Mark Lawson is a brave man coming on stage in Swindon and bringing up the topic of football at the moment. The journalist, broadcaster and author is a Northampton Town fan and he’s visited Swindon many times for away fixtures against the Robins. Not next season though. All right Mark, leave it, there’s a time and a place, mate…
Maybe he should’ve started by talking about the weather. Although he did; he’d heard an inclement weather forecast on the drive down from Northampton and he observed that the promise of bad weather is always good news when he’s travelling to a literary festival as it drives the punters indoors.
Of course he wasn’t at the Swindon Literary Festival to discuss Swindon Town’s Icarus-like fall or the promise of rain. That would be odd. No, he was here to talk about his novel, “The Allegations” and about allegations in general and the specific; accusations, allegations and reputations.
I was aware that Lawson had left his role of presenter of Radio 4’s front row a few years ago, but I hadn’t been aware of the circumstances. It transpires that he was released after anonymous and unspecified allegations that he had bullied staff on the programme. Lawson wasn’t given a chance to refute the changes and would have struggled to even if he had as he was never allowed to know exactly what he had been accused of.
This incident fed into his more recent novel. In ‘The Allegations’ a leading TV academic is arrested the morning after his 60th birthday for a potentially reputation-ruining historical assault alleged to have happened 40 years ago. A friend he turns to for support, a senior lecturer at a university, is also the subject of career-ending accusations of bullying.
In his talk Lawson looked at the nature of historical accusations. He referenced a meeting with the historian Antonia Fraser where she noted that the nature of writing historical biography and non-fiction has become more cautious, couched it terms such as “it is thought” and “it is believed” rather than definitive statements.
And yet at the same time historical abuse investigations, such as Operation Yewtree, are tasked with trying to ascertain, with absolute certainty, what happened in situations that happened decades ago; often in circumstances where the only evidence comes from the alleged perpetrator and the alleged victim.
Lawson also spoke movingly about the breakdown he suffered after being sacked from Front Row. Shoulders hunched and his eyes dusting the floor, he detailed the mixed anxiety and depression disorder he suffered that rendered him insomniac and left him confined to his bed.
Fortunately he’s now well on the way to recovery, thanks to a mixture of medication and mindfulness, is working on a third novel and is hopeful that he may only be one or two management shake-ups away from regularly working for the BBC again.
It’s difficult not to share this hope. This was an entertaining, thought-provoking and at times moving talk by a likable, articulate and erudite broadcaster. Hopefully he’ll be back on our airwaves sooner rather than later.
‘The Deaths’ and ‘The Allegations’, the first two parts of Mark Lawson’s loosely linked trilogy of novels, are available from all good book retailers and quite a few of the online ones as well.
