Dame Joan Bakewell, Baroness Bakewell, has newly discovered the benefits of a lunchtime nap.
No one could blame her. Yesterday she celebrated her 90th birthday and is currently 12 chemotherapy sessions into ongoing treatment following an operation to remove colon cancer before Christmas. Yet, I can’t help but notice, she doesn’t seem to be factoring one in the day we speak - she’s heading out to meet a friend for lunch.
The powerhouse broadcaster, journalist, writer and Labour peer, who has been working pretty relentlessly for over six decades, isn’t a napper by nature.
“I don’t let the age number count very much,” she says, characteristically sharp, but with a warm grin. She’s good fun, Joan, the roomy wine rack in her kitchen, discarded pain au chocolat on the side, and piles of Anthony Horowitz crime thrillers next to Art Quarterly on the coffee table, confirm it.
Yet she will concede to a nap now if she’s working - which, nevermind the chemo and the 90th, she will be later this month, shifting her treatment around so she can film Portrait Artist Of The Year for Sky Arts for two weeks. She will allow them to provide a pull out bed and duvet: “I recommend it, I tell you,” she urges.
She chirpily explains she has moved her 90th party to September after her chemo is finished, but for all her stoicism admits the news of her cancer during a routine colonoscopy last autumn shocked her.
“I’ve never been ill at all, I don’t expect to be ill,” she explains.
“The first thing I did was ring my daughter and said ‘You ought to know my will is in the third drawer down in the desk’.”
But quite quickly, a calmness overtook fear.
“When you’re my age a lot of your friends have died already, dying is on the agenda, it’s waiting for you,” she says.
“I thought ‘Oh, it’s my turn. My turn to go down’. So I felt quite serene about it.
“At my age a lot of people you have known have died. So I thought ‘Well if they can do it, I can do it.’” We laugh - only Joan could be competitive about death.
But for all her musing, she’s quick to point out the operation removed the cancer and chemotherapy is belt and braces.
Her prognosis is good, and she says she’s aiming for another 10 years.
“I don’t feel 90, I live life as the rest of my colleagues do.”
I can’t imagine there is much difference between Joan Bakewell at 90 and 19.
She was always determined to get on.
From Stockport, she describes how her “mother’s father was a cooper in a brewery, and had huge workers’ hands” and her father’s father “was an iron turner, he worked in a foundry.”
Her bright mother got into grammar school, but one of eight, left at 13 to bring in a wage.
Joan also got in, but remained, earning a scholarship to Cambridge.
Her mum, deeply aware of social hierarchy, arranged elocution lessons.
By the Sixties, married to her first husband, television producer Michael Bakewell and with two children, Joan was presenting the BBC ’s Late Night Line-Up four nights a week under then BBC2 Controller of Programmes, David Attenborough.
Interviewees included the artist Marcel Duchamp, but despite the seriousness of her subjects Joan earnt the tagline ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’. It’s hung about.
Frank Muir, a comedy writer and a friend, coined it. Joan never bore ill-feeling, but knew it would impact her.
“I remember thinking this will permit people to put me down and say she’s just a pretty head. I think it probably did (disadvantage me) but women were at a disadvantage anyway,” she shrugs.
Crumpet or not, she has no regrets about the miniskirts she wore then. “It was made possible by the invention of the tights. I did like clothes,” she smiles. That’s not changed.
With or without them, she’d have been subject to harassment, anyway.
Bluntly, she recalls: “I was quite pretty and quite young so a lot of people fancied me and touched me up a bit here and there. It was not unknown in a lift for them to touch your back or bottom.”
Nothing upset her, she insists, although she does reveal Jimmy Saville trying to entice her to his dressing room. “I knew that wasn’t on,” she says.
She had an eight-year affair with the playwright Harold Pinter through the Sixties, during her marriage, and his to the actress Vivien Merchant.
He wrote his highly-acclaimed play Betrayal about it, to Joan’s horror. She later wrote her own riposte, Keeping in Touch.
She has said she decided not to be “racked with guilt” and today carries no regret. “Certainly not,” she says.
But she could never have married Pinter. “He was a very inspiring person but he had a very rigid way he wanted to live his life,” she explains.
She and Michael later divorced, and she married theatre producer Jack Emery. That relationship ended over 20 years ago.
“After that I thought, that is enough,” she says. “I have a lot of friends to go out with - I don’t have anyone to sleep with but that’s passed in my life!” she laughs.
“I do have friends who have been married a long time. I watch that not with envy so much as admiration, and a sense they have achieved something I didn’t manage.”
Joan isn’t one for regrets. She’s proud of her experiences, lining them up like treasures in her mind.
She went on to work for Newsnight and Heart Of The Matter.
A portrait hangs on her stairs painted by the Scottish artist John Bellany, daubed as she interviewed him.
She interviewed Czech president Vaclav Havel but top of the list is Nelson Mandela, who she interviewed in South Africa the day he was released, his first profile interview.
It still moves her.
“I asked if he had any regrets and he said he missed very much his warder, he had made a good friend of him and learnt Afrikaans to speak with him.”
Ninety far from heralds the end of her working life. The Labour peer plans to canvas the streets with her MP Keir Starmer before the next election - “if they want me,” she adds.
“I think there is a great hunger for change,” she smiles. Her birthday makes her no less hungry.
All this, and Baroness Bakewell has surely moved into the realms of ‘national treasure’ ?
She stops me there. “It suggests I’m a cuddly teddy bear,” she says.
Napping, she may embrace. But cuddly? Never.
