Did You Really Shoot the Television

Did You Really Shoot The Television?: A Family Fable: A Family Memoir

The author is the son of broadcaster and adventurer Macdonald Hastings and journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James. One of his grandfathers was a literary editor while the other wrote plays and essays, and penned an enchanting memoir of his own Victorian childhood. His great-uncle was an African hunter who wrote poetry and became one of Max's heroes. The author tells a richly picaresque story, featuring guest appearances by a host of celebrities from Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad to John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster, who became Anne Scott-James's third husband. 'All families are dysfunctional', Anne asserted impenitently to Max, but the Hastingses managed to be more dysfunctional than most. His father roamed the world for newspapers and as a presenter for BBC TV's legendary Tonight programme, while his mother edited ‘Harper's Bazaar’, became a famous columnist and wrote best-selling gardening books.
Here, the author brings together this remarkable cast of forebears, 'a tribe of eccentrics', as he himself characterises them. By turns moving, dramatic and comic, the book portrays Max's own childhood fraught with rows and explosions, in which the sudden death of a television set was only one highlight. His story will make a lot of people laugh and perhaps a few cry. It helps to explain why Max Hastings, whose family has produced more than eighty books over three generations, felt bound to follow their path of high adventure and popular journalism.
"I am the least significant character in the story which follows. But it was an enquiry about the fate of the TV set in the London family flat of my childhood which prompted me to embark upon it. Throughout the long life of my mother, the journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James, I wrote little about our tumultuous family experiences. In 1986, featured as the castaway on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, I dodged tricky questions about parental relations. I incline to my mother’s view, that ‘All families are dysfunctional.’ However, when she enjoyed the same experience on DID in 2003 – and of course, most of us find it pleasing to talk about ourselves in such a context – at the age of ninety, she was much less inhibited. To the audience’s delight and my toe-curling embarrassment, she regaled Sue Lawley with tales of our old squabbles, and of my admittedly pretty frightful childhood behaviour. For weeks afterwards, people came up to me in filling stations and other unlikely places, demanding: ‘’Ere – did you really shoot the television?’ We shall address that question in due course,
but I want to make plain immediately that it was not a big set.
The latter part of the book evokes personal memories of my parents and childhood, partial and fragmentary as all such yarns are. Until we reach the 1950s, however, I have sought to sketch some of the doings of the Hastingses and Scott-Jameses who came before me. Their experiences, journalistic and adventurous, fed my own aspirations. The tale is not founded upon delusions that our family has been important. The bylines of Macdonald Hastings and Anne Scott-James, which were modestly celebrated in the mid-twentieth-century media, are quite unknown to a younger generation, as is the way of the world. Most of us have been ‘nearly’ people. Some of the clan, indeed, barely kept their heads above water. We have spasmodically proved capable of making a little money, but never of hanging on to it. Though our collective experiences all over the world in the past century of war and peace have been varied and picaresque, other English middle-class families can boast similar excitements."