A woman who has achieved a "series of firsts" was how Joan Bakewell was introduced to a packed audience in the Bodleian Library. Her broadcasting career is long and distinguished and her autobiography "The Centre of the Bed" illustrates how her life and career reflect the social changes of the post-war period, particularly in education and women's liberation. It was this sociological aspect that Ms Bakewell chose to talk about, rather than the more salacious aspects of her life such as her affair with Harold Pinter.
She was born five years after women got the vote and went to Cambridge seven years after women were able to receive their degrees. These statistics startle when one looks at the woman making them. She is attractive, exceedingly vital, if not now the "thinking man's crumpet" of the sixties, a label which has dogged her over the years.
It is the BBC which Bakewell focuses on, throwing herself open to any questions as she is no longer answerable to the corporation. In these post-Hutton Blairite days Ms Bakewell harks back to an era when the BBC provided "an arena in which society could debate".
She makes incisive comments on the 1960s: a "culturally flourishing" period in which TV drama could make news and have an effect. She laments the multiplicity of channels and the multimedia age which robs TV of its ability to unite society in the discussion of social issues. While she is wary of the phrase "dumbing down" in relation to the BBC she is vitriolic about the damaging nature of the Hutton saga: "it is complicated and it is disastrous".
The audience received Ms Bakewell's opinions warmly and with real affection; if anyone dared call this intelligent broadcaster "crumpet" they would have had an angry Bodleian mob on their hands.
For more information visit the Oxford Literary Festival Website.
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