Hay Festival 2011: A voice to launch a thousand books
Mariella Frostrup is the queen of the literary talk show. She talks to Cassandra Jardine
Mariella Frostrup: 'I'm not a particularly fast reader, so it takes up a lot of time'
By Cassandra Jardine 6:30AM BST 27 May 2011
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Mariella Frostrup is thrilled to have David Bailey lined up as one of her interviewees at the Telegraph Hay Festival. “Joy to the world,” she declares, in those throaty tones that make some men take an unexpected interest in books.
Her excitement has nothing much to do with Bailey’s personal charm or even the subject matter of his book Heroes – life in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. The cause of her rejoicing is that he is a photographer, so this is one book that doesn’t require reading.
With the end of her annual readathon in sight, Frostrup is demob happy when we meet. Off-screen, she has her hair scraped back, wears combat trousers and behaves with a winning lack of starry poise. She looks what she is: a busy mother with two young children who is trying to cram a career, a marriage and The Grand Initiative, a women’s rights charity, into her life.
From September through to the end of the Hay Festival, her life is dominated by reading. “I worry that my children [Molly, six, and Danny, five] will grow up hating books because I’m constantly saying to them, 'Not now, mummy’s reading’. I become addicted to narrative so skimming doesn’t work, and I’m not a particularly fast reader, so it takes up a lot of time.”
A pile of books awaits her each week because she presents both Sky’s The Book Show (four editions of which will be filmed at Hay), and Radio 4’s Open Book. Between them, those two commitments keep her on a page-turning treadmill for 10 months of the year, which she finds “onerous but not impossible”.
As a child, living in remote parts of Ireland, she read voraciously but she didn’t study for A-levels, let alone a degree, so perhaps she has the autodidact’s desire to catch up with what she might have learnt had she not started work aged 15. That lack of formal education means there are still “great chasms” in her knowledge. “Old knowledge must be very comforting, but I don’t have it. I’m not mad about Jane Austen: the mistake was probably to read her too young. I did start Middlemarch... and I’ve read War and Peace but almost no other Russian literature.”
Her line-up of guests at Hay includes Adam Nicolson, Cerys Matthews, Paul Theroux, and David Baddiel, as well as the actor Rob Lowe, whom she will be interviewing for a longer session on the main stage at Hay. They should get on well because she found his account of growing up in 1970s Malibu “captivating”.
A well-written autobiography, such as Lowe’s Stories I Only Tell My Friends, is a pleasure but, “in a world where I chose my own reading, I would veer towards 20th and 21st century novels about the here and now,” she says, moving excitedly on to Anne Enright’s “brilliant” new book, The Forgotten Waltz. Isn’t she tempted to write a novel herself? “No, because a) I’m not sure I can do it and b), it’s hard when you are reading great books all the time.”
Slacking has not been part of her schedule in the 33 years since she left home after the Irish equivalent of GCSEs. Initially, she worked in the music business. “I was an engineer’s assistant in the Dublin studio where U2’s demo tapes were made. Their first gig was one of the worst shows I have been to.”
She moved into music PR, where she believes the secret of her success was treating pop stars as “silly little boys, like my younger brothers”. After Live Aid in 1985, she broke into television as a film critic. There, producers soon spotted that she was that rarest of gems: a sexy voice attached to a photogenic face, quick wit and a way of talking about culture that didn’t make it sound like the preserve of an in-crowd.
Though 48, there’s something girlish still about Frostrup and her enthusiasm for work – all work – which stems from having had to make a success of her career because she had nothing to fall back on. After her parents split up when she was eight, her mother married a man she hated. She then lived with her father, the Norwegian foreign editor of the Irish Times, until shortly before he died, aged 44, of a heart attack brought on by heavy drinking. She was only 15, the eldest of her mother’s six children. “Home was insecure, money was tight and my stepfather was violent, though not to me – he was scared of me. I had to go out into the world and do things. Others in my situation might have taken drugs and drifted into oblivion, but my parents had given me a strong feeling of being loved, and of my own potential. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, to travel the world, read a million books and present a lot of programmes for the BBC. I also wanted to be an air hostess.”
She missed the plane for air-hostessing, but the books ambition has certainly been fulfilled. If not a million, she reads several hundred of them each year. “I was talking to the BBC recently about a classical music programme because it would be heaven to use a different part of my brain. But I realise that I am very lucky to have a job that I love – most of the time. I am tired now, and can’t wait to spend a month or two reading nothing but junk mags. But, by the end of August, I am always delighted to be back on the reading treadmill.”
• The Book Show will broadcast from the Telegraph Hay Festival, May 28-31 at 7pm on Sky Arts 1 HD, followed by Hay Sessions throughout the festival at 8pm.
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