As a professional journalist, Barry Norman had paid his dues long before becoming a celebrity and a much-impersonated national icon – complete with a catchphrase that he never actually said: “And why not?”
He had been a reporter at the Daily Mail, show business editor, and then a columnist and leader writer on the Guardian. He then got the gig that made him a legend: presenter on BBC1’s Film programme from 1972 to 1998.
The programme went through a phase of trying out alternative presenters, including Iain Johnstone and Tina Brown. But they returned to Norman, who became the programme’s brand identity: genial, avuncular, with bags under his eyes that seemed to show he’d been up all night watching movies – and which some viewers were alleged to find sexy.
His television career began, like those of Michael Parkinson and Bill Grundy, when it was considered perfectly logical to recruit front-of-camera talent from the rumpled and male world of print journalism. Barry was not a sexy young thing even when he started doing the show in his late 30s, and a far cry from Jonathan Ross and Claudia Winkleman.
Barry could claim to have film in his bloodstream: his father was Leslie Norman, a respected veteran of the industry who started at Ealing as a teenager and wound up producing classics such as The Cruel Sea, and also directed episodes of 60s TV shows The Saint, The Persuaders, The Avengers and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).
I grew up watching Barry Norman: in fact, he was the only film critic that anyone could name (although I of course could name the Guardian’s Derek Malcolm) and he became the model of a certain type of mainstream, friendly, consumerist reviewing, giving you a reliable, friendly guide to what was likely to be on at your local fleapit. He was accessible, unpretentious, if unadventurous and shy of swimming against the tide, and even at the time some of the show’s placid tics and mannerisms were a bit exasperating.
Did British TV audiences have to be treated to a top 10 countdown of what was doing well at the US box office? When he quit, he went briefly to Sky but, unlike America’s Roger Ebert, never mastered the new digital world of social media to keep his opinions available; he preferred a conventional retirement – but it was a bit of a shame.
Barry Norman and the Film programme came from a time of monolithic broadcasting, with only a few channels and indeed only a few films released each week, often unveiled to critics before agreeable lunches in expensive restaurants.
Barry had an enjoyably leisurely style, exactly right for the screen, and he came from that more leisurely era before the internet and a million bloggers and opinionators on social media, thousands of films on VOD, even before the home entertainment revolution on VHS.
Nowadays, the Film programme is having to find a way to reinvent itself, only on for a relatively short stretch of time in the year, reformatted around sofa-based discussion with a rotation of guest hosts, stars in other fields. In his day, Barry was the star, and he wore his virtual monopoly lightly; we, his viewers, hardly realised that it was a monopoly.
He did everything (apart from the US reports) including the interviews; I remember affectionately Barry’s starstruck and rather lovestruck encounter with Michelle Pfeiffer, his testy confrontation with Robert De Niro, and a breezy ride around Cannes with Steven Soderbergh. His enthusiasm and love for film always shone through.
