SEVEN DAYS INTERVIEW THE INQUISITION

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 8, 2006 | by Stephen Phelan

"I've been around long enough to recognise that the media can really only accommodate one image of an individual.

Things that challenge that picture are generally ignored. Nobody pays much attention to the Newsnight interviews, which simply convey information. They're interested in the ones that turn into a bit of a dust up. And people may be amused about Who Do You Think You Are? , but I see nothing wrong with the fact that I cried. I knew when it happened that the BBC press office would make a big deal of it, because it supposedly showed the other side to this very straightforward view of me. I can't control these things, and why would I want to?" I ask if his perception of himself was altered by that experience. Having written of an English tendency toward hypocrisy, and single-handedly coined the phrase "Scottish Raj" as a collective term for the many powerful Caledonians in Westminster, he suspects an attempt to catch him out.

"Am I scarred by being outed as a Jock, you mean? I've been expecting this! Come on, out with it man! Ha ha! The answer is no, not at all. I always knew that my maternal grandmother was from Glasgow. It's tremendous fun to wind up the Scots but it's all a bloody joke. Look, there is an issue about the preponderance of Scots in British public life, but that has to do with the nature of the Labour Party, and frankly, the high quality of the Scottish education system. So I say good luck to them. Good luck to them!" What Paxman did take away from that programme was a sense that his family, like almost everyone else's, struggled in darkness and poverty for generations, until the quality of life improved in the 20th century. "I get this uncomfortable feeling that we're now at the end point of that period where it's all going to go horribly wrong again. But most of us simply don't know we're born." This makes me wonder if he ever wanted to do something different with his life.

The discursive pleasures of the prose in On Royalty, for example, suggest he might try fiction. "Oh, I got 20,000 words of a novel down once, but I binned the whole lot. It was a state of Britain kind of thing. I actually think it's important to discover the things you can't do." He has no unfulfilled ambitions then? "Um - I've never planned my life. I've only ever done what seemed interesting at the time. I'd like to have spent more time fishing, I suppose, which is a pathetic ambition to have." This subject might be the bait to draw out Paxman's soul. Will he rhapsodise about it?

Offer up something from the calm depths?

"I've often tried to anatomise the appeal of fishing, because it's a foolish occupation really. Flailing around trying to irritate a stupid creature into snapping at the line. And yet it is stupendously, endlessly fascinating. The world turns around you in a way that it would not otherwise do. I can't be more specific or satisfactory than that I'm afraid." Finally then, Mr Paxman, given the inexorable rise of superficiality, the emphasis on youth and trivia, even within the venerable BBC, do you expect to retire when the time comes, or to be retired?