The Times 7/8 John Peel's Home Truths has attracted awards - and criticism

[Tom Roche]

Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 19:39:36 -0700 (PDT)

Subject:  The Times: Features:Having me on Radio 4 offends people   John Peel's  Home Truths has attracted awards - and criticism. Interview by Grace Bradberry
X-URL: http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/timfeafea02003.html?1026402


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   July 9 1999
   FEATURES
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   John Peel's Home Truths has attracted awards - and criticism.
   Interview by Grace Bradberry
   
   [INLINE] (c)
   Still a Radio 1 DJ at nearly 60, but John Peel has stopped playing
   hip-hop because "it became so absurdly sexist. I just can't tolerate
   that kind of stuff on the radio"
   Photograph: FINDLAY KEMBER
   
   Having me on Radio 4 offends people 
   
   John Peel's lugubrious voice, edged with anxiety, drifts down into the
   kitchen. "Pi-ig! Pig? - Sheila? Where are my trousers?" He has gone
   upstairs to change, leaving me with his wife Sheila - nicknamed "Pig"
   on account of the way she snorts when she laughs - and his son
   William, 23, who is regaling us with a tale of a visit to the doctor
   for a leg injury sustained while strawberry picking.
   
   It should come as no surprise that the Ravenscrofts (Peel's real name)
   are unselfconscious about their domestic life. After all, many of the
   more intimate details have already been shared with the listeners of
   Home Truths, Peel's increasingly popular Radio 4 show. We know about
   his children's messy bedrooms, about the way in which Sheila sleeps
   with her husband wrapped around her. The Ravenscrofts' domestic life
   is as familiar as that of Pat and Tony Archer's and there is a kind of
   theme-park treat element to being invited to their home. "Good grief,
   they're real!" you think, as you become a bit-part player in their
   family life.
   
   This inclusivity is the secret of Home Truths, which deals with
   everything from the minutiae of domestic life - neighbours who vacuum
   the grass verge - to how to stop a young boy whose father has died
   from worrying about such adult matters as the house insurance. The
   extraordinary is teased from the ordinary. We hear about the listener
   with a phobia about buttons, and the father who told his son that if
   he unscrewed his belly button, his bottom would fall off. No matter
   how bleak the interview, Peel somehow finds a moment of levity.
   
   The programme triumphed at the recent Sony Radio Awards, winning
   three, including Sony Broadcaster of the Year for Peel. Last year he
   was appointed OBE. He has also been voted Melody Maker's top DJ for 11
   years in a row, and received NME's Godlike Genius Award.
   
   By the time I meet him, however, he has become defensive. His innocent
   Saturday morning show has attracted flak and some of it has been
   friendly fire. Andy Kershaw, a friend and Radio 1 colleague, has
   called Home Truths, "a lot of old piffle" and described it as
   "cloying, sentimental and indulgent". John Walters, his former
   producer and the best man at his wedding, has expressed bewilderment
   at Peel's wanting to "talk to people who call their fridge
   Renfrewshire". Julie Burchill, horrified by his espousal of family
   values, has dubbed him the "Schoolgirl's Friend", dredging up the fact
   that in his twenties Peel unwittingly married a 15-year-old.
   
   Perhaps his critics are simply blown away by the infuriating flukiness
   of a man remaining a cult Radio 1 DJ at nearly 60, then popping up on
   Saturdays as a wry, jocular Radio 4 presenter. Which is the real Peel
   and which an invention? Peel the anti-pseud is suddenly under
   investigation. The onslaught has been a nasty shock. "When I was
   working away on Radio 1 - which I'd been doing since the reign of
   Queen Anne - people didn't listen but kind of felt that it was morally
   correct. If I got any press at all, it was 'Good old John Peel'. But
   getting on to Radio 4 seems to offend people more.
   
   "I was depressed - these are supposed to be my mates. Sheila talked me
   down because I was very incensed. When Walters came on the phone I
   said '**** him, I don't want to speak to him' but Sheila said 'No, I
   think you need to speak to him'."
   
   "The other thing that really p***** me off was people saying that I
   operated a whites- only music policy" (another Burchill allegation).
   "For a family that got death threats, which I took seriously enough to
   have police advice, to be told that you're running a racist music
   policy was a bit much." He has stopped playing hip-hop because "it
   became so absurdly sexist. I said 'My wife's a woman, my mother's a
   woman, two of my children are about to be women [his daughters
   Alexandra and Flossie] and I just can't tolerate that kind of stuff on
   the radio'." Family values again.
   
   Such is his sensitivity to these attacks that he now consciously
   rations the personal anecdotes on Home Truths. "I'm on my guard. It's
   changed things a bit. I don't mind getting slagged off, but if they
   started turning on the family . . ."
   
   The strange thing about interviewing Peel is that while other
   "celebrities" direct the conversation away from personal matters, he
   seems to steer it towards them. Unprompted, he mentions his wife's
   brain haemorrhage of four years ago, from which she is now fully
   recovered, and how it helped him to sort out his priorities. He now
   tries to spend as little time as possible away from home, even
   presenting his Radio 1 show from Suffolk once a week.
   
   But it is not just the dignified, emotional stuff that comes pouring
   out. We have barely met and begun on a tour of Peel Acres, as he
   ironically, but accurately, describes his Suffolk home, when he
   voluntarily tells of how he once slept with Germaine Greer (before his
   marriage to Sheila): "She taught me a very salutary lesson about how
   women must feel when men put them under pressure. I found myself
   saying things like 'I just want to be friends'."
   
   Once Peel has found his trousers, we go to the pub - he, his wife, his
   wife's friend Georgia and myself. The conversation leaps between the
   outrageous village anecdote - the woman who celebrated the Silver
   Jubilee by dancing on a table without wearing any knickers - and
   personal revelations.
   
   A recent Home Truths interview leads to some quite unselfconscious
   reflection on the death of his father. "I get more upset now than I
   did when he died," he remarks.
   
   "You were very flippant when he died," says Sheila.
   
   "Yeah, rather cruel and awful. It was a long time ago, when we were
   first going out, 1971 he died. When I'm having rows with William I try
   to look back and I think 'Actually, I was a really shitty son'. There
   he was dying and I never went to see him."
   
   "You did, but rarely," puts in Sheila.
   
   Pig and Peel were married in 1974. He describes her as "very much the
   fuel on which I run - if I have any confidence, it's largely because
   of her.
   
   "Without wishing to sound entirely feeble, when I was 20 I would
   scarcely have been able to speak to you. I was amazingly shy and
   absolutely terrified of women."
   
   John Robert Parker Ravenscroft was born in August 1939, in an affluent
   home on the Wirral. He was brought up by a nanny, did not meet his
   father until he was six, was sent to boarding school at seven, then to
   Shrewsbury where his father and both grandfathers had been pupils. He
   left at 16, drifted through National Service, and would have drifted
   for longer had his father not packed him off to America. He worked as
   an insurance salesman and programmer in Texas before landing a job in
   radio (by now he had modified his clipped vowels into a quasi
   Liverpudlian drawl). At the age of 26 he married Shirley, aged 15. "I
   was misled, not just by her, but her entire family kind of co-operated
   in deceiving me about her age," he says. "Both Shirley's parents died
   within a few months of each other and she was going to have to go and
   live with uncles she barely knew." They had never had sex, "But we
   married as a kind of mutual defence pact." They returned to England
   and the marriage broke up. She later served time in Holloway Prison
   for a bank fraud. A decade ago she committed suicide.
   
   It seems incomprehensible that Peel, the family man, should have
   contracted such an odd union. "Well, when you're 59 you'll look back
   on yourself now and think you were a different person. When I talk
   about having been in America, I think I'm lying."
   
   He was 35 when he married again, and he and Sheila have deliberately
   established a stable family life. "I remember when my parents
   divorced, when I was about 16, the way I was obviously saddened and
   upset by it, but I was excited by it as well. What upset me most was
   having to leave the house.
   
   "We've never moved. When we bought the house we were determined to
   live there for the rest of our lives, so in uncertain times there
   would be one constant for the children, which in a way was even more
   important than us."
   
   Then he tells me what he describes as "a strange story": his father
   got back together with a woman whom he'd first met at 16 and to whom
   he had once been engaged. Peel's mother formed a relationship with the
   actor Sebastian Shaw, who played Luke Skywalker's father in The Return
   of the Jedi.
   
   Yet while his parents appear to have sought out excitement and
   diversity in later life, Peel is taking the opposite route, except in
   his musical tastes. He readily admits that his social life has
   narrowed to the point where a neighbour's invitation to dinner is
   greeted with huge excitement.
   
   He was, though' once friends with Marc Bolan - until Bolan became
   famous and dropped him. Indeed, he claims to have no celebrity friends
   until his wife chips in: "We went to tea with Griff."
   
   "Oh yes, Griff Rhys Jones. But only because he had enlisted us to take
   part in some fundraising poetry-reading thing."
   
   Next page: Man on Top - Joe Joseph 
   
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