I considered interviewing quizmaster and TV presenter Bamber Gascoigne, who has died aged 87, sometime in 2000 when I was contributing features for Book and Magazine Collector.I had read somewhere that he was very interested in colour prints and had written a book about identifying prints of all kinds.
I approached him and he was happy to meet me, so we arranged a date. Unfortunately, it had decided to rain heavily that day, so when I knocked on the front door of his beautiful Georgian terraced house on the Thames at Richmond I was soaked to the skin. I seem to recall that I actually asked for a towel to dry my hair and not only did he oblige, but he also thrust a bottle of beer into my hand, which was equally welcome in the circumstances. For a keen quizzer like myself, meeting the former presenter of ‘University Challenge’, could possibly have become the sort of ordeal that appearing on ‘Brain of Britain’ and ‘Mastermind’ had been a few years earlier ( I had failed to get on ‘University Challenge’ while at University). Continue reading