Selina Scott on Frank Bough: a TV legend, but frankly a nightmare to work with
When I saw the photographs in all the newspapers of me with Frank Bough as the news of his death broke last week I was transfixed. Not by my big hair and blousy frock, so fashionable in the 1980s, but by the recollection of what a nightmare it had been working with him at the BBC.
I had been poached from ITN’s News at Ten to launch Britain’s first breakfast television show, arriving at the BBC in 1983 full of enthusiasm to make television history with a legend of the small screen. This feeling of euphoria was not to last.
Frank — even before tabloid scandal hit him five years later — was not the friendly uncle figure that he liked to project to the public. Some might say it is too soon to write this piece. But his behaviour, and how it was tolerated, reveals much about the BBC’s culture at the time.
To provide some context, Bough in the 1980s was a bigger star than Gary Lineker, Huw Edwards and Piers Morgan rolled up together.
Now he has gone, it pains me to shatter the myth of Frank as a friendly face, no matter what perversions took hold of him when he visited prostitutes and took drugs in the late 1980s and 1990s. But I think it is instructive to explain that the demons that drove him to this dark double life were, to an extent, shaped by fame, pressure and the misogynistic culture that prevailed at the BBC.
When I was approached to work with him by Ron Neil, editor of BBC Breakfast Time, I was looking forward to the prospect of learning from a vastly experienced presenter. Bough had been the corporation’s main man to guide viewers through big sporting championships, World Cups and Olympics as well as presenting Grandstand. But, like me, he was moving into unknown territory with Breakfast Time. Despite his bravura and confident air, maybe he was a little unsure deep down.
Sitting on a sofa at daybreak, he always appeared to be relaxed and matey with everyone. Chatting to studio guests on camera may look like money for jam but it is a special talent — and Frank had that talent in spades.
The now familiar format of a man/woman breakfast TV presenting team is like a kind of marriage. You may be irritated with each other from time to time, but when the chips are down you fight for each other. Frank never saw it that way. In his mind he was very much the pater familias and I was the compliant second wife. He was 50; I was 31.
Things started to go wrong from the beginning. After accepting the BBC offer I was invited by Frank to meet him and his wife Nesta at his Thames-side home.
He collected me in his Ford saloon to have tea in his kitchen. The omens seemed good. We chatted amiably and all seemed to have gone well. Shortly afterwards he gave an interview to the Daily Mirror explaining his reason for inviting me over: “I wanted to see if I liked her.” He was making it clear to his BBC bosses that it had been an audition and that if he didn’t like me, he would have a strong say in my future at the BBC.
This approach was confirmed when Fern Britton, a young reporter from regional television, arrived on the show. She too was “auditioned” by Frank in a dark corner of a restaurant.
Frank took Fern’s audition further, as she recounts in her autobiography: “Well, young lady, I wonder how long it will be before I’m having an affair with you?” he asked her.
Fern also reveals in her book: “During the interview briefings before the show Frank would wave me away with ‘Oh, hers can wait. Now back to mine’ but I was too raw to say, ‘Hang on a minute, I need to be briefed on this one properly please.’ Selina could see I was unhappy and knew exactly what was going on. Frank was ungenerous to her too.”
Fern and I agreed that Frank had no sense of humour, and no ability to ad-lib. Fern used this to turn the tables on him and stop him undermining her on live TV.
“To ease everyone into the theme of the day he started talking about the price of flowers,” Fern writes. “This was my moment. ‘So, Frank,’ I said, ‘what are your favourite flowers?’ I caught a flash of wild panic in his eyes. He was completely stumped.”
Fern didn’t last long at Breakfast Time. She was soon back on regional television — which was heartbreaking.
Her experience was an echo of my own: deliberately undermined on air and rubbished off it. This attitude led him to say of me that “even when she rides a bike she keeps her knees together”. He was implying that I was either frigid or a lesbian. After all, how could I be otherwise if I didn’t fancy him?
Many times, while we were winding down after the show, he would make smutty remarks to me about how well endowed he was. I wasn’t overly shocked, but for a man more than 18 years older to be making such boasts was more than simply off-colour.
I wasn’t the only one to learn about Bough’s manhood. Shyama Perera, who later co-hosted a breakfast show on LBC with him, was quoted last week recalling their first day working together: “He made a point of telling me he always showered before heading to the studio for 5am ‘so my penis is clean’.”
At ITN I had been used to working with Sir Alastair Burnet and Sandy Gall, television legends of equal lustre and years to Frank, who were supportive to a newcomer. Frank was the opposite. He did not have generosity of spirit. He always sought to upstage.
When it was time to wrap up an interview, the producer would give me a 20-second countdown through my earpiece, but Frank would cut across and ask whichever guest was on our sofa a last-minute question, crashing through the precise timings of the show. It would be me, not Frank, who would end up getting ticked off by the producers.
I could, of course, have complained to Ron Neil and I know he would have listened sympathetically but I also knew that chastising Frank was out of the question because he was viewed as too important to the show and the BBC.
At first Frank’s behaviour confused me. I didn’t want to think it was a deliberate act of sabotage but it was happening too often to be an accident. Off air I decided to confront him. “Don’t hijack my timing again,” I told him in plain language. He feigned surprise and didn’t argue. He knew that I knew what he was doing.
He could clearly see how exposed I was. I was thought to be glamorous, single and painted as a “mystery”. The full glare of the media fell on me every week.
Female newspaper columnists such as Jean Rook of the Daily Express ripped me to shreds. If it wasn’t my hair, which they said looked like a bird’s nest, it was my clothes that made me look like a nanny, or that I was too busy flirting with the guests to ask intelligent questions.
I had to read this trolling every morning at 4am, before going on air at 6.30am. Frank read it too, quietly smirking. He was allegedly delighted when the Conservative MP Teddy Taylor criticised my £50,000 salary from the floor of the Commons. Frank’s £200,000 was never an issue of course.
When the BBC asked Frank and me to present the Baftas, I made it my business to find out how much he would be paid. When I discovered that he was getting a third more than me for the same job, I threatened to pull out. The Beeb stumped up.
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been warned about the corporation. When I told Sir David Nicholas, editor of ITN, that I was leaving to go to the BBC he looked at me sympathetically and said: “You will find it very different.” Boy, was he right.
This came home forcibly to me when I sat in for Terry Wogan on his big teatime chat show. I thought everything had gone well. Prince Andrew, a few years after his heroics in the Falklands War, was even lured to the studio. But the producer, Peter Estall, clearly didn’t think much of my performance as he revealed in a meeting with other male BBC executives — details of which were leaked to The Sun.
Almost all these men were Oxbridge-educated, like Bough, and shared the same view of life and what they expected to see on their BBC. Theirs was a narrow, privileged perspective but they ran the BBC like mafia bosses.
Maybe it had to do with my asking questions of my own choosing. “Wogan has a very broad range of interest,” Estall said. “The same could not be said of Selina Scott.” He didn’t seem to like the searching questions I asked that weren’t within “the rules”. When I confronted Estall he point blank denied that he had said any of this, but I had the minutes from the meeting. As with Frank, I found duplicity coursed through the BBC.
Is the corporation different today? Certainly a sense of entitlement and privilege remains — one which its new director-general, Tim Davie, appears to be trying to do something about, cutting some of the more extortionate salaries earned by both sexes and curbing stars’ and journalists’ social media posts.
Davie is also insisting that the BBC’s “talent” declare any money they receive from commercial events earned off the back of their profile created by the BBC — an activity that Frank Bough was no stranger to in the 1980s.
Having risen before dawn and completed more than two hours of live television, he would rush off to spend the rest of the day making corporate videos for his own production company, before returning home late at night. It must have been exhausting and contributed to the pressure that was obviously boiling up inside him. We all wondered what kind of family life he had.
Some men work through the strain by having a few pints in the pub, gambling or playing golf. Frank appears to have sought relief in drugs and sexual encounters with strangers.
In 1988, the News of the World shocked the nation with its story that Frank had taken cocaine and worn women’s lingerie at a sex party involving prostitutes. The BBC sacked him. Four years later he was photographed leaving the flat of a dominatrix.
Moments of madness, they may have been — but Frank paid a high price, losing both his career and his reputation.
In a way, he did me a favour. After enduring our working relationship for a couple of years, I had had enough. I left the programme, joined The Clothes Show and soon after moved to New York to host the current affairs show West 57th on CBS — headhunted, funnily enough, after my appearance guest-hosting Wogan.
I went on to travel the world, make a series of high-profile documentaries for ITV and win Baftas of my own.
None of this would have happened if I hadn’t left BBC Breakfast Time all those years ago. So thanks a lot, Frank.