower - 18 March, 1962

Revival (1989-1998)

* Anthony Burgess - 21 March, 1989
* Merce Cunningham - 5 April, 1989
* David Hare - 16 May, 1989
* George Steiner - 31 May, 1989
* Bernardo Bertolucci - 26 September, 1989
* J.G. Ballard - 7 November, 1989
* Oliver Sacks - 24 January, 1990
* Claire Bloom - 15 February, 1990
* James Fenton - 20 March, 1990
* Roger Corman - 24 May, 1990
* Oliver Stone - 11 September, 1990
* Hans Eysenck - 16 October, 1990
* Edmund White - 20 November, 1990
* David Attenborough - 21 January, 1991
* Vanessa Redgrave - 26 September, 1991
* Norman Stone - 15 October, 1991
* Jessye Norman - 10 February, 1992
* Steven Berkoff - 21 May, 1992
* Rod Steiger - 16 September, 1992
* Susan Sontag - 10 November, 1992
* John Schlesinger - 8 February, 1993
* Derek Jarman - 15 March, 1993
* Jonathan Miller - 12 May, 1993
* Peter Hall - 23 September, 1993
* Martin Amis - 25 October, 1993
* David Hockney - 10 November, 1993
* Kirk Douglas - 13 December, 1993
* Joseph Heller - 17 January, 1994
* Steven Spielberg - 31 January, 1994
* Billy Connolly - 28 February, 1994
* V.S. Naipaul - 16 May, 1994
* Maya Angelou - 6 June, 1994
* Jeanette Winterson - 20 June, 1994
* Ken Loach - 19 September, 1994
* Salman Rushdie - 19 October, 1994
* Allen Ginsberg - 9 January, 1995
* Arthur Miller - 13 February, 1995
* Ken Dodd - 13 March, 1995
* Lauren Bacall - 20 March, 1995
* Anthony Hopkins - 18 September, 1995
* John Berger - 2 October, 1995
* Stephen Sondheim - 9 October, 1995
* Martha Gellhorn - 16 October, 1995
* Norman Mailer - 23 October, 1995
* Paul Eddington - 30 October, 1995
* Germaine Greer - 6 November, 1995
* Harold Pinter - 21 January, 1997
* Kate Adie - 28 January, 1997
* Alan Parker - 4 February, 1997
* Roddy Doyle - 11 February, 1997
* Diana Rigg - 18 February, 1997
* Bob Monkhouse - 25 February, 1997
* Denis Forman - 13 October, 1997
* Ben Elton - 12 January, 1998
* Ian McKellen - 19 January, 1998
* Joan Baez - 26 January, 1998
* Martin Bell - 9 February, 1998
* Yoko Ono - 16 February, 1998
* David Mamet - 23 February, 1998
* Jeremy Isaacs - 14 September, 1998

Further reading

* A book of the same name was published in 1964 with the portraits by Felix Topolski. (Jonathan Cape, London, 1964; Stein & Day, New York, 1965.)
* A further anthology appeared in 1989 and was published by BBC Books. Introduced by Joan Bakewell, and tied in with a (terrestrial) screening of selected episodes, it includes transcripts of the programmes with Bertrand Russell, Henry Moore, Stirling Moss, Gilbert Harding, Adam Faith and Albert Finney; the Hancock interview was excluded.