111. Interested or Interesting?
Something I learned a long time ago is that people tend to lean towards either being interested in what others have to say or being obsessed with making themselves interesting by talking endlessly about themselves.
Because I have been writing this blog for a couple of years now, I certainly could be accused of the latter approach. If I’m completely truthful, I guess I’ve been only too happy to recall some aspect of my somewhat unorthodox life in general conversation. To be fair to myself, however, I’ve also been very willing to listen to others if they have something interesting to say.
So, if I may park my own shortcomings for a while, I’d like to look at an area where this matter of being interested or interesting is perhaps most critical. This is the relationship between boy and girl, or man and women, if you prefer. As a young teenager, I really didn’t have much to say and was very shy especially when I was with a group of my peers. I’ll never forget going to a teen party in Cape Town when I was about 14. There must have been about ten of us boys and girls, but the focus of attention was on one boy about the same age as me. He was tall, muscular and ruggedly good-looking. Furthermore, he monopolized the conversation and the girls looked at him adoringly. If that wasn’t irritating enough, he announced that he would play the piano for us. He sat down at the piano and played a number of the current pop songs of the 1950s. He was brilliant and he managed to remain the focus of attention for the rest of the evening.
My own rather lame attempts to speak to a couple of the girls ended in failure. There was only one guy in the room as far as they were concerned, and it certainly wasn’t me!
Years later, the guy’s name came up in conversation. I was told that he had just ended his second marriage and was known for hitting the bottle pretty hard. This may sound like a theme for one of those US high-school movies but it happens to be true. At the time I had no idea why he had failed after being so popular as a youngster. Eventually, as I learned about the data of being interested or interesting, the penny dropped. The poor guy was so intent on being interesting that he excluded anything else from his focus on life. In fact, I was told that he had accumulated very little general knowledge and had nothing to say except those things that placed him as the center of attention. Presumably, his first two wives could only take so much and even playing a few tunes eventually failed to spark any magic.
Meanwhile, he had given me one hell of a complex. For years I could not find anything worthwhile to say in a group. What I did develop, thank goodness, was quite a good technique of holding one-on-one conversations. Looking back, I think I intuitively expressed an interest in the other person, mostly young girls, before launching into anything much about myself. In fact, I probably didn’t have much to say about myself until I stumbled into the world of television and found that most potential girlfriends were quite starstruck by the idea of going out with “someone in television.” Remember that in the 1950s the “tellie” was still something relatively new. Initially, it was only the BBC in Britain that offered a TV channel until 1955, when the first commercial channels came into being. In those heady days from 1957 when I joined the “Beeb” (BBC) and later Associated TeleVision (ATV), it was not unusual for any of us going into or leaving the studios to have some kid come up and ask for our autograph. At first, I would ask, “So, who do you think I am?” They would shrug but still press for an autograph. Then, usually when I gave them an autograph just to get rid of them, they would look at it, frown and say, “Who are you?” to which my response was to laugh and say, “Nobody, but you asked for my autograph, so I gave it.” They would mostly turn away in disgust.
Another lesson I learned was the folly of pursuing really beautiful girls. Because they had good looks, they automatically attracted the attention of men, so in most cases they devoted most of their attention to keeping themselves looking pretty and therefore interesting. As I worked in television pretty girls were a dime a dozen. At first, I made the mistake of looking for the girl that was most physically attractive and, using my one-on-one technique of chatting them up, I managed to date a few of them. They turned out to be incredibly boring and completely self-obsessed. I found a girl called Caroline that I felt at first was an exception to the rule. She was actually interested in how my career was developing and we went out a few times. One day, I took her with me to meet with someone I had met who was working at Pinewood Studios. I was by then hoping to make the transition from television to movies and when he invited me to visit Pinewood, I jumped at the chance. I told Caroline and she persuaded me to take her along. We stopped off for lunch at a pub near the studio. While we were eating, it became apparent that a group at the next table were from the studio. We could hear the odd words like “casting” and “shooting exteriors,” etc. Caroline picked this up and, to my mortification, she suddenly started talking loudly to me about “what time did we have to be at the studio?” and something like “I hope we’ll get a chance to speak to Jack Hawkins” (a major English star in the ’50s). It was so obvious that she wanted to be noticed by the people at the next table, who fortunately ignored us completely, that I realized she was only interested in who I could connect her with in show biz. She was a beautiful and talented dancer who could very likely have made it on her talent alone, but she was obsessed with being interesting. Her only interest in my career was evidently related to how useful I could be for hers. Lesson learned!
There were some real exceptions to my “interesting” theory. Petula Clark was in that category. She had been a childhood star who had blossomed into a hugely successful ballad singer in the ’50s. I never went out with her, but we always had a friendly chat in the studio when she appeared in shows like “Six-Five Special,” Britain’s first rock ’n’ roll show. I’ve mentioned this before but one day we had to rehearse a number where she walked along a line of the studio audience and sang to them as she walked.
In rehearsal the audience wasn’t yet in the studio, so I was told to walk along the line keeping up with her so she could sing to me. It was a cute little love song and as she sang to me, I could feel myself going red in the face and her eyes were full of mischief as she flirted outrageously with me. At the end of the song, she chuckled and said that she hoped she hadn’t embarrassed me – knowing full well that she had, but there was nothing malicious in it. I think she sensed that I was rather dazzled by her. When we chatted, she was always interested in what I had to say and to this day I shall never forget what a warm, lovely person she was.
The penny finally dropped with me that, when looking for a girlfriend, I should consider what kind of person she was, first of all, and consider her looks as of secondary importance. I did have another bittersweet experience whilst in television. I was introduced to a girl called Tanya, who had been invited with a girlfriend to the same show some weeks later by Pete Murray, one of the presenters of “Six-Five Special.” Tanya was extraordinarily beautiful with natural blonde hair and blue eyes. She had no interest in getting into show biz and agreed to go out with me again. I took her to dinner, and she was interested in what I had to say about a variety of subjects. I was really falling for her and told her about my years in South Africa and how I Intended going back there eventually. I even hinted that she might enjoy the country too.
I never saw her again. She never returned my calls, and I was devastated. A few weeks later the girl who had come to the studio with her came back to watch another show. I spoke to her and told her that I was very disappointed that Tanya never returned my calls. She smiled sympathetically and said that it wasn’t about me but where I came from. She explained that Tanya had previously been engaged to an American military man. They had been travelling in Europe; in those days, passports had to be shown at every border. While they were presenting their passports, he glanced at hers and saw that despite her Nordic looks she was an Indonesian. He never spoke to her again and left her at the border. When Tanya found that I was a South African, she feared that I would also have a racial prejudice against her.
I tried to arrange via the other girl to meet her again and explain that I had absolutely no racist attitudes and that many South Africans were like myself and strongly opposed to any form of prejudice. Her previous experience was clearly too strong; and she never agreed to meet me again.
Fortunately, I escaped a couple of relationships that would have been disastrous. I finally had the huge fortune to meet a beautiful girl who was both interested and interesting, the perfect balance. Fifty-seven years later, we still enjoy each other’s company and our respective senses of humor.
She’s not called Hero for nothing!
When asked to do some blogs for the ExoTech website, I was allowed to be self-indulgent, but it never stopped me for a moment in being interested in the exciting new concepts and technology of ExoTech – and how I intend that it should be part of my life from now on, with my beloved Hero at my side!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.