Odins restaurant in London`s Devonshire Street proved a convenient location for lunch with Emma Freud. She went to school in nearby Harley Street and her father, ex-liberal member of Parliament, ex-TV gourmet, and recently knighted Sir Clement Freud, has rooms a couple of blocks east on Wimpole Street.
The studios of Greater London Radio, where she hosts a daily two-hour music and talk show, are just around the corner on Marylebone High Street. But when the lady appears exactly on time, there`s a feeling that this restaurant might be inappropriate.
Located in the northern part of the city, Odins is quietly restrained, the rather older clientele suited, pearled and politely hushed. In stark counterpoint Emma Freud appears in highly polished and lethal-looking Doc Martens shoes, washed-out blue jeans, Fair Isle sweater, and an oversized man`s shirt whose unlinked cuffs almost conceal hands that are tattooed with smudged pen jottings, names and various reminders for her radio show.
With a wad of black hair falling over one eye, she approaches the table like a pirate with an eyepatch intent on felony, swinging the sturdy black suitcase she uses as a handbag. There`s something naturally urchin about her. You expect her to say ”Wotcher,” the street-slang cockney greeting. Instead she holds out a cuff and says, ”Hello, I`m Emma Freud.”
In only four years, after leaving London and Bristol Universities with a degree in drama ”and a little bit of ancient Greek,” Emma Freud, great-granddaughter of the legendary psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has become one of the country`s most familiar and increasingly popular TV faces, hosting a score of live or ”as-live” magazine and current-affairs programs that range from the teatime slot for children to late night network television for insomniacs.
Her strength is a glib, seemingly unscripted, go-for-it style of presentation that works equally well on young and old, on radio and TV. Whether listener or viewer, you can`t resist warming to her natural, unaffected enthusiasm. She is slight, with the gentlest lisp and a careless schoolgirl manner.
It has been a busy morning for Freud, and she slumps back in her chair with a surprised, bewildered look on her face. For the last two hours she`s hosted a studio discussion on torture and the work of Amnesty International, interviewed jazz musician George Melly, authors Anthony Burgess and Jonathan Guiness, and talked to producer Stephen Woolley about his latest film,
”Scandal.”
As if that weren`t enough to keep her occupied, she has chaired a phone-in, held a competition for which the prize is a book entitled ”How to Boil an Egg,” and introduced a new feature call ”We Thought You Were Dead,”
which other, less anarchic radio presenters usually and more discreetly call the ”Where Are You Now?” section of the show. Now it`s her turn to answer the questions.
”I want to know what you know about me,” she begins, and leans forward as though it`s Emma Freud holding the interview and this is the only question she`s asked all week that she really wants to know the answer to. When there`s no reply forthcoming, she has an idea.
”Tell you what. Why don`t I ask the questions for you, and then answer them? I know them all-and that`s not meant to sound pompous, but I really do.” She laughs mischievously. ”But I just know you`re going to ask me questions I`ve never been asked before, aren`t you?”
Freud has been around the business for about as long as she can remember, although she is the only one in her family (two brothers and one sister) to take it up professionally. She is the second youngest and grew up in the years when her father`s face was never far from the TV screen.
Nevertheless, she was initially uncertain about what she wanted to do.
”I thought I`d like to work in radio but wasn`t sure. So I spent the year after university doing a bit of everything. In nine months I worked as an actress, a composer, a musical director; as a newspaper, magazine and radio journalist; even wangled a summer job as co-director at the Open Air Theatre in Regent`s Park, in the New Shakespeare Company, which was great. I don`t know how it happened, but looking back it was really quite a coup. A real neat one,” she adds with relish.
”As far as I remember I`d hassled my way to being assistant director the year before, and done well, and the next year was made co-director and did a whole season there. `Midsummer Night`s Dream,` what else?”
One of the jobs Emma tried for and subsequently got during this preliminary excursion into the business was as a presenter on the cable network`s Children`s Channel.
”It was my first TV job,” she recalled. ”It began on April 1st-April Fool`s Day-and I was convinced it was a joke, because it was what I wanted to do more than anything. I thought someone must have told them, `It`s this girl`s ambition, we could really stitch her up nicely on this one.` But I turned up and it was all okay. I really had got the job. It was just the most exciting day of my professional life. And I was all of 22.”
While working on the Children`s Channel, where she admits she made all the mistakes it was possible to make, she started as a location reporter on London Weekend Television`s ”6 O`Clock Show,” where her natural unscripted enthusiasm shone through. So much so that in August, 1987, when London Weekend Television started its late-night youth magazine program, Night Network
(billed as ”Britain`s first nighttime TV show,” produced specifically for the vacant 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. slot), Freud was an obvious choice for one of the program`s more outre features.
Freud undoubtedly will find herself hitched for many years to the talk show she hosted every weekend for Night Network, taped ”as-live” in the afternoon (”absolutely no cuts whatsoever”) and broadcast to the nation at 2:30 a.m. This is not to imply that the improbably successful ”Pillow Talk,” in which she interviewed her guest in bed, should be anything to be ashamed of.
”The bed was just a shortcut,” Freud said. ”It was like going straight to the second hour of a more formal chair-to-chair interview. And people responded. They were very relaxed. And because of the false intimacy created by the bed and the darkened studio, you could actually ask questions which in other situations you might not have dared ask. You could be more direct, and the guests tended to be more candid, more honest. They really came clean. It`s very, very difficult, when you`re in pajamas, to be anything else.
”Of course, wearing pajamas was crucial,” she said. ”We had pajamas there, but we always asked guests to bring their own. It was always a very telling thing if they wore their own kit. You knew right away they were game, that everything would be okay. But if they didn`t,” she added with a chortling laugh, ”oooh, you just knew this was going to be difficult.”
In the 18 months she hosted the show, tucked under a duvet in a king-size bed in a crowded studio, Freud interviewed 60 celebrities. But in the beginning the program`s researchers were often hardpressed to find guests willing to appear with her on ”Pillow Talk.”
”We must have approached four or five hundred people to get the 60 or so who eventually accepted,” Freud said.
”But after a while, a year or so, people turned it down because they`d got to know I could be a difficult interviewer. Suddenly they were saying yes because they`d seen it, or no because they`d seen it. I`ve never been controversial before. I loved that. Having people turn you down.”
The program folded at the end of last year, a victim of poor advertising revenues rather than its often controversial content. It`s difficult to think of another who could have carried off the Pillow Talk slot quite as competently as Emma Freud.
”Maybe there was a bit of nudge-nudge to start with, a bit of the old Whey-hey-hey!,” Freud said. ”But it was never born out of the program because it wasn`t titillating. It wasn`t sexy. The guests wore pajamas, not their underwear.
”I asked questions I wanted to know the answers to, not about their sex lives, which didn`t interest me. Those programs, for me, were really funny, sometimes really deep. And some of them were the best interviews I ever did because the people really talked.”
At the risk of asking a question she would have heard before, it seems a natural progression to mention her famous forebear who made do with a couch. Like most of her family, Freud is breezily dismissive of the Sigmund legacy. Her brother, Matthew, who runs a successful public relations company, is known to handle the inevitable question with the rather abrasive reply, ”Yes, he was my great-grandfather, and to answer your next four questions: Yes, no, no, yes!”
Emma is a little more forthcoming, swift to acknowledge that the 50th anniversary of his death in September has accentuated interest, especially in the United States. ”They`re mad about the Freud thing in America. He`s loads more famous there than he is here.”
She admits to never having read any of his books. She illustrates her own and, it seems, the rest of the family`s rather ambivalent attitude toward the great man with a suitably irreverent story.
”When my older sister, Nicky, was little she came home from school one day and said, `Dad, who`s this Sigmund chap my teacher goes on about?` And Dad said: `Well, he was your great-grandfather, darling.` And my sister said, `So why does my teacher talk about him the whole time? And Dad, being Dad, told her, `Because Sigmund invented the lavatory chain,` which-being seven years old-she believed. So when anyone mentioned Sigmund Freud to her, for years, she just went puce in the face and changed the subject because she was so embarrassed that her great-grandfather had invented the lavatory chain.
”You just don`t talk about a thing like that.”
By the time her laughter has died down, there`s little time left to talk. Though she covers it skillfully, Freud can`t resist a yawn.
She is about to start a month`s work filming a documentary series on the advertising industry called ”Making the Break,” and she still has to brief her father, who will be taking over her radio show during her absence.
Then there`s her spot on ”Entertainment Tonight” to prepare, a television piece to write, two more interviews and a short piece for Thames TV`s evening news at 6.
She leans back, dips a finger into the remains of her fruit sorbet and looks forward to a well-earned rest.
”When I leave here, I`m going for my afternoon kip (nap). That`s how wild and wacky and glamorous I am.
”I need my afternoon kip.”
