Joan Bakewell opens her front door, leads me into her elegant, art-filled, double-height-ceilinged central London home, apologises for the mess, of which there is none, and starts talking about Rory Stewart, whose book is on the sofa. It would be great to be him, we both agree – floating above everything, commenting. She likes the guy fine (I’m on the fence), but that’s not her way: she can’t help feeling responsible, as though she should be helping. She’s spent the morning poring over the awful events in Israel and Gaza, wondering what she could do. Her attitude comes from the era in which she was raised, she says: “First of all the war – never again. Then the discovery of the Holocaust. There was a feeling that you had to sign up to the future and make it better.” I make a kneejerk association of nostalgia with narrow-mindedness, but Bakewell, when she mentions it, brings the past into the room in a completely different way. The things she misses – optimism, collective ambition, cultural bravery, artistic daring, civic responsibility – aren’t the unattainable relics of a vanished time: they’re all things we could have again, if we just took them seriously.
Bakewell is 90, which tells in some ways (“No, it was not that long ago – it must have been in the 80s,” she says at one point) and not in others. She is chic as hell, in a cornflower blue jumper and red patent Mary Janes, and – sorry, this is coarse, from a feminist newspaper – could easily be 70. We’re here to discuss what will be her final season on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, which she fronts with Stephen Mangan. It’s a charming show, in its 10th season, though we slip into some light whingeing about why every damn thing on TV has to be a competition. “It’s very fun, isn’t it?” she says, cheerfully, before immediately zoning in on a fundamental social value, that “they do make a point of being diverse, on race, colour, class, inclusive of the disabled”. On the one hand, it’s no more than you’d expect, but on the other, it is unbelievably hard to catch a break in the art world, and over the 10 years the show has been running, its £10,000 prize commission, along with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, has changed contestants’ lives. “The commission goes into a posh place afterwards,” she says. “The National Gallery of Ireland has got two, I think, the Museum of Cardiff, the Royal Albert Hall.” Returning to the diversity theme: “Age,” she says, “perhaps not so much. There aren’t many 80-year-olds giving their opinions.”
The contestants paint Bakewell as one of their challenges, which is droll, as they’re all a bit scared of her: one calls her “stern”, another wonders if they’ve caught her “angry eyes”. “I wonder if they were a little bit cowed by my authority,” she says, drily, “but I might just have been bored. You have to sit for four hours; I didn’t have anything to do.”
I thought leaving Portrait Artist of the Year represented Bakewell’s retirement: “Oh no,” she says. “I’m still freelance.” She would love to do a programme on why “artistic people are so creative in old age”. She broadens her scope somewhat: “A programme on what it’s like being old.” Yes, on that: what is it like? “Well, you have to stay fit. I had an operation for [colon] cancer, 18 months ago, and recovered. I only managed part of the chemotherapy because it was so horrible. And also, I thought: ‘I’m 90. I’m going to die soon.’”
I express my scepticism about that, not to be polite, just because dying tends to be really hard work. You have to start declining first. “One of the strangest things about life is that nobody thinks about dying,” she says. “When you get older, you do think about it, particularly when you open the paper and another friend has died. People die. Everybody dies. Isn’t it scandalous? The idea that your children will one day reach the age when they die, I just find unacceptable.”
Her delivery is simultaneously so puckish, and so serious, and it catapults you straight back to her career as an arts correspondent. She was the first person ever to cover the arts on TV as if they were news – she invented that. It was her effervescent gravity that made discussing cultural events … well, not boring. She got a Bafta fellowship four years ago, for a lifetime’s contribution to television, but that wasn’t the half of it. She contributed to creativity in all its major forms, just by making people want to listen to her talk about it.
Anyway, before we get on to that: you can probably do the maths yourself, but Bakewell was six when the second world war broke out; 12 when it ended. “I remember my father taking me into the garden in my pyjamas and lifting me up. He said, ‘Look, I want you to look at that light over there in the sky.’ It looked like a great sun. And he said, ‘That’s Manchester burning.’”
She grew up at a “very repressive time”, punished constantly for talking at her Cheshire grammar school (it became a comprehensive after her time). Her parents were working-class, very aspirational; her father was a huge source of support to her, her mother, not so much. “I can see now that she must have looked at my life and thought, ‘I didn’t get those chances.’ She lived until I went to Cambridge [Bakewell’s mother died young, of leukaemia] and came to see me there. I remember when I got my degree: I had the gown, I was so proud, it was such an achievement, no one in the family had ever had a degree, and I remember her saying, ‘You look a disgrace – why didn’t you have your hair done by the hairdresser?’ and me thinking, ‘But I’ve got this degree!’” Even this, Bakewell recasts as good fortune, since it made her eager to get away from home, completely intoxicated by being around people her own age who weren’t nagging her: “You can talk with your own generation about absolutely everything.”
She has this infuriating habit of talking down her intelligence – plainly the gift of a critical mother – but she also insists that it doesn’t bother her, not in the slightest. “I was rather pretty. I wasn’t clever, but pretty was enough to get me into a lot of places.” It irks to think of her on the show that brought her to prominence, Late Night Line-Up (1964 to 1972), sitting opposite the “wonderful” likes of Clive James, George Melly, Jonathan Miller, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, with all those huge male egos thinking, “Well, this is nice – she’s pretty and I’m clever.”
By the time she left university, she was with another student, Michael Bakewell, who became a radio and TV producer. They married in 1955 when she was 22, and had their daughter Harriet four years later. “I took that very seriously. Doctor Spock was all the rage – you had to stay close to the child. The mother did. Ha.” There’s a lot going on in that scornful “ha”, but it’s more in the spirit of: “Isn’t that convenient for the patriarchy?” than: “I hated every minute.” She gets on extremely well with her daughter and son Matthew, who’s four years younger. “I think they would say I was pretty tolerant.” The small-children years passed in duty and indulgence. “Then,” she says, pausing ominously, “I got bored.”
So, having persuaded the BBC that it needed an arts correspondent and it should be her, Bakewell was given this post-watershed chat space on BBC Two, in which – as improbable as this sounds – the participants could just carry on talking for as long as it was interesting, since there was nothing after them in the schedule. It was constantly controversial, because the panel would be slagging off the very shows that had aired that evening, and David Attenborough, then controller of BBC Two, would always protect them. He loved the anarchy and the wildness. “He called us his gorillas. But he didn’t like being an executive.” This is where she did her interview with Harold Pinter, which looked like love’s young dream but was actually during the final year of their affair (1962-69), which became Betrayal, Pinter’s play, which she’s always said was extremely true to life.
Because of that, and because of Bakewell’s 2003 autobiography in which she talks about it, and because in the photograph of Joan interviewing Harold they are so obviously the affair of the century, I thought of that as an open secret, and made assumptions about the 60s as a more bohemian, less judgmental time. “Well, I can only speak for my own circle,” she tells me, “but we were very sympathetic to each other’s emotional needs. On Late Night Line-Up, people would have affairs, and there was a general consideration that, within reason, it was tolerated if you were seeking your own fulfilment.” Yet, she says, as far as she and Pinter were concerned, nobody knew.
I wonder whether the moments that stand out for Bakewell are the ones that everyone else remembers – being the first person to interview Nelson Mandela as he was released from prison, for instance. In fact, what she talks about with most enthusiasm are the chancy moments of journalistic serendipity: all the times she made up a job, asked for it, and someone said “yes”; or the time she went with her second husband, the radio and TV producer Jack Emery, to a kibbutz, and the novelist Amos Oz was there. “That was considered pretty impressive,” she says. “Not only that – he was dazzlingly handsome.”
I express some surprise that she would accompany her husband on a research trip – no offence, but she doesn’t sound very much like the helpmeet type. “I can’t remember why, basically because I’ve wiped it from my memory. A lot of my marriage subsequently went wrong. But I was always backing whichever of the men was in my life at the time, I suppose. I’ve been married twice, and I’ve been pleased not to be married for the last 20 years.”
She’s keen to stress: “I was 17 years married to Michael, most of which was happy, and then it went wrong. And the same with Jack [whom she married in 1975 and divorced in 2001]. By which I mean, they flaked off and started behaving in ways which were intolerable to me.” Bakewell had quite a few heartbreaks. “I did have a habit of falling in love with people who were unavailable, and not remotely interested in me.”
“In love!” she says. “That’s a phrase you don’t hear now. Is Beyoncé in love with somebody? Is Daniel Craig?”
Well, I mean, I’m not sure they count as young, and I guess they are, or have been. You get the point, though.
Last time I met Bakewell, it was 2019, before Boris Johnson had been elected, and she was in the House of Lords (where she still is). Ed Miliband had given her a peerage – with a brief of talking about older people, she thinks, but in the event she spent a lot of time in the remain gang. She’s not what you’d called wowed by the second chamber – “Politics has got to be reformed. Everybody in the House of Lords knows that it’s got to go” – and she insists that her impact is mainly turning up to vote. Yet she goes on to describe a huge amount of research she did for a debate she proposed on gene therapy, and various select committees she’s sat on, before repeating, “No, I don’t speak much, because I haven’t got much to say.” It’s exasperating: now I can imagine Alan Sugar sitting opposite her, thinking: “This is nice – she’s pretty, and I’ve got loads to say.”
There isn’t a phase of Bakewell’s life about which you wouldn’t like to hear 10 times as much: she certainly leaves you wanting more, but then again, will probably deliver it. She’s still freelance, remember.
• This article was amended on 19 October 2023. An earlier version said that Joan Bakewell was five at the start of the second world war; she was six.
Portrait Artist of the Year is on Sky Arts, Freeview and Now on Wednesdays
