Out of Town: A Life Relived on Television

"Oh, Jack Hargreaves. He’s another one of these old English eccentrics. (Did you ever used to watch The Fast Show ? There’s a character in it that’s based on Jack Hargreaves.) For probably 20 or 25 years, he presented a series of shows on ITV in southern England – because those days TV was regional. His programmes were all about country ways; he was trying to capture and preserve country life. It was all unscripted, all done in one take, and he was based in a shed – you’d see his fly fishing things behind him, and a blunderbuss or two. And the show was made up of outside broadcasts, where his commentary was outstanding. There’s one about when the rams are let into the field with the ewes . The shepherds have got these three rams, and they let them loose on the women, and they strap massive coloured wax blocks to their undersides, and then they set them off. You’re watching this thinking ‘This is bonkers,’ but he talks you through it: all the sheep have different colours, and the reason they do it is so you’ll know which ram mated with which sheep – the wax acts like a crayon, it rubs off on the female. And Hargreaves’s commentary is along the lines of, ‘Oh, look at them go. It’s like teenagers being let loose in the Folies Bergère.’ It’s not scripted, he just made it up as he went along. He talks about his wartime experiences, growing up in the countryside, what it was like working in television in the 1960s and 70s, and it’s full of amazing folklore. He says that when he was young, you could tell what job a man did in the countryside by how he walked. The ploughman walked with a wobble, because all day long he had one foot in the trough and one foot on the higher ground. The book is full of these little anecdotes. His mission – and I suppose this is true of the other books on my list – was to try to preserve things that were going to be forgotten. I would be amazed if Robert Macfarlane was not a fan of Out of Town . I don’t think it’s ever been properly acknowledged, but Jack was probably the last person to capture certain things on tape and on the page. Some of what he writes about just doesn’t happen anymore. There’s a very famous episode, which you can see on YouTube , in which he goes to Ringwood Market. It must be the mid-1970s and there’s an old woman who, every week, brings three pats of butter to Ringwood Market, and she sells her pats of butter, and then goes home. That’s in the centre of Ringwood. Now it’s probably got a McDonald’s and an HMV and a Waterstones, right there in the spot she once was. “I would be amazed if Robert Macfarlane was not a fan of Out of Town . I don’t think it’s ever been properly acknowledged, but Jack Hargreaves was probably the last person to capture certain things on tape and on the page – some of what he writes about just doesn’t happen anymore” There’s another one where he goes to a grand old house that was being sold, along with all its contents, and he buys a cart. He talks about the fact that the house belonged to an old lord-of-the-manor type who had fallen in love with one of his maids. He was already married with children, and it caused a huge scandal at the time, but he upped sticks and ran off with his maid. They set up a new home and lived as husband and wife although they were never married. He tells the story so beautifully. This book is a mine for stories like that. Admittedly, it’s nowhere near as literary as the other books, but I like the fact that his main mission in life was to catch things before they were forgotten forever. Exactly. Hargreaves is a bit of a hero of mine for precisely that. He was trying to preserve this stuff, to tell people about its value, its interest, before it was too late. There’s one episode where he’s got what looks like a shepherd’s crook but with a flat edge, and he says, ‘I’ll tell you what this is at the end of the show, stay tuned….’ It turns out, it was a ratting stick. As a kid, his job was to go to the stables and kill the rats. It had that flat edge because otherwise they’d escape. Partly because it’s usually a self-discovered thing. At the moment, as we know, there are so many books published, and they could be advertised on buses and tube stations, or in newspapers, or there’ll be social media buzz and a lot of noise… There are so many ways of discovering books, but our industry and our media are obsessed with new . 90 per cent of the books you hear about are new ones. So actually it’s quite hard to discover old books. The reason it feels so much more personal, more romantic somehow, is that most of the time, if you discover something that is forgotten and old, it’s because either you have come across it yourself, or someone has said, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ So it’s not something you’ve been force fed, it’s not something that’s been advertised to you and everyone else, it’s not new, it’s different . That’s why it feels special. It’s also slightly depressing, because then you realise how many wonderful books are out there that you’ll never discover. You can do it digitally, and in fact, the Abandoned Bookshop is all about finding these sorts of books and issuing them digitally, partly because most of them won’t work in print. And although it’s a little bit dissatisfying to have to do them differently, at least they’re there. If we can make them available, there’s a chance people might discover them. If, in a year or two’s time, someone wants to do a print edition, brilliant, but at the moment, perhaps just by us making a bit of a noise about them, we can draw attention to these writers’ achievements. And because we’re talking about books that you’ll often come to second-hand, the same goes for the material itself: you know you’re reading something that someone else has read. You don’t know how many hands it’s passed through. It’s that connection to times gone by; I like the idea that something that someone produced 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago still resonates with someone today. I’m really excited about all these books. There will be some people reading this who will go, ‘Ah, great, I’ll buy these; I’ll seek these out.’ (And I guarantee there will be people saying, ‘Irene Handl wrote a book? That’s incredible!’) That for me is hugely exciting. I’m a cynical old bastard and there isn’t that much I get excited about these days, but I do get excited about people finding a book, or a film, or a piece of music, through the recommendation of someone else. It’s the idea of, ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I would not have found this, and I’m so grateful’ – it’s just wonderful. There are so many people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for introducing me to things I wouldn’t have known otherwise, and I’m hoping that there will be a few readers who will pick up the books on this list and feel exactly the same way."