Captain Moonlight's notebook

Success and the statutory crumpet

TO THAT part of London Wyndham Lewis called Rotting Hill and more precisely to a lane off Kensington Church Street. This is the home of Anne Robinson, television and radio talk-show host and newspaper columnist, who jumped ship last week from the Mirror to Today and the Sunday Times for an annual fee of pounds 209,000.

This flame-haired daughter of a Liverpool market trader sparred with me as I arrived and suggested I had spent too much time interviewing bimbos: 'Oh no, you're going to write an Eliza Doolittle piece, aren't you?'.

We settled down to a fairly relaxed conversation once the Evening Standard had arrived and she had read her horoscope: 'You are probably fed up to the back teeth with wrangles over finance or power struggles at work. However there is still much to be done before you hang up the 'do not disturb sign' '. The night before she had finalised departure terms with the Mirror.

Anne Robinson makes no bones about her ambition for money and fame. She calls herself an unaligned radical who combines journalism with entertainment. The combination takes her down some unpredictable paths.

She thinks the health service is more important than the Royal Family, which for years she has argued costs too much. She is not worried about the status of women, but is passionate about the rights of mothers who she believes are second-class citizens. Last week in her Mirror column she said BBC accountability to the licence-fee payer was more important than John Birt's 'creative book-keeping'.

She has had many ups and downs which have taken her through two broken marriages to her present star status. Her mother was the street trader - Irish-Liverpool stock - who married a schoolteacher. Mrs Robinson dealt in chickens and made the family fortune when she moved into the poultry wholesale business. The family lived at Blundellsands, 'a sort of Weybridge of the North-west'. She and her brother went to Catholic boarding schools. Afterwards Anne spent a year at finishing school in Paris.

Having decided at the age of 18 that she wanted to be on televison, she got a job as a typist at Rediffusion, the forerunner of Thames TV. When she said she wanted to be a serious journalist they told her to get some experience on Fleet Street. She did.

She joined the London News Agency as a reporter, then the Daily Mail where, aged 22, she met and married her first husband, Charles Wilson, the future editor of the Times, now a Mirror executive and father of her only child. She was forced to leave the Mail because husbands and wives were not allowed to work together and joined the Sunday Times in 1968.

What she describes as a messy divorce from Wilson followed in the 1970s. In mentioning this period of her life she says it was difficult for a woman on Fleet Street to learn to 'drink with dignity'. She returned to Liverpool, stopped drinking, worked as a freelance writer and came back to London and the Daily Mirror, where she became assistant editor and started her column. From there she began appearing on television and radio talk shows and remarried.

'I came into television as that statutory crumpet with the pretence of a rather important newspaper title.' I asked if that bothered her. She shrieked. 'Why would it bother me? I came before political correctness. I firmly believe it was hugely to my advantage that there were fewer women around in those days and I was able to take a lot of the glory for myself.'

Insult us, s'il vous plat

A FRIEND got his Irish up last week when he read that a court in Los Angeles was being asked to outlaw the word 'welsh' on grounds that it was racist. It didn't bother me when he complained that he had been welshed on by his partner who had got away scot-free after taking French leave for most of the month. However it reminded me that expressions of nationalistic ridicule abound in the English language - Ugandan discussions (sex), Spanish practices (skiving), Dutch uncle (not your own), Jerry-built and Dutch cap came instantly to mind. An Irish colleague pointed out that the word 'English' seems resistant to unattractive connotations except those used by the French.

My agent in Paris tells me these stereotyped ideas about the French view of the English are outdated. The real truth is that the French do not insult the English because they never even think about the English any more.

There is still a bit of tit-for-tat pejorative linguistic use. Frog here becomes rosbif there and French leave is filer a l'anglaise. But it is ages, he said, since a condom (French letter here) has been called a capote anglaise. Condoms have become commonplace as a result of Aids, and so the anglaise has been dropped from usage: a telling sign of real national decline, my agent said.

SOME fearsome advice on how to be totally fit like a Royal Marine within 16 weeks lands on my desk. So that your training does not get in the way of your personal life it is suggested you 'invite the wife to hold the stopwatch and crack the whip when you don't complete exercises properly'. My wife would throw me out with the dog if I suggested anything of the sort. Among many fun things is an exercise called 'Full Bastards', a press-up followed by a jump ('don't forget to shout 'bastard' as you do the jump'). I was relieved to see synchronised swimming recommended as an alternative to the daily routine and expect to see a pool full of warriors with nose clips, slicked hair and saccharine smiles at this year's Royal Tournament.

Say what you

like about . . .

. . . the Mafia, but:

Its members are good to their mothers

It believes in the single market

'It doesn't exist' (J Edgar Hoover)

It upholds family values

. . . don't let anyone from Sicily hear you say it

And the message this time is: no message

THE NEAREST I had ever been to Joan Baez was about 700 miles. She was in Hanoi for Christmas 1972 during the last carpet-bombing of North Vietnam, and I was in Saigon at the bottom end of Vietnam dodging North Vietnamese mortar bombs along Highway 13. We were at opposite poles: old 'Joanie', aged 31 at that time, the folk singer of the protest movement - find a cause and Joanie would be there with her guitar; and me, laughing as I saw a nave American of my own age trying to end a war with a sing-along for hard- nosed Vietnamese Communist Party veterans.

Twenty one years on I saw her singing last Wednesday at Jongleurs, a nightclub at Camden Lock, in London. She was sensational, her voice still 'achingly pure', her music fun and great to listen to. My daughter, aged 18, who had never heard of her, became a fan. Two days later I met her in a hotel room in west London and I think I fell in love. She apparently has that effect on men, and you don't have to be of a certain age either.

During the 1980s, when protesting came to a stop, she lived at her home in California and a chateau in Normandy, owned by Denis de Kergorley, a young organiser of the French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres. She said they met in a hotel room in Bangkok in 1979 when she was organising a march into Cambodia - vintage Baez. To give you some idea of the age difference, Joan, then aged 38, said she thought Denis was a student. They were together for just over 10 years, with Joanie describing her time in the chateau as 'gypsy queen in fairyland'. Two years ago Denis married and the reign of the gypsy queen came to an end - 'outski'. Joan and all the bachelor's friends were banished by the new chatelaine. She says Denis makes contact with her still, but furtively, through a call box in the village and at airports.

She laughs constantly as she tells this story. I asked her if she had a new man. 'Officially, no,' was her reply. She seems nowadays to treat her life as hugely entertaining. She is pleased, she says, to be back in the mainstream. Joan Baez has moved a huge distance since all those anti-war marches in the 1960s and 1970s, the ban-the-bomb protests, the tours and love affairs with Bob Dylan, the visits to Hanoi, the holding hands in the ring around Congress, jail, her marriage in 1968 to David Harris, a leader of the draft resistance movement, the birth of her son Gabriel Harris, her divorce, the concerts for political prisoners in the Soviet Union and campaign against torture and abduction in Chile and Argentina.

Five years ago she had what most of us would call a mid-life crisis. She said she woke up at two o'clock one morning and decided her career was going nowhere. 'It is difficult,' she said, 'to make a singing career based on political prisoners in Chile.' Politics was put on the back burner. Music came first. She had cut her hair when Gabriel was born in 1969 and now she cut it again, leaving a thin plait at the base of her neck. She got herself a manager, headed for Nashville, sought new songs, rejected 200 of them, found two songwriters, wrote some songs herself. Her career, she said, was back on track. Of course she has not discarded totally her commitment to human rights and social causes. For example the title song of her new album, Play Me Backwards, is about child abuse. But she says she feels under no pressure to deliver a message. 'Every time I appear on stage I represent 30 years of political statement. Isn't that enough, captain?' she says and smiles at me again. I meekly agree and wonder if this time I really am swooning.

I AM intrigued by the English National Opera revival of Jonathan Miller's stylish production of The Mikado, which opened at the Coliseum last week. It is sponsored by an 'anonymous' donor whose identity has been kept secret even from members of the governing board. Peter Jonas, ENO general director, says only that he is one of the company's 'closest friends'. On opening night last Thursday I noticed a man sitting alone in a box to the left of the stage who acknowledged a nod in his direction from the conductor at the end of the performance. Could this middle-aged gentleman be the mysterious ENO supporter who can deliver a minimum pounds 70,000 at the drop of a baton, so to speak, for an operatic revival? Highly unlikely was the response from St Martin's Lane. He wouldn't make himself so visible.

(Photograph omitted)