Sunday Times interview 31 Oct 2004

[Nigel U]

Interview: Robert Sandall met John Peel
Last words of middle England's accidental hero



I had not realised John Peel hardly ever went on foreign holidays, or that 
he was a nervous flyer. He was explaining this to one of the guests on his 
Radio 4 programme Home Truths on the morning earlier this month when I went 
to meet him at a studio in Broadcasting House.

That day Peel was recording interviews for a programme that would be 
transmitted after he and his wife Sheila had departed for a Peruvian resort 
in the Andes. We did not know at the time that he would not return to the 
studio, or that I would be transcribing this interview after his death.

As he mentioned the various tranquillisers he would be taking to ward off 
the terrors of the long flight and described their destination - "just the 
usual tourist spots, you know" - he didn't sound terribly excited at the 
prospect. But it was a free trip - "a sort of junket"- and Sheila was 
looking forward to it, and that, it seemed, was the main thing.

I have no idea whether he was actually ill at the time, but Peel certainly 
looked as if he needed a holiday. I had heard that his friend and former 
Radio 1 mucker Andy Kershaw had recently told him, "John, you look 
 terrible!", and frankly it was hard to disagree.

A steadily expanding pot belly, combined with his middling (5ft 7in) stature 
was turning Peel into the original roly-poly man. More alarming were his 
grey, sagging features and in particular those small, unnaturally sunken 
eyes. This guy, you felt, hadn't slept properly for weeks.

He said he'd been working hard recently on his autobiography, which was now 
half finished. The toughest part was sorting through the thousands of 
letters he'd kept from musicians he had supported over the years and 
deciding which to use and which to discard.

By a strange coincidence one of those old correspondents suddenly appeared 
in the lounge area outside the studio where we were talking: this was Bill 
Nelson, former leader of the long forgotten 1970s progressive band Be Bop 
Deluxe, here to talk to the digital radio channel 6 music. Peel greeted him 
affably and the two elderly rock gents reminisced for a while. "I think I 
might have actually got rid of his letters," Peel said later with a sly 
grin.

I had come to interview him in connection with a feature I was preparing for 
The Sunday Times Magazine on Home Truths, the Saturday morning programme of 
real-life stories and quirky listeners'anecdotes that finally turned him, in 
his sixties, into a slightly unlikely hero of middle England. He was happy 
to oblige, although he was quick to point out: "I always let people know 
that the Radio 1 job is my primary interest. Home Truths has never been in 
my hands the way the Radio 1 programme has."

This was broadly true, but not the whole story. While Peel was always 
allowed total freedom to play what he liked during his 37-year tenure at 
Radio 1 - unlike Home Truths where the content was submitted by listeners 
and selected by the production team - he never had any say as to when the 
John Peel show went out. Recently it had moved back to 11.30pm, a graveyard 
slot, which meant that for three nights a week Peel had to stay up till the 
early hours playing his favourite " grime" tracks or checking rock's new 
"indie" hopefuls.

Factor in the autobiography, a couple of days spent interviewing, scripting 
and recording Home Truths, and all the attendant toing and froing between 
London and his "Peel acres" converted farmhouse in Suffolk, and you began to 
realise why he was looking so rough. For a 65-year-old man who had three 
years previously been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, Peel had one punishing 
schedule.

But like the sturdy contributors who recount their traumatic experiences, 
dry-eyed, week in week out on Home Truths, Peel wasn't complaining. Nor was 
he prepared to take any credit for the success of his programme. He was 
"very much at the mercy of the listeners". The show wasn't a personal 
achievement so much as an institution that had been kind enough to take him 
in.

"The only things I've got any experience of are things that have gone on for 
a long time," he explained. "And that sort of success, if success indeed is 
what that is, can be very restrictive. During punk, for instance, the 
requirements of the audience took the programme out of my hands."

That famously self-effacing manner belied the fact that Peel jumped at any 
chance of talking - on air and off - about himself , his wife and their four 
children. That day he was on his favourite hobbyhorse: youth employment. 
"The thing that bothers me as a parent, because it affects me four times, is 
the distress you feel, which surpasses all other distressing things, 
watching your grown-up children try to find decent work. One of my sons was 
treated so badly I said I was prepared to be the first white middle-class 
suicide bomber. I would go into his office and detonate myself if it meant I 
could take some of those bastards with me." He'd tried to interest Home 
Truths listeners in this topic, he said, but got no response. "Other stuff 
that I'm not interested in at all they pick up and run with for weeks."
Broadcasting to the nation as a family man, rather than as the oldest indie 
fan in the land, brought out the sentimental softie in Peel - a side he 
tried to keep under wraps in public but increasingly found he couldn't. "I 
find myself identifying with an extraordinary number of the situations 
people describe on the programme," he said.

He recalled the woman from Chesterfield who came on to talk about her son 
who was killed while he was waiting for his A-level results. "She'd got it 
all sorted out in her mind, in the very admirable way that people do, and 
she could talk about it emotionally, obviously, but without losing control." 
Peel meanwhile had dissolved into floods of tears. "Our son Thomas was 
waiting for his A-level results at the time. And she was the one saying, 'It's 
all right John...' "

Never one to miss an opportunity to tell a story against himself, Peel was 
keen to point out that his early years on Home Truths in the late 1990s had 
been pretty shaky. "When I first started doing it I was very unenthusiastic 
about interviewing strangers on the phone. And I don't think I was very good 
at it. But I was flattered, as you would be as a Radio 1 DJ, when you're 
asked to do something for Radio 4, which I regard as very much the senior 
network."
He told how as a child in Liverpool during the war he had listened to BBC 
news bulletins in a bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden. Working for 
BBC radio had always been, he said, the summit of his ambition as a 
broadcaster. "I like it as an institution. I like the idea of having a 
national audience. If I ever leave the BBC it will be their decision, not 
mine."

Although nobody would have guessed from the cutting-edge music he remained 
addicted to until the end, age had clearly mellowed Peel. Once a public 
school dropout who left Shrewsbury with four O-levels, he had recently begun 
to feel reconciled to the sort of people he left behind when he began DJ-ing 
in Texas in 1960.

In particular he had been surprised recently to discover an affinity for the 
son of a junior Tory minister blown up by the Brighton bomb at the 
Conservative party conference in 1984. Edward, son of Sir Anthony Berry, had 
come on to Home Truths the week before to describe the evening he spent with 
his father in the Grand hotel only hours before the explosion that killed 
him.

"He was very English in an old-fashioned way," said Peel, "the sort I grew 
up amongst. He seemed very upright and correct, almost too much in control, 
and not the kind of person to whom I would feel at all drawn under normal 
circumstances."

Edward Berry and his dead father, however, had touched a nerve. "He just 
seemed like a decent man and you could sense a vulnerability there. He'd got 
to the point where he was getting on with his dad as an adult for the first 
time. From personal experience I know how amazing that is. It doesn't happen 
until they're in their early twenties."

Three of Peel's own children - William, 28, Flossie, 26, and 24-year-old 
Tom - had passed through that gateway. Sadly, he and his own father hadn't. 
A comfortable middle-class upbringing in the Wirral had given him an 
expensive education and, after two years of National Service, the freedom to 
spend the early 1960s scooting around the country of the music he loved, 
America. But it hadn't yielded an intimate relationship with his father.

A well-to-do Liverpudlian cotton trader, Robert Ravenscroft died in the year 
his younger son returned to England with a new surname and began 
broadcasting with the pirate station Radio London. "I was 28 when my father 
died, but I was a very juvenile 28. It's the one great regret of my life 
that I never got to know my dad as well as I would have liked." Ironically, 
Peel's eldest son William has lost his father at exactly the same age.

A last-ditch attempt to get him to reflect on his remarkable popularity as 
the Radio 4 show's host foundered on Peel's invincible modesty. Why did he 
think that so many people came to him to share experiences on air which in 
many cases they had never spoken of before to anybody else? In short, why 
him? "I've no idea," he almost snapped. "It's not for me to say. I'm 
flattered that it is so." After much prodding he said he "tried to make it 
like a conversation you might have with someone in a pub". And, amiably 
downbeat to the last, off he went.

Had I known it would be the last interview he would give I would have tried 
to keep him there. But it was time for Peel to return to the studio to 
interview another Home Truths guest "down the line" in a BBC studio in the 
West Country.

Two weeks later the BBC received more than 30,000 calls and e-mails in a 
single day from listeners all over the world saying how much they loved him 
and would miss him.